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 Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Primes And Polynomials
A result on the prime divisors of polynomial values Cropped from source Issai Schur was a mathematician who obtained his doctorate over a hundred years ago. He was a student of the great group theorist Ferdinand Frobenius. Schur…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Nominations Sought for New CCC Council Members
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is charged with catalyzing and empowering the U.S. computing research community to articulate and advance major research directions for the field. Established in 2006 through a cooperative…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF CISE Announcement: Re-starting after the lapse in appropriations
The following is a letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering…
From Schneier on Security
iPhone FaceTime Vulnerability
This is kind of a crazy iPhone vulnerability: it's possible to call someone on FaceTime and listen on their microphone -- and see from their camera -- before they accept the call. This is definitely an embarrassment, and Apple…
From insideHPC
Agenda Posted: April HPC User Forum in Santa Fe
Hyperion Research has posted the Speaker Agenda for the HPC User Forum, which takes place April 1-3 in Santa Fe. "Key topics will include updates from senior officials on America's Exascale Computing Project, Japan and the EuroHPC…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA Quadro Comes to the Microsoft Azure Cloud
NVIDIA Quadro Virtual Workstations are now available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, enabling virtual workstation performance for more artists, engineers and designers. "Starting today, Microsoft Azure cloud customers in
…
From insideHPC
Video: Computing for the Endless Frontier at TACC
In this talk from the Intel User Forum at SC18, Dan Stanzione from TACC presents: Computing for the Endless Frontier. "Coming to TACC in 2019, the Frontera supercomputer will be powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors. It will…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Data scientists need to learn about significant digits
Suppose that you classify people on income or gender. Your boss asks you about the precision of your model. Which answer do you give? Whatever your software tells you (e.g., 87.14234%) or a number made of a small and fixed number…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Withdraws Standalone Assistant Solutions from Market
As a Dev tester of the system, received the below. Implications?
Dear valued client,
We want to share with you some important upcoming changes to the future direction of our Watson Assistant Solutions offering.
On May 14, 2019
We're…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intelligent Quantum Machines?
We studied the perceptron neural model mentioned in this piece. An early first look at how biological neurons might be built in computers. Now an indication that quantum computers might be a means to build them efficiently.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tari: Imagining the Future of Digital Assets
Been looking at the management of digital assets, the podcast below is a good introduction The approach is still in development. I like the idea of using rules for assets and the ability to trust in how they will be enforced…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Conversting Wifi to Electricity
Converting Wi-Fi signals to electricity with new 2-D materials
Device made from flexible, inexpensive materials could power large-area electronics, wearables, medical devices, and more.
By Rob Matheson | MIT News Office
Imagine…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Rethinking Hamming’s questions
Richard Hamming is a famous computer scientist. In his talk You and Your Research, Hamming recounts how asked researchers three questions which I paraphrase: What are the important problems of your field? What important problems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Laser Created Audio by MIT
Cures for deafness, secret communications? The future for audiophiles?
deliver secret messages directly to your ears By Luke Dormehl — in Digitaltrend
What’s the best way to communicate with a person when they’re outside of…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Response to NITRD RFI to Update the 2016 Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan
The following post was contributed by CCC Director, Ann Drobnis. The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) National Coordination Office (NCO), on behalf of Federal agencies and the NITRD Cybersecurity…
From Schneier on Security
Japanese Government Will Hack Citizens' IoT Devices
The Japanese government is going to run penetration tests against all the IoT devices in their country, in an effort to (1) figure out what's insecure, and (2) help consumers secure them: The survey is scheduled to kick off next…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Preprocessing with NVIDIA Dali
Came across DALI in the NVIDIA developers blog. Nice idea, below is the intro, much more tech detail at the link, with coding usage examples. As in all data-hungry methods, its often about how to get the data ready and verified…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alibaba Future Hotel
Somewhat unusual player in the hotel space. But will help test other AI related interactions. Note recent indications that players in the hospitality space have decreased use of guest interacting robotics.
At Alibaba's Futuristic…
From insideHPC
200 Gigabit HDR InfiniBand to Power New Atos Supercomputers at CSC in Finland
Last week in Finland, Mellanox announced that its 200 Gigabit HDR InfiniBand solutions were selected to accelerate a multi-phase supercomputer system at CSC – the Finnish IT Center for Science. The new supercomputers, set to
…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing the Formation of Black Holes
New research based on simulations using the Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA reveals that when galaxies assemble extremely rapidly -- and sometimes violently -- that can lead to the formation of very massive black holes. In
…
From insideHPC
Rice Oil & Gas Conference in March to look for ways to meet HPC Demand
Rice University’s Ken Kennedy Institute will host the 12th annual Rice Oil and Gas High Performance Computing Conference (OGHPC) in Houston, Texas on March 4 - 6, 2019. "With the end of Moore’s law, challenges are mounting around…
From insideHPC
Slidecast: Novel Therm Powers HPC as a Service with Geothermal Energy
In this slidecast, Greg Stewart from Novel Therm describes how the company provides HPC As a Service using geothermal energy. As a wholesale provider of Geothermal HPC Data Centers, Novel Therm is a truly renewable energy source…
From The Eponymous Pickle
State of AI as Technology in 2019
What looks to be a very good piece is starting in TheVerge. As a practitioner of analytics, business AI and Consumer augmentation, all with claims of intelligence now, very interested in this view. Following.
How artificial…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Japan Hacks its own Population to Promote Security
In preparation for olympics to promote security. Or will it just guide black hats to the best places to go?
Japan plans to hack into millions of its citizens’ connected devices In Technology Review
The Japanese government will…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Retail is Here
Good piece in Forrester on Retail in China that sums up and charts progress in China
Future of Retail is Here Xiaofeng Wang, Senior Analyst Forrester
The future of retail is already here: Alibaba’s New Retail is reshaping the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What exactly is Artificial Intelligence?
I believe I mentioned this piece before, but worth pointing to again.
What Exactly is Artificial Intelligence and Why is it Driving me Crazy
Posted by William Vorhies
Summary: Advanced analytic platform developers, cloud providers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cable Cutting Skill
Direct competition between companies using skills that include AI? Interesting, but can this lead to some legal embattlement?
DirecTV encourages cable cutting with Alexa skill Creative Works By Kyle O'Brien
For all the potential…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM and VMWare
Hybrid clouds.
Also see IBMs info on this:
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/vmware
A question I would ask: How does Watson assistant link to this for a company? What value does it provide in what industry?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ops 4.0 Continuous Improvement Cycle
Transformation that does not stop, and has to react to fast changing context of many types.
In McKinsey:
Ops 4.0 helps businesses understand their greatest challenges, and solve ones that previously seemed beyond reach. It also…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Efficiency of Urban Farming
A topic of my interest, still following
Urban farms could be incredibly efficient—but aren’t yet
Casual farmers overwork, buy fertilizer, and use municipal water.
By John Timmer in Ars Technica ....