Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2017
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
2016 Robotics Roadmap and the National Robotics Initiative 2.0
The following is a blog post by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and contributor to the Robotics Roadmaps Maja Matarić. In 2009, the CCC published a report, A Roadmap for US Robotics, From Internet to Robotics…
From insideHPC
Asia’s First Supercomputing Magazine Launches from Singapore
Singapore-based publisher Asian Scientist has launched Supercomputing Asia, a new print title dedicated to tracking the latest developments in high performance computing across the region and making supercomputing accessible
…
From insideHPC
Penguin Computing Releases Scyld ClusterWare 7
"The release of Scyld ClusterWare 7 continues the growth of Penguin’s HPC provisioning software and enables support of large scale clusters ranging to thousands of nodes,” said Victor Gregorio, Senior Vice President of Cloud
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Blow to Patent Trolls
Was involved in a very small way in the actions of a patent troll, an Opinion piece by Evan Schuman on changes in the legal system that could stop them. Will this work? I know lawyers on both sides running the numbers. Instructive…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Betting against techno-unemployment
There are millions of truck drivers in the US today. In particular, there are about 1.7 million tractor-trailer (human) drivers. There are many more professional truck drivers in the US, but tractor-trailer drivers are the “archetypal…
From insideHPC
Dell & Intel Collaborate on CryoEM on Intel Xeon Phi
In this video from SC16, Janet Morss from Dell EMC and Hugo Saleh from Intel discuss how the two companies collaborated on accelerating CryoEM. "Cryo-EM allows molecular samples to be studied in near-native states and down to…
From insideHPC
In-Memory Computing for HPC
This is the first entry in an insideHPC series that delves into in-memory computing. To achieve high performance, modern computer systems rely on two basic methodologies to scale resources: scale-up or scale-out. The scale-up…
From Schneier on Security
Class Breaks
There's a concept from computer security known as a class break. It's a particular security vulnerability that breaks not just one system, but an entire class of systems. Examples might be a vulnerability in a particular operating…
From Phys.org Technology News
Lessons in trust from America's experience with electronic voting
It reads like a Hollywood movie. Elite hackers, allegedly sponsored by the Russian government, infiltrate the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee. Thousands of emails are stolen and published by WikiLeaks.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Replacing Taxis with Rideshare Cars
Spent some time in NYC lately observing the traffic and talking to cabbies. Good experience. The analyis from MIT is also interesting. This shows some opportunities. Cabbies are already eager to talk about over regulation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What Mark Zuckerberg Learned about Running His Home with AI
In Facebook. This has been out for a while, but just got to it. For the deep geek within us, an understandable journey, you can almost feel your coding muscles twitching. Almost. But the average person is looking for more…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Fielding a Hundred Thousand Questions
Via O'Reilly. We did something similar when creating our Extempo bot system, but only included a few hundred questions. Nice to see Microsoft pushing research with this. How many parameterized questions does a human ask…
From Computational Complexity
Predictions for 2017
Lance's Complexity Year in Review, posted the last week of the year (lets hope that P vs NP is not resolved on Dec 31) is a tradition that goes back to 2002. Bill posting predictions for the coming year is a tradition that goes…
From insideHPC
Announcing the New insideHPC Jobs Board
We are pleased to kick off the New Year with the announcement of our new insideHPC Jobs Board. "With listings for High Performance Computing jobs from around the world, the insideHPC Jobs Board is a great resource for employers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Language Translating with Google Home
Have been testing Google Home's language translation capabilities. You can translate spoken words or phrases from English into a large set of target languages by simply saying the words or phrases. Alexa can't do this currently…
From insideHPC
Co-Design 3.0 – Configurable Extreme Computing, Leveraging Moore’s Law for Real Applications
Sadasivan Shankar gave this Invited Talk at SC16. "This talk will explore six different trends all of which are associated with some form of scaling and how they could enable an exciting world in which we co-design a platform…
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: International Workshop on High-Performance Big Data Computing (HPBDC)
The 3rd annual International Workshop on High-Performance Big Data Computing (HPBDC) has issued its Call for Papers. Featuring a keynote by Prof. Satoshi Matsuoka from Tokyo Institute of Technology, the event takes place May
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Oculus and Eye Tracking
A natural next step, for both games and more serious applications. In Engadget:
Oculus now owns an eye-tracking company
The Eye Tribe's visual tracking technology could be in the next Oculus Rift. by Sean Buckley ....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Analytics in Fashion Retail
A few weeks ago was re-introduced to apparel and fashion retail analytics trends. Here came upon a broad look at recent trends in the area. In Smartdatacollective.
From insideHPC
Remote Visualization Accelerating Innovation Across Multiple Industries
In this highly data-driven world, innovation can happen anywhere. Thanks to advances in high-performance computing (HPC), it’s no longer necessary for scientists, engineers, and designers to be seated at their desks to execute…
From Schneier on Security
Photocopier Security
A modern photocopier is basically a computer with a scanner and printer attached. This computer has a hard drive, and scans of images are regularly stored on that drive. This means that when a photocopier is thrown away, that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Immune Systems as the Future of Cybersecurity
Saw this idea proposed quite a long time ago, May well be the way to introduce security. In concept anyway. What would the intelligence of such an immune system need to be? The IOT sensors? Could it be evolved over time
Artificial…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Hearing Houses
Virtual Assistants in the smart home are attentive in their hearing. Why not have the entire house create a hearing and sensing network? This could be done my connecting existing sensory devices, or built into the house itself…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Connecting Robotics, Future Trajectories
And more on the future of assistants. And will the use of assistant/toys mean that children will be well primed for these capabilities? And their acceptance of virtual worlds. Its already well underway with their use of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Childrens Toys, Data and AI
Bernard Marr in Forbes on toy assistant capabilities aimed at children. Like the very successful adult assistants, these are ever listening, and can gather data to be used with Big Data, which may create regulatory issues.
Caution…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Snake Robotic Chains
A modular robotic chain can be what you want it to. In particular interesting to see non humaoid robotic forms for tasks. An alternate form of biomimicry.
" ... Massachusetts Institute of
Each…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Computer Science Education Things I’m Watching in 2017
What is going to be big in 2017? It’s always hard to tell but there are several things I think I need to keep an eye on this year. (Note: Last year’s things to watch is here.) Some of the things are repeats from last year. They…
From insideHPC
Video: How AI can bring on a second Industrial Revolution
"The AI is going to flow across the grid -- the cloud -- in the same way electricity did. So everything that we had electrified, we're now going to cognify. And I owe it to Jeff, then, that the formula for the next 10,000 start…
From The Eponymous Pickle
LG and Samsung Readying Smart Home Assistants
Echo and Google Home have opened up the 'Smart Home' assistant component to the average consumer. So not unexpected to see competition by other home appliance companies. Will be following here. In Techcrunch:
LG’s Hub …
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Computational Scientist at ORNL
Oak Ridge National Laboratory is seeking a Computational Scientist in our Job of the Week. The National Center for Computational Sciences in the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory…