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 Computational Complexity
Donald Knuth Turns 80 years and 6 days
Celebrating Donald Knuth's 80th birthday, or 80 years + 7 days birthday seems odd. Should we use powers of 2? Hmm- too few, just 32 and 64 really. And having a 32-year celebration for someone is unusual. How about numbers that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
In Home Delivery Expands
There seemed to be quite a bit of push back about giving retailers the ability to open your home door and drop a package inside. Some horror stories emerged. But the idea seems to be continuing to grow. With more details and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alibaba Claims to Beat Humans in Reading Test
More examples of advanced AI in China.
Alibaba's AI Outguns Humans in Reading Test By Robert Fenner in Bloomberg
Alibaba has developed an artificial intelligence model that scored better than humans in a Stanford University
Alibaba…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neural Network Zoo Updated
Kirk Bourne writes that the useful 'Neural Network Zoo' now contains links to the original papers for each network type AND a poster version of the full infographic.
In the Asimov Institute, post by Fjodor Van Veen
" .... With…
From insideHPC
Red Hat steps up to POWER9 for HPC
In this video from SC17 in Denver, Dan McGuan from Red Hat describes the company's Multi-Architecture HPC capabilities with the Power9 architecture. "Red Hat and IBM have a long history of collaborating on Linux, going back more…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at the European Union’s Big Investment in Exascale
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at European Commission’s recent move to fund exascale development with 1 Billion Euros. "While Europe already had a number of exascale initiatives under way, this is a major step…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Imposter syndrome and the Turing Test
How a Famous Robot Test Can Help You Beat Impostor Syndrome by Kelton Reid in Copyblogger
Points to a 2012 Atlantic article on using the Turing Test to discern (or fool) people, or even ourselves into determining who we are.…
From Schneier on Security
Jim Risen Writes about Reporting Government Secrets
Jim Risen writes a long and interesting article about his battles with the US government and the New York Times to report government secrets....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Microbenchmarking calls for idealized conditions
Programmers use software benchmarking to measure the speed of software. We need to distinguish system benchmarking, where one seeks to measure the performance of a system, with microbenchmarking, where one seeks to measure the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger and Boxed
Still speculation, but other possible buyers also lining up. A response to Amazon's supply chain wins.
Kroger may acquire digital bulk retailer Boxed In Cincinnati Enquirer
" ... Kroger is considering acquiring online wholesaler…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Crucial Need for Uncertainty in Deep Learning
Below piece really rocked me. It is very old AI school. Even takes us to methods that were used in Watson-Jeopardy. Conclusions, and even sub conclusions, are rarely precise answers. They need to contain a certainty factor…
From insideHPC
Rescale Offers ANSYS Software On Demand
Today Rescale announced that ANSYS Elastic Licensing can now be purchased directly through Rescale’s ScaleX, a SaaS platform purpose-built for solving the world’s most challenging engineering, scientific and mathematical problems…
From insideHPC
HiPEAC18 Conference to Focus on Performance and Security Next Week in Manchester
Coming up next week in Manchester, the HiPEAC 2018 conference will once again bring together the best minds in computer architecture and compilation to exploit the enormous potential of new computing paradigms. "The HiPEAC conference…
From insideHPC
ClusterVision White Paper Looks at HPC Performance Impact of Spectre and Meltdown
While various kernel patches are already out for the Spectre and Meltdown, the performance impact of these patches on HPC performance has been a big question. Now ClusterVision has published a timely white paper on this important…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Laundry Folding Robots
It was one of the key goals of the 60s. Having a home robot fold your clothes and put them away after washing. Second only to the robotic butler that would mix drinks and bring them to you with your newspaper. Its debatable…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Value of Halo Effect
Interesting top line, suggesting that established and known strategy and process is not enough. Though I would still think its useful to document what you are doing as a means to finding improvement. A 'Halo' is a easy to
The…
From Schneier on Security
Fighting Ransomware
No More Ransom is a central repository of keys and applications for ransomware, so people can recover their data without paying. It's not complete, of course, but is pretty good against older strains of ransomware. The site is…
From insideHPC
Podcast: The Exascale Data and Visualization project at LANL
In this episode of Let’s Talk Exascale, Scott Gibson discusses the ECP Data and Visualization project with Jim Ahrens from Los Alamos National Lab. Ahrens is principal investigator for the Data and Visualization project, which…
From insideHPC
Video: Weather and Climate Modeling at Convection-Resolving Resolution
David Leutwyler from ETH Zurich gave this talk at the 2017 Chaos Communication Congress. "The representation of thunderstorms (deep convection) and rain showers in climate models represents a major challenge, as this process
…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
ACM-W Connections – January 2018
Letter from ACM-W chair News from ACM-W Celebrations News from ACM-W Professional Chapters News from ACM-W Scholarships News from ACM SIG News from ACM-W India and ACM-W Europe Welcome from the ACM-W Chair Happy New Year! This…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI as Storytelling Assistant
Interesting proposition, but have yet to see examples of any value. The first step should be, can we assign useful value measures to a partial or complete story? How should that be tested? Have been in meetings that looked…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Assistants for Your Job
Is What I call figuring out what the nature of assistance is. Varies also in different industries. And once it ascends to doing the job ....
AI might give you a personal assistant instead of taking your job
Karl Redenbach, Cofounder…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Capgemini: Trends in Conversational Commerce
Good overview of the space and future with statistics.
Conversational Commerce
Why Consumers Are Embracing Voice Assistants in Their Lives
Introduction
Conversational Commerce, consumer purchase of products and services via voice…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP and Blockchain
SAP's Blog talks its approach to specific applications of Blockchain. Nicely described. " ... The blockchain technology, from a business perspective, can be seen as the next-gen collaborative business process improvement software…
From insideHPC
Video: Thomas Zacharia from ORNL Testifies at House Hearing on the Need for Supercomputing
In this video, Thomas Zacharia from ORNL testifies before the House Energy and Commerce hearing on DOE Modernization. "At the OLCF, we are deploying a system that may well be the world’s most powerful supercomputer when it begins…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: System Administrator at D.E. Shaw Research
D.E. Shaw Research in NYC is seeking a System Administrator for Servers, Clusters and Supercomputers for Computational Biochemistry in our Job of the Week. "Exceptional sysadmins sought to manage systems, storage, and network…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Speakers/Assistants Reduce TV Use?
Intriguing stats embedded here. Now will the integration of Assistants with devices with screams bring the mediums together? Note how rapidly this has occurred, in the last two years. Soon with the opportunity to start real…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dolphins Tracked with Sound Classification
Note the statement of the problem of classification here:
Tracking Dolphins With Algorithms You Might Find on Facebook
The New York Times By Steph Yin
Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography have used a machine…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Timing Leaks Everything
Facing the awful truth that computers are physical machines As moderator of RSA 2016 panel Paul Kocher is the lead author on the second of two papers detailing a longstanding class of security vulnerability that was recognized…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Japanese "Dude Food" Includes Squid
This seems to be a trend. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here....