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 insideHPC
Interview: HPC Thought Leaders Looking Forward to SC19 in Denver
In this special guest feature, SC19 General Chair Michela Taufer catches up with Sunita and Jack Dongarra to discuss the way forward for the November conference in Denver. "By augmenting our models and our ability to do simulation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft on How AI can Transform Business
Click through to interact. Always thinking about how businesses can usefully interact with assistance in doing their work. AI can be a part, but also things like data visualization, dashboards, Data mining, simpler analytics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Chainlink for Smart Contracts
New developments in Smart Contracts. Addressing some of the difficult issues with the concept of a smart contract. Good discussion at the link:
Blockchain Smart Contacts Finally Good for Something in the Real World In MIT…
From The Eponymous Pickle
VR in the Operating Room
Good case for VR. Complex, real time, lots of sensor data, collaboration and interaction is key. We worked on operation room simulation to make them more efficient.
Virtual Reality Gets Real in the Operating Room
Fortune By…
From The Eponymous Pickle
NVIDIA Test Robotic Kitchen
In our kitchen lab we also thought the kitchen was a key challenge for robotics, information exchange and assistance.
This Ikea kitchen is incubating the robots of the future
At Nvidia’s new robot lab in Seattle, UW professorBy…
From Schneier on Security
Evaluating the GCHQ Exceptional Access Proposal
The so-called Crypto Wars have been going on for 25 years now. Basically, the FBI -- and some of their peer agencies in the U.K., Australia, and elsewhere -- argue that the pervasive use of civilian encryption is hampering their…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mining and AI
Mining, here Geo-Mining, not cryptocurrency or Data-Mining. A complex, sensor based problem with considerable cost and potential reward, would seem to have real application of AI-style analytics. But it seems not much has…
From The Eponymous Pickle
January IFTTT
Good new stuff on the latest IFTTT newsletter, especially with regard to the support of voice assistants. Always something interesting there, and have implemented a few examples on my own. I am a fan. Still think there is…
From Computational Complexity
The Cost of Privacy
 |
| Billboard at 2019 CES |
Computer scientists tend to obsess about privacy and we've had a privacy/security debate for decades now. But now machine learning has really given us a whole new spin on what privacy protects and takes…
From insideHPC
Interview: Gary Grider from LANL on the new Efficient Mission-Centric Computing Consortium
At SC18 in Dallas, I had a chance to catch up with Gary Grider from LANL. "So we're forming a consortium to chase efficient computing. We see many of the HPC sites today seem to be headed down the path of buying machines that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Doing AI with all of your Data
Been a while since I have read the Teradata blog, some good thoughts. This is the challenge for many enterprises. And their operational data today is still relational.
Using AI on All Your Data: Building AI Models with Relational…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart to Add 200 Technologists
Further indication that high tech is steaming in retail.
Walmart to Add 2,000 to Technology Group This Year
Bloomberg By Emma Chandra; Matthew Boyle
Walmart anticipates the hiring of 2,000 technology experts this year in an effort…
From insideHPC
Metal or Plastic Liquid Cooling Connectors? What You Should Consider
With recent advances, high-performance thermoplastic now offers performance that rivals, and in some cases, surpasses their metal counterparts. Design engineers have to take several factors into consideration when trying to choose…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Comments on Emerging Tech
Good podcasts excerpts at the link, with connections to the full thing.
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on Emerging Technology: Blockchain, Wearables and Virtual Reality in InfoQ
In a recent a16z Podcast, a16z Venture Capital…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Participant, Customer Storytellling
How much of this can we hand off to the customer, and how well does that work? Can customers plot their own journey?
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch Is an Experiment on Us
Independent (London) By David Streitfeld
The Netflix series…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advantage of Talking to Customers Directly
Related to a number of projects we did, including having customers do tours of our retail lab store with our CEO. Now a project is looking at how to automate parts of consumer survey interaction.
Customers Surveys Are No Substitute…
From Schneier on Security
Prices for Zero-Day Exploits Are Rising
Companies are willing to pay ever-increasing amounts for good zero-day exploits against hard-to-break computers and applications: On Monday, market-leading exploit broker Zerodium said it would pay up to $2 million for zero-click…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Improves her Reading Style.
I had previously experimented with Alexa voice ability to reasonably read arbitrary English text, for possible business applications. The result was rocky. Now she has come out with a means to better pronounce text, emphasizing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ontologies vs Knowledge Graphs
Challenging thoughts, which we examined for some time in the enterprise. Not solved there either, or what it would take to construct, use and maintain this from either direction. Ultimately it's the most important idea…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ahold Giant Foods to Roll out Robots
Note the planned use for operational process. But also being in the store and interacting to some degree with customers?
NRF: Roving robots report for work at all Giant Foods’ stores By Tom Ryan in Retailwire
At the NRF Big Show…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Whats the Dark Web?
The below definition question came up in a recent meeting, was surprised at the considerable variance in answers. Well it is dark, so might we expect the answer to be unclear, but order the below to get the answer from
10…
From insideHPC
Penguin Computing builds Caviness Cluster for Machine Learning at the University of Delaware
Penguin Computing has deployed a new HPC cluster at the University of Delaware. The Caviness cluster is named in honor of Jane Caviness, former director of Academic Computing Services at the University. "It is great to have our…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM, Ford and LG Link for Blockchain Cobalt Tracing
What appears to be a good example for the legitimate use of Blockchain models. A sharable supply chain authentication/governance model.
Ford and IBM among quartet in Congo cobalt blockchain project in Reuters, with more good…
From insideHPC
Call for Presentations: GlobusWorld 2019 in Chicago
GlobusWorld 2019 has issued its Call for Presentations. The event takes place May 1-2 in Chicago. The event centers around Globus, a secure, reliable research data management service that enables researchers to move, share, publish…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA and Pure Storage Power Ai for Oncology with PAIGE
The battle against cancer is now being fought at the data level. A new Ai Startup called PAIGE hopes to revolutionize clinical diagnosis and treatment in pathology and oncology through the use of artificial intelligence. Using…
From The Eponymous Pickle
KDNuggets: Books on Language Processing
I have read KDNuggets long before deep learning was discovered. Love it. The most recent post was useful for a project:
KDnuggets™ News 19:n03, Jan 16: Top 10 Books on NLP and Text Analysis; End To End Guide For Machine Learning…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA T4 GPUs Come to Google Cloud for High Speed Machine Learning
Today the Google Cloud announced Public Beta availability of NVIDIA T4 GPUs for Machine Learning workloads. Starting today, NVIDIA T4 GPU instances are available in the U.S. and Europe as well as several other regions across
…
From insideHPC
Dan Reed Panel on Energy Efficient Computing at SC18
In this video from SC18, Dr. Daniel Reed moderates a panel discussion entitled: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” -- Software Improvements from Power/Energy Measurement Capabilities." "We have made major gains in…
From Schneier on Security
El Chapo's Encryption Defeated by Turning His IT Consultant
Impressive police work: In a daring move that placed his life in danger, the I.T. consultant eventually gave the F.B.I. his system's secret encryption keys in 2011 after he had moved the network's servers from Canada to the Netherlands…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Faster intersections between sorted arrays with shotgun
A common problem within databases and search engines is to compute the intersection between two sorted array. Typically one array is much smaller than the other one. The conventional strategy is the “galloping intersection”.Continue…