Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2015
From Schneier on Security
Mapping FinFisher Users
Citizen Lab continues to do excellent work exposing the world's cyber-weapons arms manufacturers. Its latest report attempts to track users of Gamma International's FinFisher: This post describes the results of Internet scanning…
From My Biased Coin
Yes, We Have Postdocs This Year
The Harvard Theory of Computation group has postdocs. This year, besides our usual general call for postdocs, we are also inaugurating the Michael O. Rabin Postdoctoral Fellowship in Theoretical Computer Science. This new fellowship…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Readies a Shopping Assistant
Wal-Mart preps an SMS text based virtual shopping assistant called Simple Text. Based on what I have read it is unclear how much Cognitive technology is being used. Discussion in retailwire. An additional piece in FierceRetail…
From insideHPC
Advania in Iceland Tests HPC Cloud Bursting with Docker using the Ubercloud
An Iceland-based "HPC in the Cloud" company called Advania has published an interesting case study with The Ubercloud, and online community and marketplace where engineers, scientists, and their service providers discover, try…
From insideHPC
Bitfusion Labs Opens for Boosting Application Performance
Today Bitfusion announced Bitfusion Labs, a collaborative proving ground for delivering performance improvements for hardware-accelerated applications.
The post Bitfusion Labs Opens for Boosting Application Performance appeared…From insideHPC
ArcticBlue Nearline Storage from Spectra Logic Increases Data Shelf Life
Today Spectra Logic launched ArcticBlue, a new nearline disk storage system that delivers "Twice the Shelf Life of Competing Disk Platforms at Half the Cost." ArcticBlue leverages the company’s BlackPearl hybrid storage architecture…
From insideHPC
Bull Atos Installs Fastest Supercomputer in Croatia
Bull Atos has installed the fastest supercomputer in Croatia at the University in Rijeka. With an expected debut on the TOP500 in November, the 239 Teraflop BURA supercomputer will be used by university researchers in areas including…
From insideHPC
insideHPC Guide to Cloud Computing for HPC
Cloud computing is changing the way that IT organizations operate and innovate. While moving enterprise type applications to a cloud service provider is progressing, technical computing has been lagging in this transformation…
From insideHPC
Video: Network Architecture Trends
Pavan Balaji from Argonne presented this talk at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "More cores will drive the network, with more sharing of the network infrastructure. The aggregate amount of communication…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What Should Kodak have Done?
Fascinating piece in Innovation Excellence. In particular because we met with Kodak to talk collaboration in innovation at the time of their long slide. Kodak had some excellent intellectual property that could have been used…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On the Limitations of 3D Printing
In Fast Company. Prototyping clearly. But then real world scale and precision become a couple of the problems. Interesting case study. " ... Yet Strauser’s production lines will remain firmly planted in Chinese factories…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Open Sources Cloud
Walmart decries cloud lock-in, plans to open-source OneOpsWalmart announced that it will open-source the cloud technology it has built up following its acquisition of startup OneOps roughly two years ago ....Vendor lock-in has…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Governance in the Future of the CIO
The Board Leadership & Governance Insight of the “Future of CIO” Governance is like a steering wheel, to ensure the business running in the right direction! ... "
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon IOT Strategy, Facing the Consumer
Amazon has been developing some very interesting B to C Internet of Things related offerings, like the Echo and Dash. So their approach will be good to follow.Amazon's IoT strategyA new flywheel emerges. When thinking through…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Autograders–for good or for evil?
Over 40 years ago I first graded programming projects. As an undergraduate lab assistant I reviewed student projects based on metrics from the professor. The professor assigned the grade in large part based on my review of how…
From Schneier on Security
Breaking Diffie-Hellman with Massive Precomputation (Again)
The Internet is abuzz with this blog post and paper, speculating that the NSA is breaking the Diffie-Hellman key-exchange protocol in the wild through massive precomputation. I wrote about this at length in May when this paper…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Credentials in Pittsburgh
Steel City Credentials: Building the future of credentials in Pittsburgh, by Jason Swanson. Badges too. A kind of low level gamifiction implied? Mapping micro learning elements to credentials. Would like to see how well this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
DropBox Paper for Simplicity
In Wired: Dropbox is building a collaboration and work space tool called Paper to let people in small business work together to get things done. In early beta. To manipulate all of those files you have been gathering. …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Considering Risk Assessments
In CWorld: Good short basic piece on basic risk assessments. Good place to start. I would further get a professional to do the analysis that really knows the domains involved. Start with visual methods to display the risk…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Whole Foods Builds New ERP System
Whole Foods to Build New ERP System for ‘Single View’ of Product Data By Steven Norton in the WSJ Blog. The move is part of a broader effort by the grocery chain to centralize disparate IT systems, get a better view of its supply…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Domain Scoping for Subject Matter Experts
The capture, sharing and augmentation of expertise is a key topic for Cognitive. How do we do it well? By first understanding and then leveraging the language of the domain. Elham Khabiri, from IBM Watson Research, presented…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
October GIURR Webinar with DARPA’s Dr. Bradford Tousley
The National Academies’ Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GIURR) is hosting a webinar with Dr. Bradford Tousley, Director of the Tactical Technology Office (TTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency…
From insideHPC
IDC Breakfast Briefing Returns to SC15
IDC will host a complimentary Analyst Briefing and Breakfast at SC15. The popular annual event is great way to catch up with the latest trends in the HPC Market and High Performance Data Analytics.
The post IDC Breakfast Briefing…From insideHPC
Video: Beowulf Boot Camp Trains the Next Generation of HPC Experts
"This exciting course offers students and teachers a unique opportunity to work with advanced research technology not usually available in a typical classroom setting. Students will engage in the following activities: building…
From insideHPC
GCS Sponsors TUM Team for SC15 Student Cluster Challenge
The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing is sponsoring a team from the Technische Universität München for the SC15 Student Cluster Competition at SC15.
The post GCS Sponsors TUM Team for SC15 Student Cluster Challenge appeared first…From insideHPC
Weather Prediction with Intel Xeon Phi
"Modern Numerical Weather prediction (NWP) can now use many thousands of cores in a single run of the application. By using modern CPUs such as the Intel Xeon processors and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, tremendous performance…
From Computational Complexity
2015 Fall Jobs Post
When the 2014 fall jobs post is our most popular post, you know it is time for the 2015 jobs post. This year instead of (or in addition to) posting your jobs in the comments, post your theory jobs to Theoretical Computer Science…
From Schneier on Security
Problems with DNA Evidence
Turns out it's fallible....
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Project Ideas Are Everywhere
Yesterday, like thousands of other teachers, I was proctoring the PSAT exam. Few things are less exciting that watching a room full of students fill in little circles with number 2 pencils.
One does need to pay attention to…From The Eponymous Pickle
Broad Survey of Augmented Data Science
Seeing more of this. Just saw Watson's newest. I have mentioned before, we did lots of adaptive script development to do this long ago, so the idea is not new. A view from MFG Labs:Learning to learn, or the advent of augmented…