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
Concise Algorithms for Machine Learning
Nicely done piece by Ronald van Loon, The 10 Algorithms Machine Learning Engineers Need to Know . I like these concise descriptions of useful techniques. From an engineering rather than a mathematical perspective. Its good…
From The Eponymous Pickle
From Shallow Nets to Beyond Deep Learning
We called this 'artificial neural nets' (ANN) and since we used them actively, but shallowly. These have been deepened to be called 'Deep Learning'. And very successful at categorizing things like images. Our nets were
So…
From Schneier on Security
Yahoo Scanned Everyone's E-mails for the NSA
News here and here. Other companies have been quick to deny that they did the same thing, but I generally don't believe those carefully worded statements about what they have and haven't done. We do know that the NSA uses bribery…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Graphs and Machine Learning
Instructive piece in the Google Research blog about how they use machine learning methods that are integrated with graph architectures.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Big Data Spokes Connect Data Scientists with Regional Challenges
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced giving $10 million in awards to 10 “Big Data Spokes” projects in order to facilitate research on topics identified by the four Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs). The…
From insideHPC
Panasas & Western Digital to Power Life Science Research with iRODS
"Our solutions ultimately make data readily available for users, applications and analytics, helping to facilitate faster results and better decisions,” said Gary Lyng, senior director of marketing, Data Center Systems at Western…
From insideHPC
ICC Launches Alpha Series of Overclocked Financial Servers
Today International Computer Concepts (ICC) announced the release of a new line of overclocked servers: ICC Alpha. These systems were designed specifically for high-frequency trading (HFT) applications, where sequential processing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Technology Trends in Automotive
In McKinsey:
Mattias Ulbrich, CIO of Audi, discusses technology trends in the automotive industry and how his team is enabling next-generation manufacturing practices. ... "
From insideHPC
RSC Group to Market HPC Solutions in Czech Republic
Today Russia's RSC Group announced a business cooperation agreement with M Computers to market and deploy RSC's HPC solutions in the Czech Republic. "We believe that partnership with M Computers will help RSC to offer its innovative…
From insideHPC
Bright Broadens Partnership with Huawei in EMEA
Today Bright Computing announced expanded collaboration with Huawei across EMEA.
Huawei places win-win collaboration at the heart of our business in Europe," said Jaco Pesschier, Senior Channel Sales Manager, Huawei West Europe…
From insideHPC
Dell Powers RENCI Supercomputer Tracking Hurricane Matthew
RENCI’s Dell-powered supercomputer is working overtime to model the storm surge that Hurricane Matthew could bring to communities along the Eastern Seaboard. Named Hatteras, the 150-node M610 Dell cluster runs the ADCIRC storm…
From insideHPC
Dell Powers RENCI Supercomputer Tracking Hurricane Matthew
RENCI’s Dell-powered supercomputer is working overtime to model the storm surge that Hurricane Matthew could bring to communities along the Eastern Seaboard. Named Hatteras, the 150-node M610 Dell cluster runs the ADCIRC storm…
From insideHPC
Allinea Tools Advance Research at VSC in Austria
"Science problems are becoming increasingly complex in all areas from physics and bioinformatics to engineering," said Siegfried Hoefinger, High Performance Computing Specialist at VSC explains. "Bigger is better, but inefficiency…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nature Reviews the State of AI
Nature's good overview of current versus future AI, its emergent history, challenges and where it is going. Good largely non technical view with cautions. Rightly so, an emphasis on learning.
" ... Can we open the black box…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Samsung Buying Viv
Apparently Samsung's 'Otto' assistant needs more intelligence to compete. The forces are gathering for consumer AI everywhere.
Samsung to buy Viv Labs to challenge Google Assistant
A.I. startup Viv Labs was founded by the team…
From Schneier on Security
Quantum Tokens for Digital Signatures
This paper wins "best abstract" award: "Quantum Tokens for Digital Signatures," by Shalev Ben David and Or Sattath: Abstract: The fisherman caught a quantum fish. "Fisherman, please let me go," begged the fish, "and I will grant…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Facing Facts About the Geek Gene
There are a lot of people who want to believe that computer science ability is some sort of innate talent. That either you have a special brain that can handle it or you don’t. Teachers want to believe in it so that when students…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning as Service, Stealing the Model?
Interesting thoughts on constructing models. Algorithms for hire?
Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs
Florian Tramèr, Fan Zhang, Ari Juels, Michael K. Reiter, Thomas Ristenpart
(Submitted on 9 Sep 2016 (v1), last…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Executive and Digital
Interesting thoughts. Our own work with executives showed that the good approaches were to give execs direct access to the capabilities that are part of digital. That requires new design, access to data, integrated corporate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Leadership and Behavior
In McKinsey:
Leadership and behavior: Mastering the mechanics of reason and emotion
A Nobel Prize winner and a leading behavioral economist offer common sense and counterintuitive insights on performance, collaboration, and innovation…
From insideHPC
Bill Gropp to Receive Ken Kennedy Award
Rich Brueckner | October 5, 2016 at 03:29 PM
From insideHPC
AI & Robotics Front and Center at GTC Japan
Robotics and Deep Learning applications were front and center at GTC Japan this week, where 2600 attendees lined up to hear the latest on GPU technologies. The age of AI is here,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA…
From insideHPC
Parallella Tapes Out 1024-core Epiphany-V Chip
Over at the Parallella Blog, Andreas Olafsson from Adapteva writes that the company has reached an important milestone on its next-generation Epiphany-V chip. "Thanks to a generous grant from DARPA, we just taped out a 16nm chip…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Congratulations, Noam
The winner of the 2016 ACM-IEEE Knuth Prize Coursera source Noam Nisan has been one of the leaders in computational complexity and algorithms for many years. He has just been named the winner of the 2016 Donald E. Knuth Prize…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Variable-length strings can be expensive
Much of our software deals with variable-length strings. For example, my name “Daniel” uses six characters whereas my neighbor’s name (“Philippe”) uses 8 characters. “Old” software often shied away from variable-length strings…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Your Own Personal Google
More comments on yesterdays Google assistant announcements, from the Verge:
Are you ready for your own personal Google?
A Google to hear your prayers, a Google that cares by James Vincent @jjvincent
Sometimes, it’s the little…
From insideHPC
SGI Powers New Cirrus Supercomputer at EPCC
Businesses could dramatically cut the time taken to bring new products and services to market with help from a new SGI supercomputer at EPCC, the UK's leading supercomputing center based at the University of Edinburgh. "This
…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
The Open Source Application Development Portal Adds More Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) Applications for Download
The Open Source Application Development Portal (OSADP) is a web-based portal that provides access to and supports the collaboration, development, and use of open-source ITS-related applications. The OSADP has added a number of…
From insideHPC
BSC Lays out European RETHINK Big Roadmap
Today the Barcelona Supercomputing Center presented a big data roadmap that it has coordinated on behalf of the European Commission. As part of the RETHINK Big Project, the presentation was given as part of the Big Data Congress…
From insideHPC
Power8 Systems with NVLink Come to Nimbix HPC Cloud
Today’s emerging workloads like machine and deep learning, artificial intelligence, accelerated databases, and high performance data analytics require incredible speed through accelerated computing,” said Sumit Gupta, Vice President…