Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2021
From Schneier on Security
Changes in WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy
If you’re a WhatsApp user, pay attention to the changes in the privacy policy that you’re being forced to agree with.
In 2016, WhatsApp gave users a one-time ability to opt out of having account data turned over to Facebook.…From The Eponymous Pickle
Generating Visual Images from Text Descriptions
Something we could have used to test visual understanding of products and their use.
OpenAI’s latest neural network creates images from written descriptions By Ryan Daws | January 6, 2021 | TechForge Media
Categories: Neural…From The Eponymous Pickle
Mining Private Data: Does GPT-2 Know Your Phone Number?
Schneier has mentioned this as a privacy issue:
Just reading the Berkeley BAIR paper that develops this (see short excerpt below)
And the source technical paper: Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models
By Nicholas…From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Product Development from Visualization
And forward to product design and development, from visualization.
Visualization Adds Transparency to Digital Product Development
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Germany), January 4, 2021
Visualization software developed by researchers…From The Eponymous Pickle
Inferring Design Plans from Short Clips
Currently examining this kind of approach. Phones are getting these kinds of abilities.
Researchers design AI that can infer whole floor plans from short video clips By Kyle Wiggers @Kyle_L_Wiggers
Floor plans are useful…From The Eponymous Pickle
Dream Manipulation
Now here is some scary. Or a means of entertainment? Or creativity enhancement?
An MIT Lab Is Building Devices to Hack Your Dreams
From improving your mood to focusing your creativity, scientists at MIT’s Dream Lab want to…From The Eponymous Pickle
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From The Eponymous Pickle
New Learning on SolarWinds
Schneier summarizes the NYT detailed article on the SolarWinds hack. The NYT article is firewalled, and the Schneier article also includes a number of useful comments by readers. Continue to follow this as it relates to work…
From insideHPC
GlobusWorld to Be Held Online May 12-14
GlobusWorld, a non-profit organization that brings together researchers, systems administrators, developers and IT leaders from top research computing centers, national labs, federal agencies, and universities from around the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
QR Code Comeback?
We were very early experimenters and appliers, so this caught my eye. Good story in current context, With further expert opinion in retail. Will it last post-pandemic?
How did QR codes go from DOA to killer app? by Matthew…From Schneier on Security
Russia’s SolarWinds Attack and Software Security
The information that is emerging about Russia’s extensive cyberintelligence operation against the United States and other countries should be increasingly alarming to the public. The magnitude of the hacking, now believed to250…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Monitoring in-production ML models
Useful and detailed look at real world problems with Sagemaker Model Monitor. Good graphical views. Somewhat but practically technical.
Monitoring in-production ML models at large scale using Amazon SageMakerModel Monitor by…From insideHPC
SingleStore Adds AWS Glue for Simpler Cloud Data Integration
San Francisco – Jan. 6, 2021 – Database company SingleStore, for operational analytics and modern applications, today unveiled native support for AWS Glue, expanding its cloud data integration. This enables developers, data engineers…
From Schneier on Security
APT Horoscope
This delightful essay matches APT hacker groups up with astrological signs. This is me:
Capricorn is renowned for its discipline, skilled navigation, and steadfastness. Just like Capricorn, Helix Kitten (also known as APT 35…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Memory access on the Apple M1 processor
When a program is mostly just accessing memory randomly, a standard cost model is to count the number of distinct random accesses. The general idea is that memory access is much slower than most other computational tasks. Furthermore…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Solves Quantum Chemistry Problem
Heard this posed an an early 'monte carlo' simulation problem which had potential for solutions with quantum.
AI Solves Schrödinger's Equation, a Fundamental Problem in Quantum Chemistry
SciTechDaily
Scientists at Germany's Freie…From The Eponymous Pickle
Small Data, Short Term Global Risks, GRR
Nicely put, perhaps on every risk analysis we should list these calculate how they might be of threat to our contexts. At the link below some good charts and analysis, plus links to much deeper analyses.
January’s most engrossing…From Putting People First
Videos online of the SDGC conference 2020
All videos of the Service Design Global Conference of October 2020 [#SDGC20] are now available for free on youtube. Here the links to the keynotes and the talks (and links to slide decks when available).
From insideHPC
Intel-Apple-AMD-Tesla Chip Architect Jim Keller Joins AI Startup Tenstorrent
Jim Keller, one of the leading names in HPC, AI and data center chip architecture, has landed at a Toronto hardware startup developing AI chips after a two-year stint at Intel that ended “for personal reasons,” according to the…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
CSTA Expands Focus on CS Equity
The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) has expanded their CSTA Equity Fellowship program.
From Putting People First
[Book] Design of Supporting Systems for Life in Outer Space
Annalisa Dominoni presents a new discipline that will have an increasingly strong impact on behavior and performance of astronauts.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Looking Under the Skin
More advances in healthcare imaging capabilities.
Technical University of Munich (Germany)
Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany have developed self-learning algorithms…From insideHPC
Cambridge Quantum Computing Appoints Oxford Professor Bob Coecke as Chief Scientist
Cambridge, UK, Jan. 6, 2021 – Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC), a global leader in quantum computing software and algorithms, has announced the appointment of Oxford University Professor Bob Coecke as its chief scientist. Coecke…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Using Virtual Backgrounds
Hiding the mess is a good reason. Though other than plain backgrounds do quickly get tedious.
(OWL is a Business Partner of Zoom)
31 Free Zoom Virtual Backgrounds & How to Change your Zoom Background
Katherine Boyarsky | October…From BLOG@CACM
Computers for Learning: Charisma that Fails to Disrupt?
Two books examine why large-scale learning technology often doesn’t achieve expectations. Technology can improve learning at scale, but charismatic stories about learning technology too often distort the conditions for success…
From Computational Complexity
My Survey on Hilbert's 10th for particular (d,n) is ready for you to help me on!
Hilbert's 10th problem is (in modern terminology) to find an algorithm that will, given a poly
p(x1,...,xn) in Z[x1,...,xn], determine if it has a solution in the integers.
This was shown undecidable by the combined efforts…From insideHPC
Update from the Frontier of Exascale Software Development at the University of Delaware
In advance of the scheduled shipment this year of the U.S.’s first exascale supercomputer, Frontier, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, an international team of software developers led by a University of Delaware professor is
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
C by GE Turns to Cync
Wish that this had happened so strongly when I was connected, nice to see them back connected to IOT Home. But will this direction survive?
C by GE gets rebranded under new ownership, expands beyond lighting By Brian Heater…From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Predictions For 2021
This year is a Blum integer, 43*47 2017 article, not via Zoom Allan Lichtman correctly predicted the 2020 presidential election, based on a 7-6 edge in “keys” to Joe Biden. His model, which he developed in 1981 with the late…
From The Eponymous Pickle
No Driver on Board: Autonomous Trucks to Take to the Road
Evan Ackerman presents a good overview of the state of autonomous trucking. Door to door, with lots of links to background information. This should get us lots of further useful data about operational experiences. (ie accidents)…