Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2018
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart's In-store AI Lab
Useful to do this in a real operating store. Many of details of technology and analytics delivery are best seen in the messy operating world of retail. We tried to quickly move our laboratory tests to real stores. Also
Walmart…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Memory-level parallelism: Intel Skylake versus Apple A12/A12X
Modern processors execute instructions in parallel in many different ways: multi-core parallelism is just one of them. In particular, processor cores can have several outstanding memory access requests “in flight”. This is often…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Coaching Networks: Humanity's Fighting Chance
The recent look at the concept of the Nudge Theory and Nudge Engines led me to a reference about 'Coaching Networks'. Term was new to me. Can it be that AI itself will keep us from being automated out of job? Seems to be
Coaching…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson and VMWare
Some really technical points being made about the ease of constructing and maintaining virtual architectures. How much does this contribute to architectures for intelligence? To the extend that these will be complex, need to…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Toys or Tools
Are we using toys or tools to teach computers science? The cute little robots for example. Or Micro:bit? or any number of other fun little gadgets that we use to make learning more fun and interesting? Toys or tools? CallingMerriam…
From insideHPC
HPC Veteran Charlie Wuischpard Joins Optical Startup Ayar Labs
Today Ayar Labs announced that Charlie Wuischpard, former vice president and general manager at Intel, has joined Ayar Labs as CEO and a member of the board of directors. “With his track record of driving growth in both small…
From insideHPC
Video: Intel to Power Fastest Supercomputer in Academia at TACC
In this video, Dan Stanzione from TACC describes how Intel technologies from Intel will power the World's Fastest Supercomputer in Academia at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. "If completed today, Frontera would be the fifth…
From Schneier on Security
New IoT Security Regulations
Due to ever-evolving technological advances, manufacturers are connecting consumer goods -- from toys to lightbulbs to major appliances -- to the internet at breakneck speeds. This is the Internet of Things, and it's a security…
From insideHPC
Rescale Brings Cloud HPC to Academia
Today Rescale announced its launch into academia with their ScaleX Pro for Students and ScaleX Pro for Classroom products. “Rescale’s ScaleX Pro for Students and ScaleX Pro for Classroom solve for today’s academia pain points…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA Powers New Performance Records on TOP500 List
Today NVIDIA showcased its HPC leadership in the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The closely watched list shows a 48 percent jump in one year in the number of systems using NVIDIA GPU accelerators. The total…
From The Eponymous Pickle
7-Eleven Implements Scan and Go
Yet another example of the No-Checkout concept, now being tested at some 7-Eleven convenience stores. As it suggests this creates not so much a clear convenience advantage, but a strong brand interest for these stores. Where…
From insideHPC
Slidecast: BigDL Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Apache Spark
In this video, Beenish Zia from Intel presents: BigDL Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Apache Spark. "BigDL is a distributed deep learning library for Apache Spark*. Using BigDL, you can write deep learning applications…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI for Chemical Reaction Predictions
CSIG (Cognitive Systems Institute Group) Talk — Nov 15, 2018 - 10:30 AM ET
Talk Title: Artificial Intelligence for Chemical Reaction Predictions - IBM RXN for Chemistry
Speaker: Dr. Teodoro Laino, IBM Research - Zurich 10:30…
From insideHPC
Livestream: HPC Inspires Plenary from SC18
We are pleased to offer our readers a Livestream of the HPC Inspires Plenary from SC18 in Dallas. The event takes place at 5:00pm - 6:00pm Central Time on Nov. 12, 2018.
From solving the global food security crisis, to preventing…
From BLOG@CACM
The Formal Picnic Approach to Requirements
A mathematical excursion will improve your requirements.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger Making Cinci a High Tech Hub
Good information and details here. Have followed Kroger's efforts since we collaborated with our innovation center. Very impressed at what Kroger is doing now. I make it a point to visit every demonstration store and report…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon and Apple Collaborate in Retail?
The two teaming up could further yet create a yet more powerful retail power. Plus consider the deeper AI capabilities in combination. Or are the naturally just competitors?
Amazon and Apple get co-opetitive
by Matthew Stern…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP Acquires Qualtrics
Long time user of SAP in our enterprise. Note the $8 Billion cost, seems quite steep. I see them as a Customer Feedback Platform, see also here for comparison to other players. In things of the complexity of SAP it is all
…
From Computational Complexity
And the winner is again, Harambe: A pre election poll of my class that was truly a referenum on the Prez
I had meant to post this before the election but I didn't quite time it right. Oh well.
It has been said that this midterm election (more than others) was a referendum on the prez. Every prez election year I have my students…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Where are Voice Assistants Succeeding?
Considerable interesting statistics in this article. What skills can drive new behaviors? New or just a more efficient channel and location based play?
Voice tech like Alexa and Siri hasn’t found its true calling yet: Inside…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dynamic Programming
We did lots of work in this space for certain kinds of business problems, following some new developments. This kind of problem could in the future be addressed by Quantum Computing. Technical:
Prof Patrick H. Madden SUNY…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
2018 ACM Distinguished Members Recognized
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), has named 49 Distinguished Members for outstanding contributions to the field. These 2018 Distinguished Members are exemplars for their peers and represent ACM’s worldwide geographic…
From insideHPC
New Class of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Break Through Performance Bottlenecks
Unlocking the bigger-picture meaning from raw data volumes is no easy task. Unfortunately, that means that many important insights remain hidden within the untapped data which quietly floods data centers around the globe each…
From insideHPC
New TOP500 List Lead by DOE Supercomputers
The latest TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is out, a remarkable ranking that shows five Department of Energy supercomputers in the top 10, with the first two captured by Summit at Oak Ridge and Sierra at Livermore…
From insideHPC
Announcing the New CryptoSuper500 List
Today OrionX Research today announced that Bitcoin and BTC.com top the first release of the CryptoSuper500 list. The list recognizes cryptocurrency mining as a new form of supercomputing and tracks the top mining pools. “The
…
From Schneier on Security
Hiding Secret Messages in Fingerprints
This is a fun steganographic application: hiding a message in a fingerprint image. Can't see any real use for it, but that's okay....
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Guest Hosting a TweetMeet on CS and Hour of Code #MSFTEduChat
Computer Science Education week is fast approaching. It's a big week and one of the big activities for a lot of teachers, students, and schools is the Hour of Code. Microsoft Education is running a Twitter chat or Tweet Meet
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nudge Theory Now delivered by a Nudge Engine
First the Nudge Theory, now a Nudge engine to make you notice it. Calibrating the use, timing and strength of the nudge may be the most important thing to to figure out. If you have resources, there should be better ways to
After…
From insideHPC
Women in HPC Events on deck for SC18
The Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) organization will be be leading the conversation on diversity and inclusion this week at SC18 in Dallas. "The movement is growing. More and more allies are joining in efforts to
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Block Chain Will Break Big Tech Hold on AI?
Seen things akin to this proposed. And push backs that just a better database system could do the same thing. Which is correct? The article does not make it very clear.
How the Blockchain Could Break Big Tech’s Hold on A…