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 Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
A Vast and Tiny Breakthrough
Christofides bound beaten by an epsilon’s idea of epsilon src1, src2, src3 Anna Karlin, Nathan Klein, and Shayan Oveis Gharan have made a big splash with the number No that is not the amount of the US debt, or the new…
From Schneier on Security
Reverse-Engineering the Redactions in the Ghislaine Maxwell Deposition
Slate magazine was able to cleverly read the Ghislaine Maxwell deposition and reverse-engineer many of the redacted names.
We’ve long known that redacting is hard in the modern age, but most of the failures to date have been…From insideHPC
RISC-V International Announces Agenda for the 3rd Annual RISC-V Summit
The RISC-V International Association has announced the online program for the RISC-V Summit 2020 to be held Tuesday, Dec. 8 to Thursday, Dec. 10, 2020. Here’s a link for conference registration. The RISC-V Summit brings together…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Peru Defends Its Waters against Chinese Squid Fishing Boats
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
Zoom Adding End-to-end Encryption
Been following this for some time. I like Zoom, my favorite to date of the half dozen commonly in use methods I know of. Now even free users can turn on advanced end to end encryption. Very powerful encryption, though…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics Impacting the Bottom Line
Yes, well done, it always has. And further methods like AI, a kind of analytics, does the same. Been doing it for a lifetime. Interesting numbers below.
How predictive and prescriptive analytics impact the bottom line by …From The Eponymous Pickle
Upcoming ACM Talk: Deep Learning and Software Engineering
Plan to attend this ACM talk:
VIP Reminder: Nov 2 Talk with fast.ai http://fast.ai/ Co-Founder Jeremy Howard on Applying Software Engineering Practices to Deep Learning...
If you haven't done so already, Register now for the…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Catalyzing Computing Podcast Episode 29 – Digital Learning with Peter Mirski
A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. This episode of the podcast is taken from a video interview with Peter Mirski, the chair in Management and IT at the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Adding a Brain to a Robot
Sounds obvious, but what are the form and function and challenges of such a brain? To be more human, more creative, more engaging? Made me think.
How Giving Robots a Hybrid, Human-Like ‘Brain’ Can Make Them Smarter By Edd Gent…From The Eponymous Pickle
Voice Assistants and Health Care
Thoughtful and considerable piece with statistics. Below an intro, much more at the link.
How AI Voice Assistants Can Revolutionize Health in TowardsAi by Alan Jiang
Siri, Alexa, Google and the future of voice and health technology…From insideHPC
Practical Hardware Design Strategies for Modern HPC Workloads – Part 3
This special research report sponsored by Tyan discusses practical hardware design strategies for modern HPC workloads. As hardware continued to develop, technologies like multi-core, GPU, NVMe, and others have allowed new application…
From Schneier on Security
IMSI-Catchers from Canada
Gizmodo is reporting that Harris Corp. is no longer selling Stingray IMSI-catchers (and, presumably, its follow-on models Hailstorm and Crossbow) to local governments:
L3Harris Technologies, formerly known as the Harris Corporation…From Computational Complexity
Do not become obsessed with the Polls unless...
I know someone who checks the polls 3 times a day to see who looks like they will be elected prez. She cares A LOT about the election. It is irrelevant to this post who she supports.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Fooling Self Driving Autopilots
Had seen this mentioned before, good overview in Schneier. As usual the discussion in the comments there is the most interesting, with experts in the field chiming in, discussing implications for self driving vehicles andSplit…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Learning Common Sense from Animals
The common sense problem. Intriguing view. Not enough details, but has links to related academic papers.
Researchers suggest AI can learn common sense from animals By Khari Johnson @kharijohnson October 25, 2020 in VentureBeat…From The Eponymous Pickle
Benchmarking Voice Understanding
Good points made. I have been using Google voice assistant versus Amazon Alexa for a few years now. Only now and then using Siri. I see more 'balking' by Alexa (that is she does not answer coherently at all) than Google…
From The Noisy Channel
Wolf, thank you for these additional points.
Wolf, thank you for these additional points. I agree that Peter Norvig’s post, while very educational, is a starting point to learn about spelling correction but hardly an end point — either in terms of performance or applicability…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GM Can Manage an EV's Batteries Wirelessly and Remotely
Seems quite a considerable improvement of automotive battery use and management for electric vehicles.
Exclusive: GM Can Manage an EV's Batteries Wirelessly—and Remotely
The new system eliminates the rat's nest of wiring and collects…From The Eponymous Pickle
European Quantum Computing Facility Goes Online
With some useful statistics about usage and capabilities. Note integration with simulator. Good description of use and testing processes in place.
Home/News/First European Quantum Computing Facility Goes Online/Full Text
First…From The Eponymous Pickle
Radical Technique Lets AI Learn with Practically No Data
Learning more accurately, efficiently, is always useful.
A Radical Technique Lets AI Learn with Practically No Data
MIT Technology Review, By Karen Hao, October 16, 2020
Scientists at Canada's University of Waterloo suggest artificial…From The Eponymous Pickle
U.S. Government Agencies to Use AI to Cut Outdated Regulations
Makes sense, we examined related methods for regualations.
U.S. Government Agencies to Use AI to Cull, Cut Outdated Regulations
Reuters, David Shepardson
October 16, 202 The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)…From insideHPC
IBM Announces New AI Hardware Research, Red Hat Collaborations
At the IEEE CAS/EDS AI Compute Symposium, IBM Research introduced new technology and partnerships designed to dynamically run massive AI workloads in hybrid clouds: The company said it is developing analog AI, combining compute…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Can We Solve It?
It is a Friday James Maynard is a number theorist. He attended Cambridge as an undergrad and then moved to do his grad work at Oxford at Balliol College. He is now a professor at Oxford. He is one of the world experts on prime…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for Submissions: Departmental BPC Plans
The following is a guest blog from BPCnet.org Resource Portal. The Computing Research Association (CRA) and the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) are calling…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Leveraging NVidia GPUs to Power Analytics and AI
Below is an Ad from Nvidia, Book worth looking at. I like the fact that they say 'AI and Analytics', a rare clarification. Its not all AI
.... Free BOOK
ACCELERATING APACHE SPARK 3
Leveraging NVIDA GPUs to Power the Next Era…From BLOG@CACM
Tracking Down a Seminal Work on Computer Construction – in Russian
A Russian edition of Rutishauser's standard work on computer construction.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Technology Tailoring in Education
Always an interesting question. The nature of instruction. In theory it could be precisely tailored to every student and by testing it could be altered in real time to get better results. Personalized to get the best possible…
From Schneier on Security
New Report on Police Decryption Capabilities
There is a new report on police decryption capabilities: specifically, mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs). Short summary: it’s not just the FBI that can do it.
This report documents the widespread adoption of MDFTs by law enforcement…From insideHPC
Gen-Z Consortium’s Activity Lineup at Upcoming Flash Memory Summit, SC20
The Gen-Z Consortium has announced it will participate in the upcoming Flash Memory Summit and SC20 conferences. Along with speaking engagements and panel participation, the interconnect consortium will showcase Gen-Z technology…
From insideHPC
Transform Your Business with the Next Generation of Accelerated Computing
In this white paper, you'll find a compelling discussion regarding how Supermicro servers optimized for NVIDIA A100 GPUs are solving the world's greatest HPC and AI challenges. As the expansion of HPC and AI poses mounting challenges…