Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2018
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cortana as Windows Assistant
Nice idea, looking forward to a demonstration. So far have not seen much of value from the Cortana assistant.
Cortana as an assistant for Windows
Microsoft Windows might get easier to navigate with new Cortana Follow Me ... Follow…
From Schneier on Security
NSA Morale
The Washington Post is reporting that poor morale at the NSA is causing a significant talent shortage. A November New York Times article said much the same thing. The articles point to many factors: the recent reorganization,…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast can you bit-interleave 32-bit integers?
A practical trick in software is to “bit-interleave” your data. Suppose that I have two 4-bit integers like 0b1011 (11 in decimal) and 0b1100 (12 in decimal). I can interleave the two numbers to get one 8-bit number 0b11011010…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA and Baidu Announce Autonomous Car project with 30 Deep earning TOPS (trillions of operations per second)
Today NVIDIA and Baidu today that they are creating a production-ready AI autonomous vehicle platform designed for China, the world’s largest automotive market. "NVIDIA and Baidu have pioneered significant advances in deep learning…
From The Noisy Channel
Thanks Randy!
Thanks Randy! And I promise I’ll discuss some of the issues of mobile and voice interfaces in future posts.
From insideHPC
Video: Red Hat Showcases ARM Support for HPC at SC17
In this video from SC17, Jon Masters from Red Hat describes the company's Multi-Architecture HPC capabilities, including the new ARM-powered Apollo 70 server from HPE. "At SC17, you will also have an opportunity to see the power…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Distinguished Lecture: Visualizing Science and Technology
Professor Katy Börner of Indiana University will present “Visualizing Science and Technology,” part of the NSF National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) lecture series on January 16, 2018, from 10:30AM to 11:30AM ET. Katy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More on Alexa Pitching Brands
Further discussion. Amazon will also have to consider how this will position themselves against, at this time, Google Home, and then other emerging competitors. If the assistant is seen as more of a advertising channel, it…
From The Eponymous Pickle
When Computers Disappear
What Life Will Be Like When the Computers Disappear
USA Today By Edward C. Baig
The expected transition to an ambient computing era driven by advances in artificial intelligence (AI), speech recognition, natural language processing…
From insideHPC
Micron and Intel to continue joint development of NAND Memory
Today Micron and Intel announced an update to their successful NAND memory joint development partnership that has helped the companies develop and deliver industry-leading NAND technologies to market. "The companies have agreed…
From insideHPC
New Whitepaper on Meltdown and Spectre fixes for HPC
Can you afford to lose a third of your compute real estate? If not, you need to pre-empt the impact of Meltdown and Spectre. "Meltdown and Spectre are quickly becoming household names and not just in the HPC space. The severe…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at Spectre and Meltdown Exploits
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the performance ramifications of the Spectre and Meltdown exploits that affect processors from Intel, AMD, and many others. While patches are on the way, the performance hit from…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cortana Voicebots in China
In Voicebot.
Xiaomi has launched a new Microsoft Cortana powered smart speaker called Yeelight Voice
Assistant. The Yeelight product line is known in China for smart home products and includes smart lighting that integrates Cortana…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
How Hard Is That Programming Problem?
A recent blog post by Mark Guzdial (Learning Computer Science is Different than Learning Other STEM Disciplines) has my mind going in a bunch of different directions between the post itself and the comments people are makingMark…
From Schneier on Security
Tourist Scams
A comprehensive list. Most are old and obvious, but there are some clever variants....
From Mostafa Dehghani
Internship at Google Brain
I've started a five-month internship at Google Brain \o/. I am working with Lukasz Kaiser, Jakob Uszkoreit, and Stephan Gouws from Brain team and Oriol Vinyals from DeepMind on making Transformer model computationally universal…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Aipoly for Autonomous Market Shopping
This will be shown at this week's CES conference in Las Vegas:
Fully Autonomous Markets
200,000 new small businesses are born every day around the world. We help bring their products on shelves near you using AI, turning any space…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Common questions about the CSTA board
I hope everyone had a great holiday break is leaping back into the school year with renewed drive and energy. With all of the chaos of the new year, you might have missed the call for nominations for the CSTA … Continue reading…
From Computational Complexity
A new largest prime found!
A new largest KNOWN prime has been discovered and its 23 million digits long.
Nate Silver's website had an article about it (written by Oliver Roeder) here
An article about why people do this is here
Lance posted about finding…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Think with Google says Smart Speakers Changing Technology
In the latest Think with Google, Google provides stats about "Smart Speaker" (advisory) systems, and provides interesting data about their use by consumers. Google Home Mini and Amazon Echo Dot are mentioned and but notPeople's…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Extreme Event Forecasting at Uber
Spent quite some time in the enterprise considering extreme events. Interesting to see Uber's way to address this. With some technical details. In DSC, posted by Amelia Matteson:
Extreme Event Forecasting at Uber - with Recurrent…
From insideHPC
Pointwise ISV is Finalist for Small Business of the Year
The Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce has named Pointwise a finalist for 2018 Small Business of the Year award. Pointwise, Inc. is solving the top problem facing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) today – reliably generating high…
From insideHPC
Adapting Deep Learning to New Data Using ORNL’s Titan Supercomputer
Travis Johnston from ORNL gave this talk at SC17. "Multi-node evolutionary neural networks for deep learning (MENNDL) is an evolutionary approach to performing this search. MENNDL is capable of evolving not only the numeric hyper…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advances in Sensory Substitution
Been reading about this for many years, are real advances here? Article looks at the history, technology and likely advances.
Feeling Sounds, Hearing Sights By Gregory Mone
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 61 No. 1, Pages
In…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Personal Assistants Cloning Yourself
Digital Twins taken beyond the basic idea. In some ways this is much harder than building an assistant. We sought something like it when we replaced green coffee managers with expert systems in the 90s. But must it be an…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Confusion Mapping for Worst Case
Intriguing piece.
Robots Are Wrong Too—Confusion Mapping for the Worst Case
Here be dragons
By Chris Butler, Strategy and product at Philosophie NYC https://philosophie.is/
When was the last time a calculator didn’t do what you…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Memes, Protomemes and Popularity
Quite interesting, technical, detailed experimentation with data and unclear possible applications. How advertising and results are influenced
Popularity Spikes Hurt Future Chances for Viral Propagation of Protomemes By Michele…
From insideHPC
The AI Future is Closer than it Seems
Gadi Singer gave this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference in Denver. "Technology visionaries architecting the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence (AI) will share the key challenges as well
…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Computer Systems Researcher at Baidu USA
Baidu USA in Silicon Valley is seeking a Computer Systems Researcher in our Job of the Week. "Baidu's research mission is to develop hard AI technologies that will reach and impact hundreds of millions of users. Our Silicon Valley…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Ways to touch in AR
Its all about accurate and efficient interaction.
Touching The Future Of Augmented Reality
A collaboration between Meta, Ultrahaptics and ZeroLight demonstrates a new way for AR objects to be interacted with. ...
By Rebecca Hills…