Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2019
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger, Microsoft Create Futuristic Stores
Making Shelves, store and consumer fulfillment smarter.
Kroger, Microsoft Create Futuristic Grocery Store. Amazon, Take Note
The supermarket chain and technology giant are using the cloud to make it faster to navigate the grocery…
From insideHPC
Video: Deploying Marvell’s ThunderX2 at Scale in HPC Market
In this video from DDN booth at SC18, Larry Wikelius from Marvell presents: Deploying Marvell's ThunderX2 at Scale in HPC Market. "The ThunderX2 product family is the company's second-generation 64-bit ARMv8-A server processor…
From Schneier on Security
New Attack Against Electrum Bitcoin Wallets
This is clever: How the attack works: Attacker added tens of malicious servers to the Electrum wallet network. Users of legitimate Electrum wallets initiate a Bitcoin transaction. If the transaction reaches one of the malicious…
From Computational Complexity
When is a kilogram not a kilogram?
A long long time ago the standards for meter's, kilograms, etc was an actual physical object.
Those days are long gone of course. For example, the meter is defined is the length of the path traveled by light in 1/299,792,458…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Predictions For 2019
The problem of predicting ‘when’ not just ‘what’ Cropped from Toronto Star source Isaac Asimov was a prolific writer of science fiction and nonfiction. Thirty-five years ago, on the eve of the year 1984, he noted that 35 years…
From BLOG@CACM
The Ethical Responsibilities of the Student or End-User Programmer
If a student's program goes awry, who is responsible? How do we protect society and encourage people to learn about code?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amoeba Solves the TSP
A classic, iconic problem, often mentioned in analytics texts. Often use as a classic optimization problem that gets very hard, very fast for digital computers to solve. Here an analog solution by primitive animals.
Amoeba…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Downloading the Wikipedia
Since I am always connected, and have been technical since you had to solder things together, I was unaware you could do this. The further question is why would I do this? With smartphones, laptops and voice assistants arrayed…
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: International Workshop on Performance Portable Programming models for Manycore or Accelerators
The 4th International Workshop on Performance Portable Programming models for Manycore or Accelerators (P^3MA) has issued their Call for Papers. This workshop will provide a forum to bring together researchers and developers
…
From insideHPC
Video: Reimagining the Datacenter Memory and Storage Hierarchy
In this video from DDN booth at SC18, Andrey Kudryavtsev from Intel presents: Reimagining the Data Centre Memory and Storage Hierarchy. "Intel Optane DC persistent memory represents a new class of memory and storage technology…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neutrogena scans Faces, Builds Masks
Clever idea, using smartphone as a sensor, other applications?
Neutrogena app 3D scans your face to create perfect-fit sheet masks
Because there's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to faces.
By Rachel England, @rachel_england
At…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Use of Weather App Data
On the alleged gathering of data and how it is used. Leads to further consideration about how the data is used now and in the future. Future intent of data use?
L.A. Sues IBM's Weather Company over 'Deceptive' Weather Channel…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Connecting Smart Glasses to an Assistant
Now we have smart glasses (soon) connecting to an Assistant. To be shown at this weeks CES. As the review suggests, most likely interesting for narrow applications in the enterprise, where you really need hands-free, like
Vuzix…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (January 5th, 2019)
There are nearly 70,000 centenarians in Japan. China’s population fell by 2.5 million in 2018. Obesity is associated with increased senescent cell burden and neuropsychiatric disorders, including anxiety and depression. Clearing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Etherium Announces Open Plan to Cut Energy Use
How fundamental will this change be? Mining to move beyond proof by work?
Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption by 99%
IEEE Spectrum By Peter Fairley
The Ethereum Foundation, and the broader open source movement…
From insideHPC
Video: Flying through the Universe with Supercomputing Power
In this video from SC18, Mike Bernhardt from the Exascale Computing Project talked with Salman Habib of Argonne National Laboratory about cosmological computer modeling and simulation. Habib explained that the ExaSky project
…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Performance Engineer at Oak Ridge National Lab
Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee is seeking a Performance Engineer in our Job of the Week. "We are seeking to build a team of Performance Engineers who will serve as liaisons between the National Center for Computational Sciences…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Customer Experience Metrics
Useful survey, you see them all, and often not well applied, just used for historical or cost/availability reasons. You get what you measure.
Does it matter which customer experience metric you choose?
Alyona Medelyan in CustomerThink…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Finding all the Trees in the World
Akin to my previously mentioned Agriculture Deep Lens problem. No Deeplens appears to have been tried here. In Flowing data:
Finding all of the trees in the world with machine learning
Descartes Labs used machine learning to…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: The Future of the Squid Market
It's growing. 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....
From The Eponymous Pickle
100 Million Alexa Devices Sold
Platform War? Or more like an ecosystem war, the one that will get the most participants creating intelligent value, and combining that into new products. More more detail at the link.
Amazon says 100 Million Alexa Devices Have…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Procter Thinking More Channels
My former employer talks products, packaging, supply chain, channel selection and design. Quite a broad set of considerations for a relatively typical kind of CPG product. Of course, direct to consumer experiments have been…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Threat Intelligence Handbook
Just reading The Threat Intelligence Handbook: A Practical Guide for Security Teams to Unlocking the Power of Intelligence. Edited by Chris Pace of RecordedFuture.com . Well and concisely done. See their site for a copy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Use of Cube Satellites
Recent mention of the successful use of Cube Satellites made me think of yet broader applications, and others are thinking this way. Back to the swarms of small and relatively cheap robots to perform tasks as a group. Could…
From insideHPC
Major Media and Entertainment OEM orders $4 Million HPC Gear from One Stop Systems
Today One Stop Systems announced a $4 million purchase order with a $1 million customer extension option from a major OEM in the media and entertainment industry. "As our largest-ever follow-on purchase order, we believe it reflects…
From insideHPC
Machine Learning Award Powers Engine Design at Argonne
Over at Argonne, Jared Sagoff writes that automotive manufacturers are leveraging the power of DOE supercomputers to simulate the combustion engines of the future. "As part of a partnership between the Argonne, Convergent Science…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kohler Seeks to Automate the Bathroom
Our smart home setup featured an automated bathroom. Before voice control became popular. It was one of the most popular stops in our tours. Right now Kohler is including both Alexa and Google Assistant solutions as ecosystems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Frameworks for Big Data Ecosystems
Of interest, below is an abstract, just a bit more at the link, further detail requires signup. Ecosystems are hard to sell, but ultimately essential.
Framework for Implementing a Big Data Ecosystem in Organizations
By Sergio
Communications…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Techniques for Adaptive Robotics
When building autonomous systems we often had to adapt the changes in context over time, advances in the techniques needed to do this efficiently are always interesting. Note here the use of trial and error for real time adaptation…
From Putting People First
Why data is never raw
“Except in divine revelation, data is never simply given, nor should it be accepted on faith,” writes Nick Barrowman in The New Atlantis. “How data are construed, recorded, and collected is the result of human decisions — decisions…