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 Putting People First
Designing Better Elderly Healthcare with with Singapore’s Public Services
Many public services, from welfare to healthcare, are mainly intended for the elderly. One of the challenges of designing digital services is to create simple and effective public services for older users. Designers Italia, the…
From Putting People First
[book] This Is Service Design Doing
This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World by Marc Stickdorn, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, and Jakob Schneider O’Reilly Media; 1 edition January 12, 2018, 568 pages > Video presentation…
From Putting People First
[Book] This Is Service Design Doing
This Is Service Design Doing: Applying Service Design Thinking in the Real World by Marc Stickdorn, Markus Edgar Hormess, Adam Lawrence, and Jakob Schneider O’Reilly Media; 1 edition January 12, 2018, 568 pages > Video presentation…
From insideHPC
Engineering a Better Portal For Scientific Discovery
Engineers from ESnet and the Globus team have designed a new approach that makes data sharing faster, more reliable, and more secure. As described in a new report, the "Science DMZ" provides a new architecture to meet increasing…
From Schneier on Security
Locating Secret Military Bases via Fitness Data
In November, the company Strava released an anonymous data-visualization map showing all the fitness activity by everyone using the app. Over this weekend, someone realized that it could be used to locate secret military bases…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Algorithmia: Best Practices For Algorithm Design
Have not looked at Algorithmia for a while. It is branded as a marketplace for algorithms. Nice idea, don't know how well it is doing.
They now have a good blog post on Best Practices for Algorithm Design:
Nicely done, lots of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Humans Gaming the System
Sometimes you need to include outlier training. But is that an opening for gaming? Ultimately we will also have to model multiple kinds of human intent as well.
Are AI Learning Scenarios Unpredictable Enough? By Sam Ransbotham…
From insideHPC
Pssc Labs Offers Hpc Solutions For Weather Modeling and Wildfire Analysis
PSSC Labs is offering HPC clusters solutions for Weather Modeling and Wildfire Analysis in collaboration with Atmospheric Data Solutions (ADS). "The solutions ADS are developing use a comprehensive blend of predictors that are…
From BLOG@CACM
Tech Ethics at Work
Ethics for Tech must address how professional issues play out in the workplace, in real life.
From insideHPC
Eni in Italy Launches 18.6 Petaflop Hpc4 Supercomputer
Eni in Italy has launched its new HPC4 supercomputer. With a peak performance of 18.6 Petaflops, the HPC4 cluster from Hewlett Packard Enterprise quadruples the Company’s computing power, making it the world’s most powerful industrial…
From insideHPC
Radio Free Hpc Looks at Nvidia’s Efforts to Ban Consumer Gpus in the Datacenter
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at NVIDIA’s new EULA GeForce Software user license, which prohibits the use of consumer GPUs in the datacenter. We are not looking to beat up on anyone, but our focus is on what
…
From insideHPC
Intel Select Solutions: Enabling Hpc For a Broader Set of Users
Building upon the success of Intel Cluster Ready and Intel Scalable System Framework (Intel SSF), Intel is facilitating the deployment of computing resources to non-traditional HPC users with the recently announced Intel Select…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Solving Nlp Problems
Nicely done, mostly non-technical piece on natural language processing (NLP). Why it is important and how to plan and execute NLP problems. Text is our language, still an important channel, so we need to know how to interpret…
From Computational Complexity
Publishing: Why Are We Doing It Right and Other Sciences Aren't?
(NOTE- this is NOT a `we hate Elsevier and the others' post- though I suspect the comments will be about that.)
Alexandra Elbakyan has created a repository of science papers for scientists to share. She did this because toohere…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtualitics For 3d Data Sharing
Took another look at Virtualitics. The idea is one we experimented with for years and this is a commercial example. This is a kind of Virtual Visualization, and particularly attractive if you want
to share visualizations among…
From Schneier on Security
Estimating the Cost of Internet Insecurity
It's really hard to estimate the cost of an insecure Internet. Studies are all over the map. A methodical study by RAND is the best work I've seen at trying to put a number on this. The results are, well, all over the map: "Estimating…
From BLOG@CACM
Benefits of a Master's Degree in Computer Science
If you have the means, consider pursuing a master's degree in computer science.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Source Leadership
The Emperor Has No Clothes: Recasting Leadership in the Open-source Era
Rajeev Peshawaria discusses his new book: Open Source Leadership: Reinventing Management When There's No More Business as Usual.
The digital age has democratized…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mycroft: Better Privacy and Open Source Assistant
Wrote about Mycroft back in April 2016, have been following. Still says it won't be available until late 2018. You do have to be careful about funding some of these efforts, there is always a considerable possibility it won't…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Will Amazon Eat Media and Marketing?
Interesting idea posted, where is Amazon going? A considerable document. In Digiday:
" ... Amazon seems to have everything going for it: Endless scale, bottomless coffers and a customer-centric point of view that can provide…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Contract Development
Following up on Smart Contracts beyond the Bitcoin.
New Project to Fight Deficit of Smart Contract Developers By Nick Bakursky in Cointelegraph
The number of job postings on LinkedIn related to Blockchain, cryptocurrency and Bitcoin…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Novartis as a Data Science Co.
Like to hear how leaders are positioning this. Is it just about data science as it exists today, or is it more about data science as it supports process? The latter I would think.
Reimagining Novartis as a 'medicines and data…
From insideHPC
China Readies Exascale Prototype
The Xinhua news service reports that prototype for China's new-generation exascale supercomputer is set for launch in 2018. "China's ongoing efforts in HPC are evident in the recent TOP500 list, where the nation has the two fastest…
From insideHPC
Slidecast: How to Improve the Performance of Parallel Codes
In this slidecast from the POP Centre of Excellence in Barcelona, Jon Gibson from NAG presents: How to Improve the Performance of Parallel Codes. As part of the EU-funded Performance Optimization and Productivity (POP) Centre…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why Digital Strategies Fail
Thoughtful piece on the topic:
Why digital strategies fail
By Jacques Bughin, Tanguy Catlin, Martin Hirt, and Paul Willmott in McKinsey
Most digital strategies don’t reflect how digital is changing economic fundamentals, industry…
From insideHPC
One Stop Systems Plans For Ipo
HPC vendor One Stop Systems has announced plans to raise $20 million in an initial public offering (IPO) on Wednesday, January 31. Founded in 1998, the company plans to issue 2,900,000 shares at a price of $6.00-$8.00 per share…
From insideHPC
Unstructured-Grid Cfd Algorithms at Nasa on Volta Gpus
Eric Nielsen from NASA gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. "In the field of computational fluid dynamics, the Navier-Stokes equations are often solved using an unstructured-grid approach to accommodate geometric complexity. Furthermore…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Human Deisgned Machine Learning
Good thought on the problem, what are the specifics of human needs, without limiting possible augmentation?
The UX of AI
Using Google Clips to understand how a human-centered design process elevates artificial intelligence By…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Algorithms of Our Future Thinking Machines
More about dealing with uncertainty. Most of this is today rolled into the statistics of machine learning, but it needs to be included in results that can be easily propagated for reasoning and assisting. Note especially…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart to Sell Online Books
A more serious move by a retailer into online channels.
Walmart Challenges Amazon with E-Book Move
Walmart plans to sell e-books and audiobooks, its latest effort to encroach on an area of Amazon strength. The nation's largest
The…