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 insideHPC
Wolfgang Dreyer to Head Up New Rescale Office in Munich
"Europe has always been a crucial market for Rescale,” said Rescale co-founder and CEO Joris Poort. “We are thrilled to be establishing a solid regional foundation for sales and support for our customers in Europe. Wolfgang Dreyer…
From insideHPC
Cal Tech Upgrading Demo Cluster with Intel Xeon-Phi x200 Processor
Nor-Tech reports that Caltech is upgrading its Nor-Tech demo cluster with Intel Xeon Phi. The demo cluster is a no-cost, no-strings opportunity for current and prospective clients to test-drive simulation applications on a cutting…
From insideHPC
Apply Now for PRACE HPC Summer School Programs
The European PRACE organization is now accepting applications for the following expense-paid educational programs: The 2017 International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences and the PRACE Summer of HPC 2017…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Voice Assistant Apps
Somehow don't think assistant apps are as important, never hear them mentioned when someone describes a good experience with assistants. Still this is intriguing view of how they are used. 'services' in assistants are still
Robotics…
From insideHPC
D-Wave Rolls Out 2000 Qubit System
"D-Wave's leap from 1000 qubits to 2000 qubits is a major technical achievement and an important advance for the emerging field of quantum computing," said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for high performance computing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mattel Aristotle by Nabi
Has some regulatory issues when interacting with children in the US:
" ... Mattel Aristotle is an Amazon Echo that understands your kids, too
It's a baby monitor. It's a voice-activated smart assistant. It answers your questions…
From Schneier on Security
How the Media Influences Our Fear of Terrorism
Good article that crunches the data and shows that the press's coverage of terrorism is disproportional to its comparative risk. This isn't new. I've written about it before, and wrote about it more generally when I wrote about…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Areas of AI to Watch
Very good piece by Nathan Benaich, Covers at the right Tech savvy management-introductory level a number of AI oriented techniques. I like these because each is more problem than technology facing. Also brings in practical…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Resizing arrays can be slow in Swift
Swift a recent high-performance programming language. It is still primarily used develop iOS applications, but it has the potential to be a general-purpose language. The lack of maturity of the language is still apparent. For…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Locating People in the Wild
Located beacons can detect people's mobile IDs in store and even on the street. A powerful move to establish consumer journey. I had heard of related methods some time ago, by testing and ID'ing people just walking into a store…
From insideHPC
Video: A Hybrid Approach to Strongly Correlated Materials
"Given limitations to the scaling for simulating the full Coulomb Hamiltonian on quantum computers, a hybrid approach – deriving effective models from density functional theory codes and solving these effective models by quantum…
From insideHPC
GIGABYTE Selects Cavium QLogic FastLinQ Ethernet Solutions
"GIGABYTE servers - across standard, Open Compute Platform (OCP) and rack scale form factors - deliver exceptional value, performance and scalability for multi-tenant cloud and virtualized enterprise datacenters," said Etay Lee…
From insideHPC
HiPEAC Vision Report Advocates Reinvention of Computing
"Computers as we know them are disappearing from view,’ asserts Koen De Bosschere, Professor at the Engineering Faculty of Ghent University, Belgium, and Coordinator of the HiPEAC network. "The evolution from desktop PC will
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Is Data the New Oil?
Interesting idea. But we ingest in a different way than we do fuels. While the chemistry of petroleum is well known and constant, the chemistry of required data is infinitely variable and constantly changing, so their general…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI is Changing the Retail Industry
How AI is Changing the Retail Industry for Consumers
Rick Delgado
Artificial Intelligence is an up and coming technology system that is constantly enhancing different aspects of various industries. Some of these new areas where…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at the New Isambard Supercomputer from Cray
In this podast, the Radio Free HPC Team looks at the Cray's new ARM-based Isambard supercomputer that will soon be deployed in the UK. After that, we discuss how Persistent Memory will change the way vendors architect system
…
From insideHPC
Five Ways Scale-Up Systems Save Money and Improve TCO
The move away from the traditional single processor/memory design has fostered new programming paradigms that address multiple processors (cores). Existing single core applications need to be modified to use extra processors
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building Networks for Ecosystems
Intriguing piece about pipelines and platforms. We discussed methods of building supply chains by evolving them. Now with machine learning?
Building Networks for Scale: From Pipeline Models to Platforms, Ecosystems, and Machine…
From The Eponymous Pickle
An AI on the Board
Is this even close to reasonable? Depends how you define them .... You could make the case that computers run many companies, but at a low level. They provide information that leads to logic, that is exercised (mostly) to…
From Schneier on Security
Obama's Legacy in Internet Security
NextGov has a nice article summarizing President Obama's accomplishments in Internet security: what he did, what he didn't do, and how it turned out....
From Computational Complexity
My Once-Every-Four-Years Presidential Quiz/How Should Quizzes Work in the e-Era?
Every four years I post a PRESIDENTIAL QUIZ which I must update based on new information since we have a new prez and veep. The questions are here:here.
I will post a link to the answers next week. The answers will also…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talking Tom Reaps Eyeballs
A stark reminder that the most desirable aspect of the Web is still getting eyeballs in the door, and then playing videos. 'Talking Tom' seemingly trivial, with some interactive botlike aspects, has gotten some 10.3 billion…
From insideHPC
Appentra Joins OpenPOWER Foundation for Auto-Parallelization
Today Appentra announced it has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community based on the POWER microprocessor architecture. Founded in 2012, Appentra is a technology company providing software tools for guided…
From insideHPC
Video: Sonifying Simulations
Scientists typically understand data through graphs and visualizations. But is it possible to use sound to interpret complex information? This video from Georgia Tech's Asegun Henry shows the Sonification of the vibrations of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Marketing Campaign
An intriguing example, with statistics, that looks like a process model of how to do marketing campaigns. Like to see this further built out with more detail, so it could be learned from in other domains.
In Think with Google…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Display Cards for Alexa
One of the criticisms of voice-only assistants is there is no provision for visual display, and often visual is just better than reciting an answer over a speaker. For example if its a recipe I want to see a picture of it. …
From insideHPC
Video: A Look at the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center
"Guided by the principles of interactive supercomputing, Lincoln Laboratory was responsible for a lot of the early work on machine learning and neural networks. We now have a world-class group investigating speech and video processing…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Application Performance Engineer at Mellanox
"Mellanox Technologies is looking for a talented engineer to lead datacenter application performance optimization and benchmarking over Mellanox networking products. This individual will primarily work with marketing and engineering…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Know Your Cephalopods
This graphic shows the important difference between arms and tentacles. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tips for VR Content
In Think with Google:
" ... It's one thing to make your VR content accessible. But how can you ensure that your audience engages? Our recent research identified three key insights for "sticky" VR content that you can carry into…