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
Warrant Canaries are Here
A term that was new to me .... I remember well the notion of the 'canary in the coal mine', the canary tells us by dying, that something has happened. Now the idea is broadened technically to indicate a simple signal that something…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What Amazon Alexa Announced ot CES
A number of interesting things announced about Alexa at the just completed CES. Hard to understand what is serious investment and what is not. Like to see more 'intelligent' moves and business applications.. Some stats and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kaiser Permanente Bets on Watch Based Health Compliance
Some good stats about how such compliance sensors like smart watches could be used in pharma.
Kaiser Permanente Bets on Smartwatches to Lower Costs
The Wall Street Journal
Agam Shah
January 9, 2020
Hospital management and health
Requires…
From The Eponymous Pickle
OrCam for Visual, Hearing Impairment
Basically a navigation aid, which could have profound assistive effect, but implies it must be taught specific contexts to be most useful. How hard that is to do, or how error prone, is unclear. Positioned as 'Personal AI'Their…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (January 11th 2020)
The extra wealth that ones acquires by attending college is now estimated to be indistinguishable from zero. The authors control for the parent’s education and the individual’s financial acumen. A drug approved for use in human…
From insideHPC
Podcast: PSIP Brings Software Development teams together at the Exascale Computing Project
In this Lets Talk Exascale podcast, Elaine Raybourn from Sandia National Laboratories decribes how Productivity Sustainability Improvement Planning (PSIP) is bringing software development teams together at the Exascale Computing…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Research Systems Integration Engineer at UC San Diego
UC San Diego is seeking a Research Systems Integration Engineer in our Job of the Week. "Information Technology Services uses world-class services and technologies to empower UC San Diego's mission to transform California and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
People Too Trusting of Virtual Assistants
Another look at the general idea of creating a 'personality' of assistants. Anthropomorphic features like names, speaking style, voice, gender, etc. can influence how we perceive trust, truth, value, uses. Of course just…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Defining the Smart Home: More than a Speaker
Very true, but it sets the stage. There is so much more work to be done to establish the level assistance that needs to created. Skills are many, but most are trivial. Below article points to recent surveys.
ProBeat: in…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Stuffed Squid with Vegetables and Pancetta
A Croatian recipe. 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
Bandage like Sensors gather Body information in Real-Time
Breath and accuracy of data in real-time could be important.
Bandage-Like Sensor to Detect Human Body Conditions in Real Time
Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology
January 7, 2020
Researchers at South Korea’s Daegu…
From BLOG@CACM
Evolution Through Revolution: Getting Your Team to Embrace Change
Don't accept the status quo. Instead, build a team willing to fight for positive change.
From insideHPC
Sano Genetics Deploys Lifebit CloudOS for Direct-to-Consumer Genetics
Today Sano Genetics announced the company is using Lifebit CloudOS to power their free DNA sequencing platform, achieving 35% increase in speed of imputation analyses. Imputation is a statistical technique that fills in the gaps…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Y2020 Bug? Still happening.
I remember discussing this particular 'fix' back then. And have seen code in software that still makes assumptions about how long code will be around. Whats a really reasonable assumption about code life?
A lazy fix 20 years…
From insideHPC
MIRIS Teams with LiquidCool Solutions for Datacenter Heat Recovery
MIRIS has entered into an agreement with LiquidCool Solutions (LCS), a world leader in rack-based immersion cooling technology for datacenters. The agreement gives MIRIS the exclusive right to distribute LCS technology on heat…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAS CEO on Augmenting People and Processes
Jim Goodnight of SAS helped us through many of the early years of doing analytics in the enterprise. Good to see him talking about natural language processes and AI, which we never hear of much of in those days, when classic…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
How Do Teachers Without CS Experience Debug Student Code
My Programming Honors students are wrapping up their semester projects today. Actually they should all have been handed in by now but I’ll give them until the end of the day. In any case, my students have come up with some interesting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Supplier Relationships
Well yes, seemore details at the link.
Kraft Heinz chief procurement officer: ‘Relationships with suppliers should not be purely transactional' 02-Jan-2020 By Elaine Watson in FoodNavigator
Type ‘Kraft Heinz procurement’ into…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pushy Robotics Learns about Object Manipulation
The idea of directing a sensor to explore a space and its contents is useful. Now an element of how objects in the space react.
Pushy robots learn the fundamentals of object manipulation
MIT researchers have compiled a dataset…
From insideHPC
ORNL Researchers Develop Quantum Chemistry Simulation Benchmark
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a quantum chemistry simulation benchmark to evaluate the performance of quantum devices and guide the development of applications for future…
From insideHPC
Latest Climate Models Predict Thinner Clouds and More Global Warming
Thanks to clouds, latest climate models predict more global warming than their predecessors. Researchers at LLNL in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Leeds and Imperial College London have found that the latest…
From Schneier on Security
Police Surveillance Tools from Special Services Group
Special Services Group, a company that sells surveillance tools to the FBI, DEA, ICE, and other US government agencies, has had its secret sales brochure published. Motherboard received the brochure as part of a FOIA request…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Webcast on the Future of Transportation
On January 14, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation and moderated by Axios, the British Embassy is hosting a distinguished panel discussion on the future of transportation, with a focus on driverless vehicles…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talk:Introduction to Service Design
You are invited to attend the first call in the...
ISSIP Service Design Speaker Series - Introduction to Service Design, by Drs Daniela Sangiorgi & Lia Patricio, January 22, 2020, 8:00-8:30 US Pacific Time
The ISSIP Service Design…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Social Robotics from Samsung
Got some praises at CES. Another attempt at social as well as helpful. 'A Ball-like moving device than can explore space'. A silly gadget? Have now seen maybe a dozen attempts at this. This one also suggests that it can…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ethereum and Ernst & Young
In Forbes, more examples in the space, here using a zero-knowledge approach.
Ernst & Young Doubles Down On Its Bet With Ethereum
Ben Jessel Contributor
Crypto & Blockchain
I write about fintech and enterprise adoption of blockchain…
From insideHPC
Microway Deploys NVIDIA DGX-2 supercomputers at Oregon State University
Microway has deployed six NVIDIA DGX-2 supercomputer systems at Oregon State University. As an NVIDIA Partner Network HPC Partner of the Year, Microway installed the DGX-2 systems, integrated software, and transferred their extensive…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Synthetic Data for Machine Learning
Synthetic data is something you use when you don't have real, sensor or measurement based data. Its not un-common when you don't have enough real data ... It can come from simulations, forecasts, derived from metadata, crowdsourced…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Announcement from NSF/SHF: New funding opportunity Principles and Practice of Scalable Systems (PPoSS)
The following is an announcement from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Software and Hardware Foundations Program Directors Nina Amla, Anindya Banerjee, and Sol Greenspan announcing an up to $87M (over several years) new…
From insideHPC
IBM Doubles Quantum Volume with 28 Qubit Raleigh System
All qubits are not created equal. Over at the IBM Blog, Jerry Chow and Jay Gambetta write that the company's new Raleigh 28-qubit quantum computer has achieved the company’s goal of doubling its Quantum Volume. The development…