Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2021
From insideHPC
TACC Adopts Intel oneAPI for Remote Visual Analysis
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin reports it is using the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit for remote analysis capabilities on the center’s supercomputers, “providing high-fidelity
…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
In C, how do you know if the dynamic allocation succeeded?
In the C programming language, we allocate memory dynamically (on the heap) using the malloc function. You pass malloc a size parameter corresponding to the number of bytes you need. The function returns either a pointer to the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
600 KM Quantum Encryption Transmission
Recently studied a company doing something similar, over considerably less distance. Will this continue to expand? Implications?
Quantum-Encrypted Information Transmitted Over Fiber More Than 600 Km Long By Optica October…From insideHPC
AWS Announces GA of Habana Labs-powered EC2 DL1 Instances
SEATTLE– Oct. 26, 2021– AWS has announced general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) DL1 instances designed for training machine learning models and powered by Gaudi accelerators from Habana Labs (an Intel…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
In C++, is empty() faster than comparing the size with zero?
Most C++ programmers rely on “STL” for their data structures. The most popular data structure is probably vector, which is just a dynamic array. The set and the map are other useful ones. The STL data structures are a minimalist…
From insideHPC
Let’s Talk Exascale: Guiding the Construction of Frontier’s Mechanical Systems
In this episode of the Let's Talk Exascale podcast, David Grant, high performance computing engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, talks with the lab's Scott Gibson about Frontier, the nation’s first exascale supercomputer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
NATO Releases first ever Strategy for AI
Was a bit surprised at this, will review. Mentioned are related ethics. Cooperative approaches. Indicates a level of seriousness. Have worked with some NATO connects.
Last week, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)…From insideHPC
Secure Petabyte Transportable Storage for the Rugged Edge
In this sponsored post, Braden Cooper, Product Marketing Manager at One Stop Systems, discusses how OSS uses the latest in NVMe storage technologies and rugged environmental design to meet the need of next-gen HPC storage applications…
From insideHPC
Oak Ridge Partners with University of Oklahoma
Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Oklahoma (OU) recently executed a memorandum of understanding to officially recognize their partnership in pursuing shared research and development goals. ORNL, the nation’s…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Risk Assessment Algorithms Can Unfairly Impact Court Decisions
An aspect hat we examined for potential changes in court standings on regulations. Well worth following.
Risk Assessment Algorithms Can Unfairly Impact Court Decisions By Government Technology, September 29, 2021 in CACM…From The Eponymous Pickle
Creating and Detecting Manipulated Images
Creating and human detection of manipulated images. Including an excellent explanatory video. Expect this to become increasingly common. Considerable detail, generally non technical.
Human Detection of Machine-Manipulated…From insideHPC
Los Alamos Names 3 Athena Engineering Scholars
The Athena Engineering Scholars Program is designed to inspire women to achieve their full potential as future leaders in engineering. The Athena Program is open to all LANL women, students and staff who are interested in pursuing…
From insideHPC
AMD to Showcase New EPYC and Instinct Data Center Chips at Nov. 8 Virtual Event
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) will host its Accelerated Data Center premiere on Monday, Nov. 8 at 11 am ET, showcasing the company’s upcoming EPYC CPU processors and Instinct GPU accelerators. While AMD declined comment, it’s assumed the…
From My Biased Coin
How to send a real number using a single bit (and some shared randomness)
In this post, we'll look at the natural problem of how to communicate an estimate of a real value in [0,1], using just 1 bit. The post is based on this paper (by Ran Ben-Basat of UCL and Shay Vargaftik of VMware Research and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Partners with Wolfram for Data
Just noted this, a good direction. Can see this as useful, especially in filling analyses with meta or test data. Which we often integrated. I just also started to use Wolfram Alpha data as part of the Siri assistant.
Wolfram…From The Eponymous Pickle
AI and Robotics for Eldercare
We worked with researchers in Japan on related efforts.
Collaborators Launch AI-Robotics Initiative to Aid Older Adults in Daily Care By University of Massachusetts Lowell
University of Massachusetts Lowell researchers are among…From The Eponymous Pickle
Making Pseudo Coffee
I did technical analysis work for one of the world's largest coffee companies. So this was interesting. But I disagree that the environmental issues here are paramount. They are minor. Coffee can be grown with considerable…
From The Noisy Channel
Thoughts on Search Result Diversity
Regular readers know that search is about much more than ranking. If you’re new here, you might want to read this post about ranking vs. relevance.
But a topic I’ve neglected is search result diversity. I’ll remedy that in this…From The Eponymous Pickle
From CIS: Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law
Very good piece from Stanford Law on technology. Below intro and beyond.
From: The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies…From The Eponymous Pickle
MFA is Phishable
Multi factor authentication (MFA) is seen as a strong means of security, but can be less so, here some reasons why.
Why Is the Majority of Our MFA So Phishable?
Published on October 20, 2021
By Roger Grimes in Linkedin, Data-Driven…From The Eponymous Pickle
Watch Who You Talk to
More details about the approach at the link
Twitter accounts linked to cyberattacks against security researchers suspended
North Korean hackers are luring professionals with "zero-day vulnerability hype." By Charlie Osborne for…From Computational Complexity
Squaring the circle is mentioned in a Gilbert and Sullivan comic Opera.
The problem of squaring the circle: Given a circle, construct (with ruler and compass) a square with the same area. While browsing the web for more information on this problem (for the blog entry on problems that might be similar…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Is AI Re-Inventing Computers?
Very interesting piece. Anything can become a computer?
Three key ways artificial intelligence is changing what it means to compute.
By Will Douglas Heaven, October 22, 2021 in TechnologyReview
Fall 2021: the season of pumpkins…From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft: Orbit Database of Objects
Microsoft Announces a teachable database of objects.
Published October 19, 2021
By Daniela Massiceti , Senior Researcher Cecily…From The Eponymous Pickle
Moscow Implements Metro Facial Recognition
Expect parts of the world without these 'fears' to quickly implement many kinds of such recognition systems, for greater efficiency.
Privacy Fears as Moscow Metro Rolls Out Facial Recognition Pay System By The Guardian (U.K…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (October 23rd 2021)
Apple announced new processors for its computers. Here is a table with the transistor count of some recent Apple processors: processor release year transistors Apple A7 2013 1 billions Apple A8 2014 2 billions Apple A9 2015 2…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Putting Living Cells on Chips
Linking biological responses to Computer Chips
By University of Nebraska-Lincoln, October 21, 2021
University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Abhijeet Prasad, Distinguished Professor Ravi Saraf, and Aashish Subedi…From Putting People First
UX Theatre, or the rise of UX design without users
UX Theatre is "the application of any sort of design methodology without including a single user in the process, or including users but merely for show."
From Putting People First
An anthropologist on Facebook’s new “Ray-Ban Stories” glasses
With this product, writes anthropologist Sally Applin in MIT's Technology Review, "Facebook is claiming the face as real estate for its own technology."
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Training Proof for Quantum AI
Technical finding regarding CNN and the ability to train. Applicability to discovering new materials.
Breakthrough Proof Clears Path for Quantum AI
Los Alamos National Laboratory News, October 15, 2021
Scientists at the U.S…