Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2017
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Responds to New York Times Article- Society Needs Computer Science (and Math and Social Sciences) Now More Than Ever
The following blog post was drafted by CCC Chair Beth Mynatt, CCC Exec Member Ben Zorn, and CCC Council Members Elizabeth Bradley, Sampath Kannan, and Cynthia Dwork. Beth Mynatt, CCC Chair, recently submitted the following letter…
From BLOG@CACM
Human Acts and Computer Apps
Our behaviors often seem to mimic the procedures that we induce in computers. What questions does that raise?
From insideHPC
UCX and UCF Projects for Exascale Move Forward at SC17
In this video, Jeff Kuehn from LANL, Pavel Shamis from ARM, and Gilad Shainer from Mellanox describe progress on the new UCF consortium, a collaboration between industry, laboratories, and academia to create an open-source production…
From insideHPC
Video: BSC Simulations Predict Air Traffic Disruption from Antarctic Volcanic Ash
Researchers are using HPC systems at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to predict potential threats to air traffic posed by Antarctic volcanoes. "Antarctic volcanoes might pose a higher threat than previously considered. A
…
From insideHPC
Video: Mellanox Takes HPC Interconnects to the Next Level at SC17
In this video, Gilad Shainer from Mellanox describes the company's advanced interconnect technologies that were on display at SC17 in Denver. "Mellanox is leading industry innovation by providing the highest throughput and lowest…
From insideHPC
HPE Superdome Flex to power Stephen Hawking’s COSMOS Research Group
Today HPE announced a collaboration with the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge to accelerate new discoveries in the mathematical sciences. This includes partnering with Stephen Hawking’s Centre for Theoretical…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
How (Some) Schools Sabotage Computer Science Education
There are many problems getting more computer science into schools. There is a shortage of teachers. There is a problem with room in the schedule. I could go on but there are also problems for schools who have computer science…
From insideHPC
Video: Pure Storage Speeds I/O for AI & HPC Workloads at SC17
In this video from SC17 in Denver, Brian Gold from Pure Storage describes how the company's innovative FlashBlade Systems speed up I/O for AI & HPC workloads. "From scientific research and movie rendering to artificial intelligence…
From insideHPC
Exploring the OpenHPC Solution for HPC
To meet some of the biggest HPC software challenges, representatives from more than 25 academic, research, and commercial organizations formed a community project at the end of 2015: OpenHPC. This is the third article in a four…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Who will Fly all the Drones?
NASA Finds AI-Powered Drones May Be Safer Than Human-Flown Ones
International Business Times By Rishabh Jain
Researchers at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have demonstrated…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Chinese Consumer Landscape
Double-clicking on the Chinese consumer
By Wouter Baan, Lan Luan, Felix Poh, and Daniel Zipser. In McKinsey
A rising post-90s generation is emerging as a strong engine of consumption, in one of four important new trends in the…
From Schneier on Security
Man-in-the-Middle Attack against Electronic Car-Door Openers
This is an interesting tactic, and there's a video of it being used: The theft took just one minute and the Mercedes car, stolen from the Elmdon area of Solihull on 24 September, has not been recovered. In the footage, one of…
From BLOG@CACM
The Citadel and the Amusement Park
There are two kinds of Web sites.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Customer Data in Grocery
The new grocery battleground – customer data
By Rick Ferguson in The Wise Marketer
The retail grocery game has never been for the faint of heart, what with its razor-thin margins, relentless competition, and fickle customers…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Bit hacking versus memoization: a Stream VByte example
In compression techniques like Stream VByte or Google’s varint-GB, we use control bytes to indicate how blocks of data are compressed. Without getting into the details (see the paper), it is important to map these control bytes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Recorded Future on IoT
Recall we connected with Recorded Future some time ago to understand their visually oriented method to analyze and react to known and predicted external threats. We sought to use it to help us think about external activity…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
TIME’s 25 Best Inventions of 2017
TIME’s 25 best inventions of 2017 are a mixture of fun little gadgets like the fidget spinner, a DIY cooking companion called Tasty One Top, and delicious treats like Halo Top ice cream. What is surprising, however, is that most…
From Computational Complexity
Van der Waerden's theorem implies the infinitude of the primes
(Sam Buss and Denis Hirschfeld helped me on this post.)
I was reading the table of contents of the American Math Monthly and saw an article by Levent Alpoge entitled
Van der Waerden and the primes
in which he showed fromhere…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC wraps up the SC17 Student Cluster Competition
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team goes over the results of the SC17 Student Cluster Competition. This year, Nanyang Technological University from Singapore took the Top Prize. "In this competition, student teams design…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AVA Does Customer Service
As part of a look and conversation regarding conversational agents for both engagement, loyalty and enhanced customer service for Autodesk. Does such a solution have to look like a human? Note below Watson services are being…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA and Nuance to Advance AI for Radiology
Today Nuance Communications announced that they are working together to bring the power of machine learning to radiologists and data scientists working across the entire healthcare system. "We stand on the edge of a new age in…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
A Rose By Any Other Name Gives An Error
There is an old computer science joke that goes more or less like this:
Now I don’t have to cover cache invalidation in myToday…There are two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors
From insideHPC
Argonne to Install Comanche System to Explore ARM Technology for HPC
Argonne National Laboratory is collaborating with HPE to provide system software expertise and a development ecosystem for a future high-performance computing system based on 64-bit ARM processors. "Argonne is working with HPE…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machines that Say No
Back to how we interact with machines and the implications of different aspects of dialog. Do we really expect a 'No' from a machine? Different than 'disobeying our commands', I would note. Both have their own implications…
From insideHPC
AMD steps up with EPYC Processors for HPC at SC17
In this video from SC17, Josh Mora describes how the new AMD EPYC Processors deliver huge memory bandwidth and application performance for HPC. "EPYC strikes the perfect balance of cores/threads, memory, I/O bandwidth and security…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Substitute Phone for Device Addiction
Kick your smartphone habit with the 'Substitute Phone' in Engadget
Pinch, scroll and slide your way to a phone-free future.
Cigarettes are hard to kick not just because of the nicotine, but the fact that they give you something…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SIGAI Blog
ACM's blog about AI aspects of computer science. Newsletter form. Worth following. Recent posts:
News from AAAI FSS-17
Public Policy Opportunities
Is it too late to address the moral , ethical, and economic issues introduced
Joint…
From insideHPC
Video: HPE Showcases Innovation for HPC at SC17
In this video, Bill Mannel gives a booth tour that highlights some of the amazing HPC innovations on display in the HPE booth at SC17. "HPE’s first ARM-based HPC system brings more choice and flexibility to HPC customers. The…
From Schneier on Security
Uber Data Hack
Uber was hacked, losing data on 57 million driver and rider accounts. The company kept it quiet for over a year. The details are particularly damning: The two hackers stole data about the company's riders and drivers -- including…
From insideHPC
Video: Introducing the 125 Petflop Sierra Supercomputer
In this video, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describe Sierra, LLNL’s next-generation supercomputer. "The IBM-built advanced technology high-performance system is projected to provide four to six times…