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 Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
An Annoying Problem
It’s the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers — Cory Doctorow ACM Turing Award source Robert Tarjan is well known to most—a Turing award winner in 1986 with John Hopcroft. Bob is a professor…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Recent AI books are Described in CACM
Some good recent books brought to my attention, intro below.
Three books offer varied perspectives on the ascendancy of artificial intelligence.
Devdatt Dubhashi , Pages 30-31
"AlphaZero crushes chess…From insideHPC
LLNL Joins Human Vaccines Project
Oct. 21, 2021 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has joined the international Human Vaccines Project (HVP), bringing lab research and computing resources to the consortium to aid development of a universal coronavirus…
From The Eponymous Pickle
MIT Media Lab RFusion Finds Hidden, Missing Things
A classic problem for mapping, decluttering the Smart Home
52.9K subscribers
This video presents a new robot from MIT called RFusion, which can find and retrieve hidden objects. The robot fuses RF (Radio Frequency)…From insideHPC
Overcoming Bandwidth and Capacity Bottlenecks in the Exascale Era
[SPONSORED POST] Join us for the Advanced Memory Architectures to Overcome Bandwidth Bottlenecks for the Exascale Era of Computing webinar on November 10 at 9:00 am PT. During this webinar, leading industry experts will discuss…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Regulators Want more Details of Payment Systems
To be expected, how can the details of this be used to improve security?
Regulators demand more info about tech payment systems in TheVerge
Query orders sent out to Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Paypal, and Square
By Russell…From The Eponymous Pickle
Did IBM Lose the Cloud?
Did IBM Lose the Cloud and was Emphasis on Watson to Blame? Interacted with them during the early Watson days and there was quite an investment in that.
How IBM lost the cloud in Protocol
Insiders say that marketing missteps…From insideHPC
Argonne Names 5 New Distinguished Fellows
Argonne National Laboratory has named for 2021 five new Argonne Distinguished Fellows, the lab’s highest title: Pete Beckman, Lois Curfman McInnes and Rick Stevens from the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences (CELS) directorate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retail Hyperautomation?
My friend Gib Basset authors this piece in Retailwire, including further discussion:
Will ‘hyperautomation’ determine retailing success from this point forward? by Gib Bassett in Retailwire
There is no doubt 2021 is shaping up…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Converting binary floating-point numbers to integers
You are given a floating-point number, e.g. a double type in Java or C++. You would like to convert it to an integer type… but only if the conversion is exact. In other words, you want to convert the floating-point number toContinue…
From My Biased Coin
Networking+Theory Postdoc at Harvard
The last couple of years one aspect of research I've greatly enjoyed is getting back into networking, which is really due to my excellent (and patient) collaborators Ran Ben Basat (now at UCL, was a postdoc at Harvard) and Minlan…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Swarm Robotics
The power of the swarm? Collective application to a task? Sharing tasks. Data and path aware solutions?
Researchers Successfully Build Four-Legged Swarm Robots By University of Notre Dame News, October 20, 2021
The University…From insideHPC
$125M in NIH Grants to Study Cellular Aging to Be Coordinated by PSC and Other Pittsburgh Institutions
Oct. 20, 2021 — National Institute of Health grants totaling approximately $125 million over five years to 16 U.S. institutions will fund research to explore the human body at the molecular level, studying how cells and tissues…
From The Eponymous Pickle
US Commerce Dept Bans Selling Hacking Tools to China, Russia
Not sure this means very much, but the list of tools mentioned within the article is interesting.
Commerce Department announces new rule aimed at stemming sale of hacking tools to Russia and China By Ellen Nakashima, Wash…From The Eponymous Pickle
Qualcomm Smart Cities And Cepton
Cepton Joins Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerator Program, Bringing Expertise in Smart Lidar Technologies for Higher Levels of Safety, Intelligence and Connectivity
Cepton announced its membership in the Qualcomm® Smart Cities Accelerator…From The Eponymous Pickle
Robots Sewing
Useful to see examples where robotics have problems with manufacturing steps.
Why Robots Can't Sew Your T-Shirt
By Wired, September 28, 2021
SoftWear Automation https://softwearautomation.com/ is a robotics company that wants to…From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM's Journey to AI Blog
IBM taking a fresh look at AI
Data: It’s becoming richer, cheaper, and increasingly open in the post-pandemic world of broad digitalization. And for financial services organizations, this windfall is opening…From The Eponymous Pickle
The Security of Pin Codes
Disconcerting suggestion.
Via Schneier, see where there are comments of interest ....
Credit card PINs can be guessed even when covering the ATM pad in Bleepingcomputer
By Bill Toulas
Researchers have proven it’s possible toThe…From insideHPC
Exxact Partners with SoftIron on Ceph-based Software Defined Storage
FREMONT, CA, October 19, 2021 — Exxact Corporation, provider of high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI) and data center solutions, and SoftIron, provider of task-specific data infrastructure solutions, …
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Some Statistical Gamma Fun
Nothing takes place in the world whose meaning is not that of some maximum or minimum. — Leonhard Euler Cantor’s Paradise page Kasper Müller is a mathematics and data science writer for Medium, where he contributes primarily…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lucy as a Robot Archaeologist
Archaeologists adapt to the context to make the best use of their time and resources. Is this what is being done or are just doing remote control? Following.
Why NASA Launched a Robotic Archaeologist Named Lucy By The New York…From The Eponymous Pickle
Small Data Also Crucial, With Tested Transfer Assumption
We tried related ideas but found that the transfer assumption rarely held well enough to be useful. Useful to keep in mind to potentially simplify models, with care..
'Small Data' Is Also Crucial for Machine Learning
By Scientific…From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantum Data Link over Chinese Cities
Repeated, was asked for new comment on this: via ACM TECHNEWS
Quantum Data Link Established Between 2 Distant Chinese Cities
By New Scientist
Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China have created a secure…From insideHPC
PRACE Invites Participation in HPC for Industry Survey
Oct. 19, 2021 — PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, has issued a survey aimed at assessing difficulties and issues SMEs face when attempting to apply high performance computing (HPC) and big data analysis…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Forecasting
All of AI is a kind of forecasting and I like see the comparison of statistical and AI style methods. Some related examples below.
New Post: Updates and Lessons from AI Forecasting
Updates and Lessons from AI Forecasting
by…From insideHPC
ColdQuanta’s Research-as-a-Service Begins 1st Project with Oak Ridge
BOULDER, Colo., Oct. 18, 2021 — Cold atom quantum technology company ColdQuanta has announced the company has embarked on its first project under its new Quantum Research as a Service (QRaaS) Division to build a custom ion trap…
From insideHPC
Frontier: OLCF’S Justin Whitt on Deploying the First Exascale Supercomputer
In this installment of the Let’s Talk Exascale podcast series produced by the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, Justin Whitt, program director of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, discusses deployment…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robot Trains for Clogged Infrastructure
Intriguing solution.
How to Move More Goods Through America's Clogged Infrastructure? Robot Trains
The Wall Street Journal, Christopher Mims, October 9, 2021
Autonomous trains increasingly are seen as a solution to U.S. truck driver…From The Eponymous Pickle
Facebook's Tools can Target a Single User
Well I would think the title above is clearly true, but the question is how effective is it in a useful context? And is that ethically more powerful than a typical ad?
Researchers Show Facebook's Ad Tools Can Target Single Users…From The Eponymous Pickle
Pentagon Predicting Events
Long after I worked for NCSS at the Pentagon, but you could start to hear the same questions at the time, when we were predicting events using large scale visualization of plans and events in eastern Europe. Ultimately thePentagon…