Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2017
From The Eponymous Pickle
Soft Robotics from Liquid Metals
Been intrigued by 'soft robotics' that can change shapes Here new work out of U of Sussex, that can transform. Applications? Programmable materials in changeable environments.
Researchers at the University of Sussex…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple and GE Join for Industrial Mobile IOS
Apple isn't known for industrial, so this is an interesting spin. Note also the predictive spin using I assume machine learning. Much more about the work at the link. I was an early tester of GE Predix, and its aimed at
Apple…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Show vs Google YouTube
Brought to my attention weeks ago. Just because they are in competition with assistants? Or is it some technical aspect of how marketing value is shared in Youtube videos. We need to know that channels, especially new ones…
From insideHPC
MareNostrum Supercomputer to contribute 475 million core hours to European Research
Today the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre announced plans to allocate 475 million core hours of its supercomputer MareNostrum to 17 research projects as part of the PRACE initiative. Of all the nations participating in PRACE's…
From insideHPC
HPC I/O for Computational Scientists
Phil Carns from Argonne gave this talk at the 2017 Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "Darshan is a scalable HPC I/O characterization tool. It captures an accurate but concise picture of application I/O behavior…
From Schneier on Security
IoT Cybersecurity: What's Plan B?
In August, four US Senators introduced a bill designed to improve Internet of Things (IoT) security. The IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2017 is a modest piece of legislation. It doesn't regulate the IoT market. It doesn't…
From insideHPC
How Manufacturing will Leap Forward with Exascale Computing
In this special guest feature, Jeremy Thomas from Lawrence Livermore National Lab writes that exascale computing will be a vital boost to the U.S. manufacturing industry. “This is much bigger than any one company or any one industry…
From insideHPC
1000x Faster Deep-Learning at Petascale Using Intel Xeon Phi Processors
A cumulative effort over several years to scale the training of deep-learning neural networks has resulted in the first demonstration of petascale deep-learning training performance, and further to deliver this performance when…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Am I Doing It All Wrong?
My programming students are learning about methods. Functions, subroutines, what ever you want to call them they are important. Coming up with examples for demos and projects is an interesting exercise. There are actually several…
From Putting People First
Innovate through service design – Experientia and Intesa Sanpaolo for “Torino Design of the City”
by Erin O’Loughlin – Photos: Naz Kazazoglu In Turin, you only need to tell your taxi driver “Take me to the skyscraper” to end up at the impressive Innovation Center of the Intesa Sanpaolo bank, rising in the heart of Turin,
…
From insideHPC
Intel to Ship Neural Network Processor by end of year
Intel's Naveen Rao writes that Intel will soon be shipping the world’s first family of processors designed from the ground up for artificial intelligence. As announced today, the new chip will be the company's first step towards…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon, Microsoft and Healthcare
Will it be head to head or collaborative? Microsoft has already said they were collaborating with Alexa systems in their recent meeting. Future health systems may need to do more listening than speaking. More below:
Amazon…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intelligent Workflow Drones
Logical, first I had seen this stated this way. But then anything that does work to perform useful tasks or gather data should ideally be integrated into a workflow. Formally or informally.
Intelligent Workflow Drones by Biren…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Algorithms teaching Algorithms
The ultimate AI play has devices teaching each other in context.
AI Algorithms Are Starting to Teach AI Algorithms
Automating machine learning will make the technology more accessible to non–AI experts. by Will Knight, Technology…
From insideHPC
ESnet’s Science DMZ Could Help Transfer and Protect Medical Research Data
The Science DMZ architecture developed for moving large data sets quick and securely could be adapted to meet the needs of the medical research community. "Like other sciences, medical research is generating increasingly large…
From insideHPC
Call for Contributions: PEARC18 in Pittsburgh
The PEARC18 Conference has issued its Call for Contributions. The conference takes place June 22-27 in Pittsburgh. "The Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) annual conference series fosters the creation…
From insideHPC
Jesús Labarta from BSC to receive Ken Kennedy Award
Today ACM and IEEE Computer Society named Jesús Labarta of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center as the recipient of the 2017 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Labarta is recognized for his seminal contributions to programming models…
From insideHPC
Video: The AI Initiative at NIST
Michael Garris from NIST gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "AI-enabled systems are beginning to revolutionize fields such as commerce, healthcare, transportation and cybersecurity. It has the potential to impact nearly all…
From insideHPC
OpenSFS Announces Maintenance Release 2.10.1 for Lustre
OpenSFS today announced the first Long Term Support (LTS) maintenance release of Lustre 2.10.1. "This latest advance, in effect, fulfills a commitment made by Intel last April to align its efforts and support around the community…
From Schneier on Security
Security Flaw in Infineon Smart Cards and TPMs
A security flaw in Infineon smart cards and TPMs allows an attacker to recover private keys from the public keys. Basically, the key generation algorithm sometimes creates public keys that are vulnerable to Coppersmith's attack…
From insideHPC
HPC Software Stacks: Making High Performance Computing More Accessible
More than 200 researchers at the University of Pisa use high performance computing (HPC) systems in their quantum chemistry, nanophysics, genome sequencing, engineering simulations and areas such as big data analysis. The University's…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Garmin Speak Adds Alexa Option
Garmin Speak puts Amazon Alexa in your car, It's now available for $150. By Mariella Moon, @mariella_moon
Gamin's GPS devices already feature voice control, but if you'd prefer to have Alexa onboard, its latest product is more…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
CS Educator Interview: Mike Thompson
I met Mike Thompson (no relation) just recently. He was giving a professional development session on teaching middle school students with AppInventor. I wanted to see how others taught that and I got some very helpful ideas and…
From Putting People First
Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize is a win for good design
by Erin O’Loughlin Richard Thaler’s 2017 Nobel Economics Prize on Monday was met with more buzz around the offices of our design agency than is usual for economics news. What people outside of the industry probably don’t realize…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Report from the Smart Kitchen Summit
Used to attend these kinds of meetings, to feed our own innovation center experiments, always had to separate the reasonable from the outlandish. In say a decade long frame. I am a cook from way back so I do appreciate what…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Put Humans at the Center of AI
Worked with the Stanford AI lab, and a number of the startups and students that came out of it.
Put Humans at the Center of AI in Technology Review
At Stanford and Google, Fei-Fei Li is leading the development of artificial intelligence…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Improves, Automates Pet Tagging
We were involved in work that sought to autotag pictures of people and pets in still images and video. So this is quite a step forward. Not too long ago this was not achievable. Some details at the link below.
Meow it’s even…
From insideHPC
Video: Supercomputing Models Enable Detection of a Cosmic Cataclysm
In this podcast, Peter Nugent from Berkeley Lab explains how scientists confirmed the first-ever measurement of the merger of two neutron stars and its explosive aftermath. "Simulations succeeded in modeling what would happen…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facebook Releases Video Neural Training Data
More generally available training data for Deep Learning systems.
Facebook debuts new video datasets for training neural networks by Maria Deutscher
Facebook Inc. unveiled its latest contribution to the artificial intelligence…
From Computational Complexity
Reductions between formal languages
Let EQ = {w : number of a's = number of b's }
Let EQO = { anbn : n ∈ N} (so its Equal and in Order)
Typically we do the following:
Prove EQO is not regular by the pumping lemma.
Then to show EQ is not regular you say: If…