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 Writing
Terraform tips & tricks: loops, if-statements, and gotchas
In the previous parts of the Comprehensive Guide to Terraform series, we explained why we picked Terraform, introduced the basic syntax and features of Terraform, discussed how to manage Terraform state, and showed how to create…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On a Third Age of Data
In Datanami by Jeff Cobb
The Third Age of Data has arrived. Today, an estimated 1 trillion sensors are embedded in a nearly limitless landscape of networked sources, from health monitoring devices to municipal water supplies,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intelligent Smart City Marketing
Via MIT:
Intelligent Marketing in Smart Cities Crowdsourced Data for Geo-Conquesting
Bo-Wei Chen, Monash University
Wen Ji, Chinese Academy of Sciences
The authors’ approach for intelligent marketing in smart cities uses large-scale…
From The Eponymous Pickle
G Suite from Google
Virtual assistant style interaction for business, linking together a number of Google Apps and services. Formerly called Google Apps. It is unclear how much 'intelligence' has been added to their interaction, but the potential…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neural Nets and the Universe
Or perhaps they can just model some small part of the cosmos, given enough data. Is this just the classic case of over-fitting? ? Be worried if your model suddenly has too many exact applications.
Do Neural nets run the universe…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blink Security and Amazon Echo
Have thought about how you could compare snippets of a video to infer security status. Digital Video Analysis. Blink appears to be doing this. Though Google has the tagging smarts to be put in Home. Now to be connected to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automating Data Science
Thoughts on automated data science. In KDNuggets. Interview with SKLearn team. Some good thoughts here. I would note that this was thought of decades ago, and it has not progressed significantly until recently, it still…
From insideHPC
Sandia’s Bill Camp to Receive Seymour Cray Award
This week, IEEE announced that Dr. William Camp, Director Emeritus at Sandia National Laboratories, has been named the recipient of the 2016 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award “for visionary leadership…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Which Jobs will Robots Take First?
From the BBC, non technical view: Intelligent Machines: The jobs robots will steal first - BBC News : Largely agree but we also need to consider how AI techniques will be integrated with other systems capabilities. I would…
From insideHPC
First Look: BeeGFS File System at CSCS
In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference, Hussein Harake provides an overview of the CSCS and then introduces the audience to the BeeGFS parallel file system. "BeeGFS (formerly FhGFS) is an up and coming parallel…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Improving the Value of Data Science
Five Practices to Improve the Value of Data Science
Optimizing the Effectiveness of Data Science Teams
Data science efforts are only as good as the results they deliver. In this Big Data world, executives are relying on data scientists…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Global Technology Policy Update – October 2016
ACM PUBLIC POLICY HIGHLIGHTS Computer Science Education and Research in Europe – ACM Europe Policy Committee members will be attending the European Computer Science Summit in Budapest, Hungary on October 24-26, which features…
From insideHPC
Is Free Lunch Back? Douglas Eadline Looks at the Epiphany-V Processor
Over at Cluster Monkey, Douglas Eadline writes that the "free lunch" performance boost of Moore's Law may indeed be back with the 1024-core Epiphany-V chip that will hit the market in the next few months.
The post Is Free Lunch…
From insideHPC
Brookhaven Lab to Develop ECP Exascale Software
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory will play major roles in two of the 15 fully funded application development proposals recently selected by the DOE's Exascale Computing Project (ECP) in its first-round funding of
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Measuring Social Promotion Effectiveness
Measurement is always a key topic. Via Revtrax:
The Unique Power and Value of Social Promotions
Social Promotions have a special ability to drive trial and loyalty far beyond other types of digital coupons – by combining the activation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Oracle and Data Science
Oracle’s Big Data & Analytics Platform for Data Scientists
I work for Oracle, helping businesses realize the potential of data science, big data and machine learning to grow their revenues, minimize their costs and expand new
From The Eponymous Pickle
Salesforce Chatbots
Another example of cognitive AI delivered for service in chatbot tools.
Salesforce debuts chatbot building tools
The new LiveMessage service helps with automated and human-based support ... "
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Global Tech Policy Update – September 2016
ACM PUBLIC POLICY HIGHLIGHTS Cybersecurity in the United States – The ACM U.S. Public Policy Council submitted comments to the Presidential Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. The comments address the challenges and…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Are Colorblind
All cephalopods are colorblind. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
From Computational Complexity
Typecasting from Avi's 60th Celebration
Bill: Hi Lance. Last time I saw you was for the Mike Sipser…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Need for Common Sense
In New Scientist:
Basic common sense is key to building more intelligent machines ...
An unfashionable old technique that helps modern artificial intelligences grasp our world could make them more versatile and better at communicating…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Target Piloting AddStructure
Retailers responding to devices like the Amazon Echo with natural Language interaction. Looking for more details. In Retailwire:
Target piloting Amazon Alexa voice search rival by Dan O’Shea
Target and three other retailersAddStructure…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Worry over Superintelligent AI
Good piece in Technology Review about worry over 'Superintelligent AI'. I do think this is worth talking about, but not likely to become a direct problem very soon.
From insideHPC
LLNL Collaboration to Improve Cancer Screening
Computer scientists at LLNL and Norwegian researchers are collaborating to apply high performance computing to the analysis of medical data to improve screening for cervical cancer. The team is developing a flexible, extendable…
From insideHPC
Video: Introduction to Parallel Supercomputing
Pete Beckman presented this talk at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "Here is the Parallel Platform Paradox: The average time required to implement a moderate-sized application on a parallel computer architecture…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Tornadogenesis
"We're trying to make high resolution simulations of super cell storms, or tornadoes," McGovern said. "What we get with the simulations are the fundamental variables of whatever our resolution is — we've been doing 100 meter
…
From insideHPC
COMSOL Speeds Multiphysics Modeling & Simulation
Today COMSOL announced updates to their software solutions for multiphysics modeling, simulation, app design and deployment. The latest update of the COMSOL software features major performance increases and the release of the…
From insideHPC
General Atomics Releases Next-Gen Nirvana Data Management Software
Today General Atomics announced the next generation of Nirvana – a premier metadata, data placement and data management software solution for the most demanding workflows in Life Sciences, Scientific Research, Media & Entertainment…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Emerging Machine Translation
Had heard of some improvements in machine translation in the recent Google announcements. Here are some of the technical details about how this being done at production scale. We tested earlier methods for years, but often…
From Schneier on Security
NSA Contractor Arrested for Stealing Classified Information
The NSA has another contractor who stole classified documents. It's a weird story: "But more than a month later, the authorities cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Martin leaked the information, passed them on to a third party…