Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2019
From insideHPC
HPC Framework Blocks to Ease Programming of Exascale Supercomputers
Researchers are beginning a three-year cross-institute project that aims to lower the barrier to entry for software engineers developing new high-performance applications on large scale parallel systems. "The team of researchers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tiny Drones for Unknown Environments
We explored the approach of using small swarms of drones. In industrial and outdoor forestry and logging spaces.....
Swarm of Tiny Drones Explores Unknown Environments
Delft University of Technology
A swarm of tiny drones that…
From BLOG@CACM
The Shortest Possible Schedule Theorem: Yes, You Can Throw Money at Software Deadlines
As close as we have to a universal law of software engineering management.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Giant Food for Frictionless Checkouts
There has been some suggestion that Amazon is backing off the idea, except in narrow contexts. But recently there has been a newly opened store. Here new word in the spec from Ahold, who we worked with on several advanced
Have…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Decade's end: On Future Developments
Gizmodo does a reasonable look at what to expect:
The Most Futuristic Developments We Can Expect in the Next 10 Years
By George Dvorsky in Gizmodo via Walter Riker
Decade's End
Gizmodo, io9, and Earther look back at our passing…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Quantum Supremacy At Last?
What it takes to understand and verify the claim Cropped from 2014 Wired source John Martinis of U.C. Santa Barbara and Google is the last author of a paper published Wednesday in Nature that claims to have demonstrated a task…
From The Eponymous Pickle
China Passes Cryptography Law
Broad implications unclear, especially how it might relate to Blockchain or other uses of cryptography that relate to regulatory access. Apparently quotes the Chinese president promoting blockchain.
China’s Congress Passes Cryptography…
From insideHPC
Nortek Unveils World’s Most Powerful CDU for Data Center Liquid Cooling
Today Nortek Air Solutions rolled out its new CDU1200, a 1,200-kW coolant distribution unit (CDU). As the single most powerful, compact CDU on the planet, the CDU1200 is the newest addition to its ServerCool data center liquid…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Operations Manager at Ohio Supercomputer Center
"OSC is seeking an HPC Operations Manager, a new position inside the HPC Systems Team. The operations manager will manage a team of three systems administrators and two student employees. The person who fills this role will be…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Decision Trees for Shopping
Perhaps simplistic, but interesting. Even if you have to ultimately complicate such a model, its useful to start with something this simple and see how well it can predict, then add more complexity later. In the enterprise…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (October 26th 2019)
People who were the oldest in the classes in school tend to be more confident and to take more risks. At the University of Montreal, about 32% of the students are male and 68% are female. Did blind orchestra auditions reallyContinue…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How expensive is it to parse numbers from a string in C++?
In software, we frequently have to parse numbers from strings. Numbers are typically represented in computers as 32-bit or 64-bit words whereas strings are variable-length sequences of bytes. We need to go from one representation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cross Entropy
What is this? New to me as a term. I record here for my own refernce and pass it out to others. In particular the suggestion here is that classification may be improved or even optimized this way. See Jason's other publications…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
A Loop By Any Other Name
My first programming language was FORTRAN IV. As I recall we had Do loops. They worked pretty much the same as what we call For loops in most languages today. We didn’t have while loops but we did the same sorts of things with…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
2020 Scholarship Winners
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Researchers Investigating Using Squid Propulsion for Underwater Robots
Interesting article and paper. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Qualcomm Creates Fund for 5G Use Beyond Phones
Being speed, what are the applications in play? Where can we predict particular useful ventures that we should support?
Qualcomm creates $200 million fund for 5G uses beyond phones in Reuters
Qualcomm Inc on Thursday said it has…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wozniak: No Self-Driving Cars in My Lifetime
A contrary look to be considered.
Steve Wozniak: No Self-Driving Cars in My Lifetime By Bill Howard in Extremetech
LAS VEGAS — Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes in technology. But that doesn’t extend to believing autonomous…
From insideHPC
D-Wave Announces First European Leap Quantum Cloud Site at JÜlich
Today D-Wave Systems announced that it will house its first European Leap quantum cloud-based system outside of North America at the Jülich Supercomputing Center in Germany. The system marks the cornerstone of the new Jülich
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Using Databricks with Tableau
Intriguing update for Tableau.
Visualize your data lake with the new Tableau Databricks Connector
Tableau 2019.3 was a momentous release for a number of reasons. Along with the unveiling of Tableau Catalog and Explain Data came…
From insideHPC
Micron Unveils World’s Fastest Datacenter SSD
Today Micron Technology announced a breakthrough in nonvolatile memory technology with the introduction of the world’s fastest SSD, the Micron X100 SSD. "Micron’s innovative X100 product brings the disruptive potential of 3D
…
From insideHPC
Hyperion Research Growth Spurs Search for New Hires
Hyperion Research report that their business tracking the worldwide HPC market has grown rapidly since the company was spun out of IDC in 2017, and the company is actively seeking qualified candidates for four additional positions…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Viviana Bono
Chair — ACM-W Scholarship Committee Dr. Viviana Bono is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Torino… Chair — ACM-W Scholarship Committee Associate Professor Computer…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing the Future Path of Wlldfires
In this KPBS video, firefighters in the field tap an SDSC supercomputer to battle wild fires. Fire officials started using the supercomputer's WIFIRE tool in September. WIFIRE is a sophisticated fire modeling software that uses…
From insideHPC
How Data and Computing Can Change Medicine in the Exascale Era
In this video, Gina Tourassi from ORNL explains how data and computing is changing medicine. "Exascale computing infrastructure such as Frontier will be the paradigm shift because we can bring all of the data together and analyze…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Phone Made of Paper
A cute and interesting idea. Its best understood by looking at the very short video at the Fastcompany article below. Makes you think about how we are processing our interaction with the world.
Google just released a ‘phone…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advances in Conversational Search
Here a long time interest in intelligent conversation, and one of the most used uses of conversation on line these days is search. Intelligent conversation gets us much closer to general AI. Has this now been considerably…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Recovering “Lost Dimensions” of Images, Video
Fascinating idea I could have used long ago. Projections, for example, from advertising copy, archived and needed for reapplication.
Recovering “Lost Dimensions” of Images, Video
MIT News Rob Matheson
Researchers at the Massachusetts…
From The Eponymous Pickle
MIT Connecton Science and Human Dynamics Lab
These efforts well worth following. AI, Data, Human Dynamics, Privacy
MIT’s Pentland Outlines Rules For Data And AI
October 25, 201979
MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs https://connection.mit.edu/
There are several…
From Schneier on Security
Dark Web Site Taken Down without Breaking Encryption
The US Department of Justice unraveled a dark web child-porn website, leading to the arrest of 337 people in at least 18 countries. This was all accomplished not through any backdoors in communications systems, but by analyzing…