Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2020
From The Eponymous Pickle
Commercial Drone Deliveries
Its the year of the Drone delivery. Probably mostly in specialty contexts, but it will be broadly tested, regulated, tracked, controlled. Then will spread broadly. Good intro article in IEEE Spectrum:
U.S. Commercial Drone Deliveries…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robotic Process Automation
Good intro piece in O'Reilly on RPA. Thoughtful, though somewhat limiting in scope. Its an excellent starting point, but can also be seen as a framework for more complex and 'intelligent' solutions. When we wrote complex…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sensing Tech to Improve ML Precision
A photo of the sensing model created at Purdue that works with ML for applications like e-cars and home design. Sensing Technology Could Improve Machine Learning Precision for Manufacturing, Electric Vehicles, Smart Homes
Purdue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How is Technology Reshaping Real Estate?
Was asked this question recently, here is one answer I found
How Technology Is Reshaping the Real Estate Industry
Karam Mangat -December 30, 2019 ...
Whenever we think of buying a property, a house or an office space, it always
Most…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Two Minute Papers
Two Minute Papers
Brought to my attention by colleague Jeff Dyck
Awesome research for everyone. Two new science videos every week. You'll love it!
Summarization of research papers in short videos
Our links:
Web → https://cg.tuwien…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
What does “doesn’t work” mean?
Every computer science teacher has heard it “My program doesn’t work. What is wrong with it?” Sometimes they will show you the code without any more explanation than “it doesn’t work.” One generally replies with something like…
From Schneier on Security
USB Cable Kill Switch for Laptops
BusKill is designed to wipe your laptop (Linux only) if it is snatched from you in a public place: The idea is to connect the BusKill cable to your Linux laptop on one end, and to your belt, on the other end. When someone yanks…
From The Eponymous Pickle
HSBC Builds a Digital Vault
Transmitting money, or just vaulting it.
HSBC to shift $20 billion worth of assets to blockchain-based Digital Vault via Reuters
(Reuters) — HSBC aims to shift $20 billion worth of assets to a new blockchain-based custody platform…
From insideHPC
Micron steps up Memory Performance and Density with DDR5
Today Micron Technology announced that it has begun sampling DDR5 registered DIMMs, based on its industry-leading 1znm process technology, with key industry partners. DDR5, the most technologically advanced DRAM to date, will…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Workshop on Report on Future Directions for Parallel and Distributed Computing (SPX 2019)
The following blog was written by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin Madison. Due to technology challenges and potential societal benefits, NSF has provided sustained funding…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Using Humans in Duplex too
Reminds me again of our early use of what we called 'concierge' methods for chatbot implementations. That is, using a combination of logic-AI-learning and humans to provide exactly the right solution, based on context and complexity…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Celestial Observation by Smartphone.
Have had a long time background in observational astronomy, have been impressed how smartphones can support observation, but always thought there would be much room for stronger integration between smartphones and telescopes…
From insideHPC
GIGABYTE Brings AI and Cloud Solutions to CES 2020
GIGABYTE is showcasing AI, Cloud, and Smart Applications this week at CES 2020 in Las Vegas. "GIGABYTE is renowned for its craftsmanship and dedication to innovating new technologies that are current with the time and helping…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Will AI Save Lives?
More on the healthcare uses pf AI methods for accurate diagnosis:
It's too soon to tell if DeepMind's medical AI will save any lives
Artificial intelligence trained on health records can now detect kidney injury up to two days
AIs…
From insideHPC
Joe Landman on How the Cloud is Changing HPC
In this special guest feature, Joe Landman from Scalability.org writes that the move to cloud-based HPC is having some unexpected effects on the industry. "When you purchase a cloud HPC product, you can achieve productivity in…
From insideHPC
Altair Acquires newFASANT for High-Frequency Electromagnetics
Today Altair announced the acquisition of newFASANT, offering leading technology in computational and high-frequency electromagnetics. “By combining its people and software into our advanced solutions offerings, we are clearly…
From insideHPC
Predictive Data Science for Physical Systems: From Model Reduction to Scientific Machine Learning
Karen Willcox from the University of Texas gave this Invited Talk at SC19. "This talk highlights how physics-based models and data together unlock predictive modeling approaches through two examples: first, building a Digital…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Journal of the ACM: January 2020
This month's CACM was particularly good regarding hot topics and approaches. For both the science and application areas. Below the table of contents. Something here for everyone. Click through for link addresses. Join the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Traces Coffee Sourcing with Blockchain
Again, an area we worked in regarding coffee supply chain. An increasingly common use of distributed ledger, and a means of sharing trust about sharing key parts of the supply chain. Look for more coming out of this week's…
From Schneier on Security
Mailbox Master Keys
Here's a physical-world example of why master keys are a bad idea. It's a video of two postal thieves using a master key to open apartment building mailboxes. Changing the master key for physical mailboxes is a logistical nightmare…
From Computational Complexity
The Wikipedia Entry on NP-Intermediary Problems lists one of mine! I'm not bragging about it.
I recently needed to look at what NP problems were possibly intermediary (neither in P nor NP-complete). So I went to Wikipedia and found this.
They had many problems, though some I had never heard of. Those that I had never…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Looks to Mobile Home Robotics
Bloomberg reports on linking up with a wheeled home robot for mobile tasks. The complexity and maintenance of the latter makes them more problematic as general task devices, as can be seen by the failure of a number of attempts…
From The Eponymous Pickle
2 Factor Authentication Compromised
Had always known it had vulnerabilities, here is an example. Still a good approach to utilize. Note the approach requires theft of software tokens.
Chinese Hacker Group Caught Bypassing 2FA
By ZDNet, January 2, 2020
Dutch cybersecurity…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Servant: The TV Show
Using logic to try and understand the show Servant [ M. Night ] M. Night Shyamalan is the creator of many wonderful horror movies, including The Village and The Sixth Sense. His films often have a twist ending. Today I thought…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA to host Full-Day HPC Summit at GPU Technology Conference
NVIDIA will host a full day HPC Summit this year at the GPU Technology Conference 2020. With a full day of plenary sessions and a developer track on high performance computing, the HPC Summit takes place Thursday, March 26 in…
From insideHPC
Analytics, Multicloud, and the Future of the Datasphere
James Coomer gave this talk at the DDN User Group at SC19. James Coomer from DDN presents: Analytics, Multicloud, and the Future of the Datasphere. "We are adding serious data management, collaboration and security capabilities…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dependability in Edge Computing
Quite a good pece, broad and deep, on the topic of edge computing. Scale, Security and standardization in Deployment. Below the abstract, more about the specific insights covered are at the link, full access requires sign into…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Considering Statistical Traps
Needs to be carefully considered and checked. We also found that some of these problems could creep in over time, even when not the case at first. Check, recheck for this.
Statistical Traps in KDNuggets
Fallacies are what
There…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Contract Security and Correctness
Intriguing thoughts, but still find the extensibility of SC to be closer to 'agreements', and thus work process, less general than it could be. Security certainly an issue. But also, as in all programming, correctness as
Turing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Super Saturday vs Black Friday
Another look, with some numbers, with further expert comment and opinions from Retailwire.
Is Super Saturday rivaling Black Friday in importance? in Retailwire by Tom Ryan
Super Saturday’s sales this year reached $34.4 billion…