Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2016
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smartphone Changing Home Shopping
Well, yes, Smartphones already change the way most people behave in many spaces. So its natural that once they strongly embed the behavior, it will change how we shop. In our informal Costco study, now dated, we talked to
In…
From insideHPC
Gen-Z Consortium to Promote New High-Performance Interconnect
Today a group of leading technology companies today announced the Gen-Z Consortium, an industry alliance working to create and commercialize a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol. This flexible, high-performance
…
From insideHPC
Reader Survey: Is Machine Learning in Your Future?
Will this be the year of artificial intelligence, when the technology comes into its own for mainstream business? There are big pushes for AI in manufacturing, agriculture, healthcare and many other industry sectors. But why
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Being Happy
Another interesting overview on research driven ways to be happy.
There's no shortage of advice on how to live a great life. Research has answers... but, frankly, who can remember them all? .... What do you need to do to be…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Persuasive Presentations
A Checklist for More Persuasive Presentations, by Dorie Clark
Fundamental, but also short and well put HBR piece. Include the Who, What,When, Why clearly. Know your audience. Include a story. Just starting some teaching and…
From insideHPC
Bright Computing Powers HPC Cluster at Oldenburg University
Today Bright Computing announced that Oldenburg University in Germany has once again chosen to renew its license agreement with Bright Computing. "There were three compelling reasons for Oldenburg to choose to reinvest with Bright…
From Computational Complexity
Ideal courses for a comp sci dept/I'm glad we don't do it
I once heard it said:
In our data structures course we read Knuth and ignore the proofs
In our algorithms course we read Knuth and ignore the code.
And indeed, there are many topics where the theory-part is in one course and…
From insideHPC
Datacenter Efficiencies Through Innovative Cooling
Datacenters that are designed for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications are more difficult to design and construct than those that are designed for more basic enterprise applications. Organizations that are creating…
From Phys.org Technology News
Typing while driving could be more safe with simple text entry technique
A combination of a head-up display and the keypad familiar to us from mobiles in the 2000s significantly improved the performance of drivers who were texting while driving.
From Schneier on Security
Murder Is a Relatively Recent Evolutionary Strategy
Interesting research in Nature. The article is behind a paywall, but here are five summaries of the research....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cultural Differences in Chatbots
Microsoft chatbots: Sweet XiaoIce vs foul-mouthed Tay
Cultural differences, eh? .... by Katyanna Quach
AI chatbots can act like social experiments, offering a glimpse into human culture – for the good or the bad.
Microsoft and…
From BLOG@CACM
What Makes a Program Elegant?
Most programmers would agree that some programs are elegant, and that elegant programs are better than others.
From BLOG@CACM
Stop Trying to Deter Cyberattacks
Whither cyber deterrence? In my view, let it wither.
From BLOG@CACM
How We Teach Should Be Independent Of Who We Are Teaching
A look at teaching and diversity in Computer Science.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cognitive AI and Ad Agencies
In AdAge: Good thoughts, but how to make it work is still very complicated.
A.I. and Ad Agencies: Bringing Cognitive Intelligence to Clients By Jason Jercinovic
It's a pivotal moment for technology and marketing. These two industries…
From insideHPC
NVLink Speeds Deep Learning on New OpenPOWER Servers
Over at the IBM System Blog, Sumit Gupta writes that the company's new IBM Power System 822LC with Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs is already demonstrating impressive performance on Deep Learning training applications. "A single S822LC…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
A case study in the performance cost of abstraction (C++’s std::shuffle)
Statisticians and machine-learning experts sometimes need to shuffle data quickly. There is one standard and simple algorithm to shuffle an array, the so-called Fisher-Yates shuffle: for (i=size; i>1; i--) { nextpos = random_numbers_in_range…
From The Eponymous Pickle
60 Minutes on AI
Last nights's 60 Minutes spent about thirty minutes on AI. Watson got a good chunk of the coverage with Cancer diagnosis. Also Carnegie Mellon being Innovative. As usual, was quite thin in its presentation. Quite a few…
From insideHPC
XSEDE Awards Supercomputer Time to 155 Research Teams
Last week, XSEDE announced it has awarded more than $16M worth of compute resources to 155 research projects. This is the first cohort of allocations awardees after the announcement of a 5-year renewal of XSEDE by the National…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Siren Servers Anticipating Social Uprisings
Seems a fairly obvious application. Track social activity to determine potential social upheavals. False positive linking to specific process may be key to its use, as in any 'alarm' scenarios. Also note the term 'siren server'…
From insideHPC
High Performance Interconnects: Assessment & Rankings
In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference, Dan Olds from OrionX discusses the High Performance Interconnect (HPI) market landscape, plus provides ratings and rankings of HPI choices today. "In this talk, we…
From Schneier on Security
Security Economics of the Internet of Things
Brian Krebs is a popular reporter on the cybersecurity beat. He regularly exposes cybercriminals and their tactics, and consequently is regularly a target of their ire. Last month, he wrote about an online attack-for-hire service…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 10 October 2016
It is Columbus Day in New Hampshire. Or as my family likes to say “Leif Landed First Day.” I’ve been enjoying visiting the amazing fall foliage in northern New Hampshire with my family this long weekend. (No school for us today)…
From insideHPC
EUDAT Renews European Data Infrastructure for Research
Today EUDAT, the pan European collaborative data infrastructure announced that 16 major European research organizations and datacenters have signed an agreement to sustain the EUDAT – pan European collaborative data infrastructure…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Operational Excellence and Data Viz
Unlocking Operational Excellence with Data Visualization and Analytics
by Robert Golightly
Operational excellence is a major priority for the process manufacturing industry. While achieving this can be a challenge, many companies…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Spreadsheets
In the HBR:
An Ode to the Underappreciated Spreadsheet by Alexandra Samuel
I used to teach accountants to use early spreadsheets, an example of where you could really impress people with technology. I have also been brought…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at Security Concerns for Augmented Reality
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the issue of security for Augmented Reality and IoT. Now that every device in our lives is getting connected to the Internet, how will be prevented from attackers? Henry points…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Model Based Machine Learning
Thinking of the possibilities for analyzing supply chain problems. Bayesian approaches. Has anyone examined? This shows some technical examples using R. Via DominoDataLab.
This guest post was written by Daniel Emaasit,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Changing Customer Loyalty
Thoughts on changes in customer loyalty.
Customer Loyalty Isn’t What It Used to Be
Instead of relying on points programs and clever marketing, companies have to listen carefully to customers and adapt products and services to their…
From Apophenia
Columbus Day!?!? What the f* are we celebrating?
Today is Columbus Day, a celebration of colonialism wrapped up under the guise of exploration. Children around the US are taught that European settlers came in 1492 and found a whole new land magically free for occupation. In…