Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2020
From Schneier on Security
Tracking Users on Waze
A security researcher discovered a wulnerability in Waze that breaks the anonymity of users:
I found out that I can visit Waze from any web browser at waze.com/livemap so I decided to check how are those driver icons implemented…From insideHPC
PRACE Opens Nominations for Ada Lovelace Award for HPC – Deadline: Nov. 26
From 22 to 26 March 2021, PRACE will organise the eighth edition of its Scientific and Industrial Conference – PRACEdays21 – as part of the EuroHPC Summit Week in Porto, Portugal. PRACE initiated the “PRACE Ada Lovelace Award…
From insideHPC
CoEC Targets Combustion Breakthroughs with Exascale Computing
Barcelona, 29 October 2020 – The European Union is committed to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To reach this goal, there is a need for coordinated research and innovation efforts to make low and zero-carbon…
From insideHPC
Zero to an ExaFLOP in Under a Second
In this sponsored post, Matthew Ziegler at Lenovo discusses today's metric for raw speed of compute. Much like racing cars, servers do “time trials” to gauge their performance relative to a given workload. There are more Spec…
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
Making Global Progress Towards an #Internet4All | Universal Acceptance Local Initiatives
By Ajay Data, UASG Chair - 29 October 2020 Throughout the year, the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) spearheads global projects that raise awareness of Universal Acceptance (UA) and seek to achieve a multilingual and…
From Computational Complexity
2020 Fall Jobs Post
My annual fall jobs posts, giving advice to PhDs looking for faculty positions, were getting repetitive. See last year's post for the usual stuff and feel free to post opportunities in the comments on this post. This year let's…
From insideHPC
PNNL’S CENATE Taps ML to Guard DOE Supercomputers from Illegitimate Workloads
Pacific Northwest National Lab sent along this article today by PNNL’s Allan Brettman, who writes about the advanced techniques used by the lab’s Center for Advanced Technology Evaluation (CENATE) “to judge HPC workload legitimacy…
From Putting People First
Videos online of the anthropology and technology conference
Videos are now available of last month's Anthropology and Technology conference, dedicated to socially-responsible AI.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Estimation Theory at Work
Rarely hear about this, we used it for retail analysis, it is useful to understand. Link to it below and a Wikipedia article definition.
Blog post by Jasmine Nettiksimmons, Molly Davies September…From The Eponymous Pickle
Replaying Memory to Retain it
Fascinating play. Remember this similarity being brought up in a talk about short vs long term memories. Now being brought into play?
How a Memory Quirk of the Human Brain Can Galvanize AI By Shelly Fan in SingularityHub
…From insideHPC
Schneider Electric Partners with EdgePresence and Accu-Tech to Deploy Edge Data Centers
Boston – Oct. 28, 2020 – Schneider Electric, the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation, today announced its partnership with EdgePresence and Accu-Tech to deploy edge points-of presence (PoPs) to…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Computing Researchers Respond to COVID-19: Uncertain Times
This article has been adapted from one that appeared in Aeon, aeon.co. Our society is a complex system, “a system with many interacting agents, whose collective behavior is usually hard to predict.“ This makes things challenging…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What the heck is the value of “-n % n” in programming languages?
