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 Putting People First
The case for … cities that aren’t dystopian surveillance states
We could decide to treat people as sensors, and not as things to be sensed – to observe Kant’s injunction that humans should be “treated as an end in themselves and not as a means to something else”.
From Putting People First
Tricia Wang on why the big data mentality fails – and what to do about it
Tricia Wang of Sudden Compass pokes holes in big data hype, arguing for the course-correcting power of thick data. I share podcast highlights, such as her dismantling of "data-driven" infatuations.
From Putting People First
Human-centred policy? Blending ‘big data’ and ‘thick data’ in national policy
How might policymakers better understand citizens’ perspectives when designing policy? Put another way, how should we improve and innovate the way policy is made to ensure it becomes more human-centred?
From insideHPC
HDR 200GB/sec InfiniBand for HPC & AI
In this video from the DDN booth at SC19, Scot Schultz from Mellanox presents: Connecting Visions: HDR 200GB/sec InfiniBand. "HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand accelerates 31 percent of new InfiniBand-based systems on the current TOP500…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Head of Research Computing at the Norwich Biosciences Institute
The Norwich Biosciences Institute Partnership (NBIP) is seeking a new Head of Research Computing in our Job of the Week. "We have an exciting opportunity for a strategic High-Performance Computing (HPC) leader to take accountability…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retail Technology at NRF
A look of how retailers are using new technology from the recent NRF conference. Human labor and its management still a very important topic.
NRF 2020 Review: Human vs. Machine
by Ron Margulis in Retailwire with further expert…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantum Machines Joins IBM Q Network
IBM continues to make alliances in Quantum computing.
Quantum Machines Joins the IBM Q Network
TEL AVIV, Israel, Jan. 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Quantum Machines (QM), creators of The Quantum Orchestration Platform, a complete hardware…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Improving Neural Models
So many groups working on how to make such models smaller and faster. Not different from the very long hunt for faster models to solve optimization problems over the years. Discussion is technical.
A Tool to Simplify Complex…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Stats on Alexa Skills
Decrease in skill increase. Lots of other interesting skills, in particular by language. Now lets get the quality and intelligence up
New Alexa Skill Data Show New U.S. Skills Launched in 2019 Fall to Lowest Level Since 2016
Bret…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Genome Analyzed
This is fantastic work: In total, the researchers identified approximately 2.7 billion DNA base pairs, which is around 90 percent the size of the human genome. There's nothing particularly special about that size, especially…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AR Contact Lens: Prototype
If the QR Contact lens finally here in prototype. Has been talked about for some time. Ultimate kind of wearable.
Tech Start-up Develops AR Contact Lenses
Financial Times
Patrick McGee
Start-up Mojo Vision is developing augmented…
From BLOG@CACM
Not So Good After All? Don't Let 'Altruism' Kill Your Company
Altruism is often heralded as a panacea for management challenges, but it could actually be a death sentence for your team and projects. Here's why.
From insideHPC
Groq Hardware Now Available on Nimbix Cloud for AI Workloads
Today Groq announced that the company's tensor processing hardware is now available on the Nimbix Cloud for select partners. The Groq processor is designed specifically for the performance requirements of computer vision, machine…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Sciencetown Investigates Extreme Computing at SC19
In this Sciencetown podcast, we follow experts from around the world to the epicenter of supercomputing - the annual, North American supercomputing conference or SC19. We ask them to weigh in on how the future of computers, artificial…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Allocating large blocks of memory: bare-metal C++ speeds
In a previous post, I benchmarked the allocation of large blocks of memory using idiomatic C++. I got a depressing result: the speed could be lower than 2 GB/s. For comparison, the disk in my laptop has greater bandwidth. Methodologically…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Be Hopeful about the Future
Good thoughts here, with the usual cautions coming from this source.
Pessimism dematerialized: Four reasons to be hopeful about the future
In More from Less, MIT Sloan School of Management’s Andrew McAfee argues that the “four
by…
From insideHPC
Meet the Future at the Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2020 Conference
Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2020 is a platform for the thought leaders from both academia and industry to interact and discuss the visionary ideas, the most important global trends and substantial innovations in supercomputing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI for Pizza?
Not unexpected.... classic examples of looking for patterns, then creating efficiency based predictions. Use that to provide the right profitable incentives. Has always been a good place to star, even before AI.
AI… for Pizza…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing the Mysteries of Boron Carbide
Researchers at the University of Florida are using XSEDE supercomputers to unlock the mysteries of boron carbide, one of the hardest materials on earth. The material is also very lightweight, which explains why it has been used…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Theory of Computing
Looks to be of interest, both technical and philosophical. Undergrad view at least, but could inspire people to think about where all this emerging tech and hype is going once again. The word 'Theory' scares many people, but…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtual Agents
A broader take than chatbots, more addressed to solving specific customer service issues. We used the term in loose combination with agent-models to deliver goal-specific assistants. Was always important to have very specific…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Seeing in Higher Dimensions
'Seeing' is constructing useful models about spaces from sensors to understand and navigate them. Predict current and future states. A good studey of the idea.
An Idea From Physics Helps AI See in Higher Dimensions
The laws of…
From insideHPC
200G HDR InfiniBand to Accelerate Weather Forecasting at ECMWF
Today Mellanox announced that 200 Gigabit HDR InfiniBand has been selected by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to accelerate their new world-leading supercomputer, based on Atos’ latest BullSequana…
From The Eponymous Pickle
US Treasury Tracking Federal Grants
Novel look to track and verify activity on grants. Testing an innovation.
US Treasury Department testing blockchain tech for tracking federal grants in TheBlockCrypto
The U.S. Department of the Treasury, which manages government…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Program Associate Position Open
The Computing Research Association (CRA) seeks a highly motivated individual to serve as a Program Associate for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) subcommittee. The program associate works closely with the CCC Director…
From insideHPC
Exxact Teams with Panasas for Turnkey HPC Storage Clusters
Today Exxact Corporation announced the company is joining the Panasas Accelerate Channel Partner Program. Exxact will become a key distributor and integrator for the Panasas ActiveStor Ultra product line, providing installation…
From insideHPC
ScaleMP and AMD Benchmark Best-in-Class Large-System Performance on SPEC CPU 2017
Today ScaleMP announced that it has accomplished best-ever recorded results for the SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark for any system size of four processors and higher. ScaleMP’s results for 32-, 24- and 16-processor systems are now holding…
From insideHPC
2020 Predictions from Radio Free HPC
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team lays out their tech predictions for 2020. "Henry predicts that we’ll see a RISC-V based supercomputer on the TOP500 list by the end of 2020 – gutsy call on that. This is a double down
…
From Schneier on Security
Securing Tiffany's Move
Story of how Tiffany & Company moved all of its inventory from one store to another. Short summary: careful auditing and a lot of police....
From insideHPC
Video: FPGAs and Machine Learning
James Moawad and Greg Nash from Intel gave this talk at ATPESC 2019. "FPGAs are a natural choice for implementing neural networks as they can handle different algorithms in computing, logic, and memory resources in the same device…