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 CERIAS Blog
It Was A Good Monday
Mondays. There are many reasons Monday have a bad reputation. Few of us would claim to like Mondays.
My Monday earlier this week got off to a poor start. I was traveling to attend a workshop (a good one, on ethics in cyber) and…From The Eponymous Pickle
Omnidirectional Mobile Robotics
On the Ball: Omnidirectional Mobile Robot has just two moving parts. Good play for simplicity.
From CMU:
Spherical Induction Motor Eliminates Robot’s Mechanical Drive System
By Byron Spice
More than a decade ago, Ralph Hollis invented…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Slack Competitor via Skype?
A Microsoft Slack Competitor via Skype?
Might Microsoft show off its Slack competitor at November 2 event?
Microsoft is planning to talk up team collaboration technologies at a November 2, 2016, event in New York City. Maybe we'll…
From insideHPC
TotalView: Debugging from Desktop to Supercomputer
Peter Thompson from Rogue Wave Software presented this talk at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "TotalView breaks down barriers to understanding what's going on with your high-scale parallel and multicore…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Microsoft Slack Competitor via Skype?
Might Microsoft show off its Slack competitor at November 2 event?
Microsoft is planning to talk up team collaboration technologies at a November 2, 2016, event in New York City. Maybe we'll see the beta of Skype Teams launchBy…
From insideHPC
SGI Powers New SPICE System for Weather Forecasting at UK Met Office
"With the new SPICE system from SGI, we have seen a step-change in performance for our researchers and scientists doing post-processing of weather and climate data,” said Richard Bevan, Head of Operational Technology at the Met…
From Schneier on Security
Security Lessons from a Power Saw
Lance Spitzner looks at the safety features of a power saw and tries to apply them to Internet security: By the way, here are some of the key safety features that are built into the DeWalt Mitre Saw. Notice in all three of these…
From Phys.org Technology News
Underwater drone to investigate sonar contacts in MH370 hunt
A ship involved with the deep-sea sonar search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is being fitted with a drone that will examine several sonar contacts of interest on the remote seabed west of Australia, officials said…
From XRDS
CHI PLAY 2016 – Day 2
Highlights from the second day of ACM CHI PLAY 2016 - the international conference on human-computer interaction in play. Continue reading
The post CHI PLAY 2016 – Day 2 appeared first on XRDS.
From The Noisy Channel
Great post!
http://thenoisychannel.com/2012/03/18/facing-prosopagnosia
From The Eponymous Pickle
MicroStrategy Desktop Now Free
Examined MicroStrategy for the enterprise some time ago, and found it to be very good. Nice to see this added to the growing free BI viz options. For students or the small business especially. Worth a look.
MicroStrategy Desktop…
From insideHPC
UK Met Office Research Simulations Predict European Winter One Year Ahead
In a paper published today in Nature Geoscience, scientists at the Met Office have demonstrated significant advances in predicting up to one year ahead the phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which drives European…
From Schneier on Security
Intelligence Oversight and How It Can Fail
Former NSA attorneys John DeLong and Susan Hennessay have written a fascinating article describing a particular incident of oversight failure inside the NSA. Technically, the story hinges on a definitional difference between…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Announces Speech Recognition Breakthrough
Continued advances in Cognitive interaction. While speech recognition is good today, making it better will remove one barrier to interacting nimbly with spoken language. 'Understanding' semantically, with common sense implied…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Investment Portfolios
Makes sense to think of this as a portfolio analysis. Which leads to thinking about how their business value can be measured. ROI is notoriously difficult to estimate for emerging technology. Risk analysis, too, should be…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Towards AI Best Practices
Industry Leaders Establish Partnership on AI Best Practices
.... 28 Sep 2016: Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft today announced that they will create a non-profit organization that will work toPartnership…
From XRDS
CHI PLAY 2016 – Day 1
Highlights from the first day of ACM CHI PLAY 2016 - the international conference on human-computer interaction in play. Continue reading
The post CHI PLAY 2016 – Day 1 appeared first on XRDS.
From insideHPC
CSCS in Switzerland to Celebrate 25 Years of Supercomputing
Over at CSCS, Simone Ulmer writes that the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre is turning twenty-five. First opened in 1991, CSCS supports users from Swiss and international institutions in their top-flight research and runs…
From Putting People First
Behavioral economics, UX design and insurance
The key to unlocking the insurance industry, writes Richie Hecker in TechCrunch, is understanding behavioral economics. The most successful players in insurance tech, he says, will win by rounding the edges on existing products…
From Putting People First
Interaction Design is dead. What now?
Ralph Ammer argues that interaction design is based on technological thinking and restricted to profitable applications, and proposes a new direction, which he calls “Natural Design”, centered around biological systems. The principles…
From Putting People First
Flaws of the Smart City – A design friction kit
Flaws of the Smart City is a critical, workshop-tailored kit to explore the dark faces of the so-called Smart Cities. As any hardware or software piece, the connected cities embed flaws. This kit aims to fix these weak spots
…
From insideHPC
Moving Beyond Moore’s Law with the New CRNCH Center at Georgia Tech
Georgia Tech is taking on the challenge of moving computing past the end of Moore’s Law by standing up a new interdisciplinary research center, which is known as CRNCH. "We knew that at some point physics would come into play…
From Phys.org Technology News
Software firm's glitch stops travelers from booking tickets
A technology company says it's fixed a problem that had prevented travelers from booking trips with some U.S. airlines this week.
From insideHPC
HPC Bear Cloud to Power Research at University of Birmingham
Designed specifically with researchers in mind, the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Cloud will augment an already rich set of IT services at the University of Birmingham and will be used by academics across…
From Computational Complexity
This university does not discriminate based on....
I recently came across the following (I delete the name of the school)
and also add my own comments in caps as they relate to UMCP hiring
of professors.
X-University, located in YZ, in hiring professors
does not discriminate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tim Cook Talks Apple AI Plans
Clear to be a major player simply because it owns such a large part of the infrastructure that will provide data to AI systems. Some indications of their becoming more open, which may help. As expected, their views are grand…
From insideHPC
Slidecast: Running HPC Simulation Workflows in Microsoft Azure
In this video from the Microsoft Ignite Conference, Tejas Karmarkar describes how to run your HPC Simulations on Microsoft Azure - with UberCloud container technology. "High performance computing applications are some of the
…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Thoughts from White House Frontier’s Conference and the National AI R&D Strategic Plan
This blog post was co-authored by CCC Staff, Greg Hager, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Past Chair and Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, and Beth Mynatt, CCC Chair, Professor and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Evolution of Selling Propositions
Term new to me, but like in many systems, we implemented early simple versions.
What Is a Meta-DSP and Why Should Advertisers Care? By Chris Dobson.
As Landscape Shifts, CRM Agencies Partner With Marketing Tech Firms
Over the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Businesses investing in AI
Gartner: A.I. to become a top business investment priority
Analysts make subtle point about the potential of these systems to respond in unexpected ways ... "
Such systems are still not off the shelf, and I believe the investments…