Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2018
From The Eponymous Pickle
Omohundro on Costly Signalling
Interesting thoughts, can this be implemented in a behaviorally predictive system?
What Scientific Term or Concept Ought to be more Widely Known?
By Steve Omohundro Scientist, Self-Aware Systems; Co-founder, Center for Complex…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Tests Arc de Triomphe Model for Pickup
The 'hand-off to the customer' part of pickup continues to be examined.
After a test in Oklahoma City last summer, Walmart…
From Schneier on Security
Chinese Supply Chain Hardware Attack
Bloomberg is reporting about a Chinese espionage operating involving inserting a tiny chip into computer products made in China. I've written (alternate link) this threat more generally. Supply-chain security is an insurmountably…
From insideHPC
Kim McMahon joins Cloud Foundry as Senior Director of Digital Strategy
Kim McMahon has joined the Cloud Foundry Foundation as the Senior Director of Digital Strategy. In this new role, she will collaborate with the open source community and their marketing teams to promote adoption and awareness…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Demystifying AI for Execs
Yet another piece to de-mystify AI for execs. Used to be what I did. Not bad, a useful description that is worth reading. Good that it is mentioned that it is about how people and machines will ultimately work together. But…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
If you are using global variables you are doing it wrong
One of the hard things for students to learn is simplicity. Beginners tend to over complicate things. In part this is because they lack the full toolbox early in their learning. Another part though is that they tend to see new…
From insideHPC
Using Ai to Automatically Diagnose Alzheimer’s Disease
Researchers from Stanford University have developed a deep learning based system that can automatically detect Alzheimer’s disease and its biomarkers from MRIs, with 94 percent accuracy. "Our method uses minimal preprocessing…
From insideHPC
Call for Submissions: ISC 2019 Tutorials and Workshops
ISC 2019 has issued their Call for Submissions for tutorials and workshop proposals. If you have expertise in a particular area of high performance computing and are interested in sharing it with your like-minded peers, the conference…
From insideHPC
HPC4Materials Program Funds Nine Projects to Fight Hot Corrosion Degradation
The Department of Energy today announced the first round of awardees for the new HPC4Materials (HPC4Mtls) Program. "We are excited about adding a materials portfolio to the HPC4EnergyInnovation umbrella program,” said acting
…
From Mostafa Dehghani
Alexey's Thesis Cover
Alexey Borisov, one of our great ILPSer, has just defended his PhD dissertation, on "On Understanding, Modeling and Predicting User Behavior in Web Search" and going to spend all of his time to make Yandex great
From Schneier on Security
Helen Nissenbaum on Data Privacy and Consent
This is a fantastic Q&A with NYU Law Professor Helen Nissenbaum on data privacy and why it's wrong to focus on consent. I'm not going to pull a quote, because you should read the whole thing....
From Writing
How we got to $1 million in annual recurring revenue with $0 in fundraising
In March, 2016, Josh and I each took $2,500, put it in a bank account, and filed the paperwork to found Gruntwork. That $5,000—the minimum you need to open most business banking accounts—is the only money anyone has invested…
From Putting People First
Bringing patients into focus at the Roche Innovation Summit
Experientia is proud to have been a key participant at the Roche Innovation Summit, held at Roche headquarters in Basel Switzerland on 19 June 2018. Themed “Transforming the Healthcare Experience Together”, the summit aimed…
From Schneier on Security
The Effects of GDPR's 72-Hour Notification Rule
The EU's GDPR regulation requires companies to report a breach within 72 hours. Alex Stamos, former Facebook CISO now at Stanford University, points out how this can be a problem: Interesting impact of the GDPR 72-hour deadline…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Quickly parsing eight digits
In my previous post, I described how we can quickly determine whether eight characters are made of digits (e.g., ‘13223244’). It takes a bit over 2 cycles. Suppose that you want to turn this string into an integer value. Most…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
The Future VR/AR Network — Towards Virtual Human/Object Teleportation
This blog post is from Jacob Chakareski, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Alabama. Virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) hold tremendous potential to advance our society. Together…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Network of Brains
Voluntarily, I hope. If this works trying to think the implications.
Technical reference: Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1809.08632: BrainNet: A Multi-Person Brain-to-Brain Interface for Direct Collaboration Between Brains
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wearable Goal Cockpit Concept
Displays based on predicted goals are generated and produced
An innovative wearable cockpit in design by BAE could lighten the load on both fighter planes and their pilots.
The wearable cockpit concept would rely on modern technology…
From insideHPC
ALCF – The March toward Exascale
David E. Martin gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "In 2021, the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) will deploy Aurora, a new Intel-Cray system. Aurora, will be capable of over 1 exaflops. It is expected to have
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Deep Learning without Labels for Apache Spark
With a quite instructive visual example with the Snow Leopard images.
Machine Learning Blog
Deep Learning Without Labels by ML Blog Team
Announcing new open source contributions to the Apache Spark community for creating deep…
From insideHPC
Xilinx Steps Up with Alvea FPGA boards and Versal Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform
Today FPGA maker Xilinx unveiled Versal, "the industry's first adaptive compute acceleration platform (ACAP)". The company also announced new Alveo FPGA cards, which the company claims can deliver "4X the performance of GPUs,…
From insideHPC
GPU-powered SQream DB Boosts Query Performance up to 150% for IBM POWER9
Today SQream announced that its GPU-powered SQream DB software now includes optimized support for the IBM POWER9 multi-core architecture. The powerful trinity of SQream DB, IBM POWER9 and NVIDIA GPUs results in advanced performance…
From insideHPC
Lenovo ThinkAgile System Certified for SAP HANA on Hyperconverged Infrastructure
Today Lenovo announced that it is one of the first server vendors certified for SAP HANA for hyperconverged infrastructure. "With Lenovo’s ThinkAgile HX7820 four-socket system certified for SAP HANA, enterprises can now take
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tennenbaum Institute
Just reviewed Ga Tech's Tennenbaum Institute. Had not for some time. Especially about process and decision in the enterprise. Worth a look:
The Tennenbaum Institute at Georgia Tech helps businesses and organizations use data…
From Schneier on Security
Terahertz Millimeter-Wave Scanners
Interesting article on terahertz millimeter-wave scanners and their uses to detect terrorist bombers. The heart of the device is a block of electronics about the size of a 1990s tower personal computer. It comes housed in a musician's…
From The Noisy Channel
Thanks for the kind words.
Thanks for the kind words. As for how to get your team to approach query understanding, it’s hard to give generic advice. But if you can find a way to categorize queries and established some labeled training data, that’s probably…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Diffbot : Foundation of Knowledge Graphs
A massive public database and graph. How might it be integrated with private data?
In Datanami, a description of the Diffbot Graph
The Graph That Knows the World By Alex Woodie
Somewhere in a data center in Fremont, California…
From Schneier on Security
Sophisticated Voice Phishing Scams
Brian Krebs is reporting on some new and sophisticated phishing scams over the telephone. I second his advice: "never give out any information about yourself in response to an unsolicited phone call." Always call them back, and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bayesian Optimization
Under consideration for a project, how do we choose among multiple learning contexts and parameters? When there is noise in the objective evaluations? A means for automating machine learning? This paper also makes the case…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
HLF 2018 Comes to an End
The 6th annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum ended with a tour, reception, and lovely dinner at Heidelberg Castle. It was a time for reflection and celebration for an amazing once-in-a-lifetime week for the students. As a journalist…