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 Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Becoming the Voice of the IOT?
Maybe it won't be the 'brain', but will it be the voice of the IOT, and through the IOT to many kinds of goods and services? I would still bet on Google or others sculpting the brain, but Amazon is leading the pack on voice…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Drone Aerodynamics
In this video, researchers at NASA Ames explore the aerodynamics of a popular example of a small, battery-powered drone, a modified DJI Phantom 3 quadcopter. "The Phantom relies on four whirring rotors to generate enough thrust…
From insideHPC
Podcast: How Deep Learning Will Reshape Our Cities
In this AI Podcast, Lynn Richards, president and CEO of the Congress for New Urbanism and Charles Marohn, president and co-founder of Strong Towns, describe how AI will reshape our cities. "AI will do much more than automate
…
From insideHPC
Video: Lenovo Powers Manufacturing Innovation at Hartree Centre
"STFC Hartree Centre needed a powerful, flexible server system that could drive research in energy efficiency as well as economic impact for its clients. By extending its System x platform with NeXtScale System, Hartree Centre…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Self Organizing Robotics
Had not realized that Harvard was working on this. Potential medical applications at least. In the CACM: " ... Harvard University's Self-Organizing Systems Research group has developed a "large-scale robot collective" that…
From insideHPC
IA Optimized Python Rocks in Production
"Intel recently announced the first product release of its High Performance Python distribution powered by Anaconda. The product provides a prebuilt easy-to-install Intel Architecture (IA) optimized Python for numerical and scientific…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Electric Cars Going Mainstream
A question many of us have been thinking about. In Knowledge@Wharton, a good economic oriented view of the direction. Innovation: When Will Electric Cars Go Mainstream?
From Phys.org Technology News
What can history tell us about today's infrastructure crisis?
On Tuesday, the University of Virginia's Miller Center released the eighth volume in its far-reaching First Year Project, an ongoing initiative to provide nonpartisan, history-based insight into major issues facing the next president…
From The Eponymous Pickle
January-February 2017 Analytics Magazine
Informs January-February 2017 Analytics Magazine
An issue with emphasis on the IoT and its evolution. Such as on related business opportunities.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sensors in the Internet of Things
Good early introductory and pictorial piece on the interaction of sensors and sensing for the Internet of things. Pointers to more resources.
From Schneier on Security
Internet Filtering in Authoritarian Regimes
Interesting research: Sebastian Hellmeier, "The Dictator's Digital Toolkit: Explaining Variation in Internet Filtering in Authoritarian Regimes," Politics & Policy, 2016 (full paper is behind a paywall): Abstract: Following its…
From XRDS
Build your own Natural Language Processing based Intelligent Assistant using Python, It’s easy!
Before we begin, let us talk about how Mike (a fictional character) spends a typical morning. Mike begins his day by searching for breakfast recipes on Google Now (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Now). After a filling breakfast…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pinterist uses Deep Learning
Nice example of a use of deep learning.
Pinterest uses deep learning AI for better pin recommendations By Eric David
Pinterest Inc. revealed today that its Related Pins feature will now be powered by deep learning neural networks…
From insideHPC
Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing Returns to Chicago in July
"As a bridge to that future, this two-week program fills many gaps that exist in the training computational scientists typically receive through formal education or shorter courses. The 2017 ATPESC program will be held at a new…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Autonomous Collaborating Micro-Drone Swarms
The autonomy of such drones and drone swarms indicates an unprecedented depth of decision making driven by AI. Implications are very broad.
Pentagon successfully tests micro-drone swarm In mPhys:
The Pentagon may soon be unleashing…
From Schneier on Security
NSA Given More Ability to Share Raw Intelligence Data
President Obama has changed the rules regarding raw intelligence, allowing the NSA to share raw data with the US's other 16 intelligence agencies. The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Jill Watson at Ga Tech
Have worked with many TA's myself, so this is interesting. It also relates to chatbots too, lessons to are to be learned here. As in all tests of this type I wonder about the difference between providing value to someone versus…
From Computational Complexity
Guest Post about the first Women in Computational Topology (WinCompTop) Workshop
The first Women in Computational Topology WinCompTop workshop was held in August at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) in Minneapolis, MN. In total, 27 women participated, ranging from undergraduates to…
From insideHPC
Upgraded Bridges Supercomputer Now in Production
"Bridges’ new nodes add large-memory and GPU resources that enable researchers who have never used high-performance computing to easily scale their applications to tackle much larger analyses,” says Nick Nystrom, principal investigator…
From The Eponymous Pickle
ACM Statement on Algorithmic Transparency and Accountability
The well known ACM professional society issued a statement about algorithmic transparency and accountability today. I have been a member and participant for many years. Algorithms have been part of computing forever, but only…
From insideHPC
IBM Rolls Out All-flash Storage for Cognitive Workloads
"The DS8880 All-Flash family is targeted at users that have experienced poor storage performance due to latency, low server utilization, high energy consumption, low system availability and high operating costs. These same users…
From insideHPC
D-Wave Releases Open Quantum Software Environment
"Just as a software ecosystem helped to create the immense computing industry that exists today, building a quantum computing industry will require software accessible to the developer community,” said Bo Ewald, president, D-Wave…
From insideHPC
A Decade of Multicore Parallelism with Intel TBB
While HPC developers worry about squeezing out the ultimate performance while running an application on dedicated cores, Intel TBB tackles a problem that HPC users never worry about: How can you make parallelism work well when…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
PECASE Awards Announced
The White House has released the list awardees of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE awards were established by President Clinton in 1996 and are coordinated by the Office of…
From insideHPC
Cray Appoints Stathis Papaefstathiou as SVP of Research and Development
Today Cray announced the appointment of Stathis Papaefstathiou to the position of senior vice president of research and development. Papaefstathiou will be responsible for leading the software and hardware engineering efforts…
From insideHPC
Selecting HPC Network Technology
"With three primary network technology options widely available, each with advantages and disadvantages in specific workload scenarios, the choice of solution partner that can deliver the full range of choices together with the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Chatbot Retention Problem
The open question is, how well will people accept non human online interaction? Bots can be novel, but that is not enough. Bottom line, they need to provide a faster and more accurate interaction than talking to a human or…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Industrial Lab for IoT
National Instruments industrial IoT lab unites rivals
Cisco, HPE, Intel and others help sponsor the lab to show enterprises that IoT systems can work By Stephen Lawson
There are many companies vying to build the industrial…
From Schneier on Security
Twofish Power Analysis Attack
New paper: "A Simple Power Analysis Attack on the Twofish Key Schedule." This shouldn't be a surprise; these attacks are devastating if you don't take steps to mitigate them. The general issue is if an attacker has physical control…
From Putting People First
Experientia’s CITYOPT project awarded prestigious French award for its sustainable development design
Following the 2016 Smart Innovation Award at “FIMBACTE Trophées du Cadre de vie”, the CITYOPT project has once again been recognized, this time in the prestigious French design competition: “Observeur du Design 2017”, in the
…