When coding efficient algorithms having to do with hashing, random number generations or even cryptography, a common construction is the expression “-n%n“. My experience has been that it confuses many programmers, so let us examine…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Underwater Robot Uses Squid-Like Propulsion
This is neat:
By generating powerful streams of water, UCSD’s squid-like robot can swim untethered. The “squidbot” carries its own power source, and has the room to hold more, including a sensor or camera for underwater exploration…From Schneier on Security
The NSA is Refusing to Disclose its Policy on Backdooring Commercial Products
Senator Ron Wyden asked, and the NSA didn’t answer:
The NSA has long sought agreements with technology companies under which they would build special access for the spy agency into their products, according to disclosures by…From insideHPC
WekaIO Announces Cloud-Native, Unified Storage Solutions for Data Lifecycle
CAMPBELL, Calif. – October 27, 2020 – WekaIO (Weka), the leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today announced a transformative cloud-native storage solution underpinned by the world…
From insideHPC
Sellafield Nuclear Site Extends Atos Contract
London, 28 October 2020 — Sellafield Ltd has signed a contract extension with Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, for a further two years, extending the long term relationship which started in 2012 into 2022. In …
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Study on the Efficacy of Chatbots
But AI is still in action, especially in speeding simpler customer interactions:
IBM study highlights rapid uptake and satisfaction with AI chatbots in AINews
A study by IBM released this week highlights the rapid uptake of AI…From The Eponymous Pickle
Is AI Failing to Deliver Expectations .... Again?
Always interesting former IBMer Irving Wladawsky-Berger talks AI hype, cycles, and lots of supporting links and observations. Been through it all, and this second spin has delivered more, but still not close to the full expectations…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Five Nonobvious Remote Work Techniques
Very interesting piece in Queue and the Communications of the ACM, Nov 2020, pp 108-110. Take the problem beyond the technical and to the collaboratively social. From experiences at Stack Overflow. Well Worth the read.
Five…From insideHPC
AMD’s Su on Xilinx Acquisition: ‘We Can Define the Future of High Performance Computing’
Marking a new phase in in the re-resurrection AMD in its eternal struggle with Intel, and as reported here October 9, AMD has agreed to buy FPGA chip maker Xilinx, for $35 billion – another in a series of recent technology industry…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Deception and Concealment Technology
Worked with MITRE way back. Now it is also about active defense. Not much revealed here, but its interesting.
MITRE Shield Matrix Highlights Deception & Concealment Technology
The role that these technologies play in the MITRE…From The Eponymous Pickle
AI, the Next Generations
Fairly good, short, non technical piece. I agree with the first item mentioned: 'unsupervised learning', it is the future, and it is hard to do generally. But I note that I do not agree that 'supervised learning' hasThe…
From The Eponymous Pickle
MonoEye - Human Motion Capture
Most interesting approach. The implications? Note deep neural approach for selection of poses. Accuracy? Gathering information for healthcare, sports, training? Thinking possibilities.
MonoEye: A Human Motion-Capture System…From The Eponymous Pickle
Singularity Hub Looks at GPT-3
Out of SingularityHub. A look at the writing AI called GPT-3. Scopes some of the possibilities and limitations.
OpenAI’s GPT-3 Wrote This Short Film—Even the Twist at the End By Vanessa Bates Ramirez
OpenAI’s text generating…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Assured Autonomy Workshop Report Release
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of the Assured Autonomy report, titled Assured Autonomy: Path Toward Living With Autonomous Systems We Can Trust. The report is the result of a year…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Behold the Openbot Smart Phone
A curious and interesting thing. Strap a smartphone to some wheels and sensors, and you have an OpenBot. Is it a toy, a test platform, an indication where Intel is going?
How Intel's OpenBot Wants to Make Robots Out of Smartphones…From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Made a Mistake with Whole Foods?
In Bob Herbold's blog, a strategic error by Amazon acquiring whole foods? Used to go to these, not much anymore. Yes, can see the 'cultlike' tag for its customers. Does that not work in a pandemic?
Amazon: A Rare Strategic…From insideHPC
The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: NERSC’s Jeff Broughton on the End of the Top500 and Exascale Begetting Petaflops in a Rack
NERSC’s Jeff Broughton career extends back to HPC ancient times (1979) when, fresh out of college, he was promoted to a project management role at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – a big job for a young man. Broughton
…
From insideHPC
SC20: IDEAS Productivity Team Announces Software Events
The IDEAS Productivity Team and others in the HPC community are organizing software-related events at SC20, Nov. 9-19. IDEAS is a family of projects supported by the U.S. Department of Energy addressing challenges in HPC software…