Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2019
From The Eponymous Pickle
From the Possible Minds Conference
From 'The Edge', a huge amount of information on AI and Minds. Below an intro, full text and video at the link.
The Possible Minds Conference
I am puzzled by the number of references to what AI “is” and what it “cannot do” when…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Alexa Emotions
New complexity in voice expression is announced for Alexa. Need to see this in useful context, but intrigued by possibilities.
Use New Alexa Emotions and Speaking Styles to Create a More Natural and Intuitive Voice Experience…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Stopping RoboCalls
A very common annoyance for many of us. A new means to address the problem.
How Your Phone Company Aims to Stop Robocalls in Spectrum IEEE
The STIR/SHAKEN protocol will stop robocallers from exploiting a caller ID loophole toJim…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Towards Better Forecasting: Less Noise
A forecast prediction is key for any business decision. Short intro, then the entire podcast follows at the link.
Wharton’s Barbara Mellers and Ville Satopӓӓ from INSEAD discuss their research on the impact of noise on forecast…
From insideHPC
EuroHPC Sets Stage for Pre-Exascale LUMI Supercomputer at CSC in Finland
Today the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking signed today a Hosting Agreement for one of the three pre-exascale supercomputers at CSC's datacenter in Kajaani, Finland. "EuroHPC JU is pooling European resources…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Announces Ambient Mode on Some Phone Devices
What they have called an 'intent based' rather than 'App based' design, for some phones now, and likely to happen on all their devices. I would imagine this would work quite well, but better for some kinds of task-based proactive…
From insideHPC
Santos Dumont from Atos is now the Fastest Supercomputer in Latin America
Today Atos announced a major upgrade to the Santos Dumont supercomputer in Brazil, making it the most powerful supercomputer in Latin America. "With this expansion, LNCC will gain access to state-of-the-art technologies implemented…
From insideHPC
Tyan Showcases Intel Xeon Solutions for HPC, AI, and the Edge
In this video from SC19, Philip Maher from Tyan describes the company's latest lineup of HPC and storage server platforms based on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. "Data is the foundation of the new economy, and how organizations…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Technology and the Future of Utilities
In the Cisco Blog, a good overview of how tech is helping redesign and enable energy utilities. Making them more efficient and secure.
Energy - Oil & Gas and Utilities
The Future of Utilities
By Wes Sylvester
As we power through…
From BLOG@CACM
Are My Requirements Complete?
Knowing the notion of sufficient completeness and the theory of abstract data types helps practitioners produce better requirements.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Will IOT Reinvent the Supply Chain?
We always thought so, starting with the use of the simplest IOT, RFID tagging. Though it may ultimately require new kinds of ledgers, contracts and modeling that allow advanced modeling of what is happening in the SC and predict…
From insideHPC
Qumulo Unified File Storage Reduces Administrative Burden While Consolidating HPC Workloads
At SC19, Qumulo showcased its scalable file storage for high-performance computing workloads. The company's technology helps innovative organizations gain real-time visibility, scale and control of their data across on-prem and…
From insideHPC
DDN Steps up with High Performance Storage at SC19
In this video from SC19, James Coomer from DDN describes the company's latest storage solutions for high performance computing. "At the conference, DDN announced new infrastructure and multicloud solutions as well as new data…
From Geeking with Greg
Papers and posting
If you haven't seen it, Adrian Colyer's excellent blog has great reviews and summaries of recent papers. Back when this blog started in 2004, there weren't many people summarizing research papers. Many more are now, which isAdrian…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Better computational complexity does not imply better speed
A recent magazine article presents a theoretical result: Harvey and van der Hoeven have shown that you can multiply two n-bit integers using O(n log n) complexity. Roughly speaking, this means that as n grows large, there isContinue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
P-Hacking as Malpractice
In the early days we used to have rooms full of statisticians and economists, and we were trained in the craft as well. Yet I don't ever remember the term 'P-value' being used in any serious context. I just reviewed a notebook…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Taking AI and ML from Research to Production
Good, though too short piece from O'Reilly. I add, its 90% the same as getting any kind of important IT into production.
Moving AI and ML from research into production
Dean Wampler discusses the challenges and opportunities businesses…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa to be Seen in Much Smaller, Simpler Devices
Will be interested to see where this emerges, with voice, or delivering new kinds of skills?
Alexa is coming to low-spec devices like light switches and thermostats
A Cortex-M processor and 1MB of RAM is all you need.
By Steve Dent…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Supercomputers at the Exascale
Continued work on faster and better solutions to hard problems. Still think its mostly about designing and delivering better software in context and to scale.
Intel and Argonne National Lab on 'exascale' and their new Aurora…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Deepfakes being Addressed
Continued look at the process of validation.
Tech Companies Step Up Fight Against 'Deepfakes'
The Wall Street Journal
By Betsy Morris
Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google are working to slow the spread of maliciously doctored…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ahold Testing Cashierless
More on Ahold's working on cashierless stores.
Ahold has a go at cashierless store format By Dan Berthiaume in CSA
A major supermarket conglomerate is taking a page from Amazon’s grocery playbook.
Ahold Delhaize USA, which operates…
From The Eponymous Pickle
3D Printing 'Living' Materials
Implications here fascinating, more details at the link.
3D Printing Technique Produces 'Living' 4D Materials
UNSW Newsroom
By Caroline Tang
November 19, 2019
Researchers at Australia's University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Very Fast PhotoGrammetry for Agriculture
Once again, very fast acquisition of accurate maps, in agriculture could be used to quickly detect changes in plantings by location and predict changes. Our own needs were to determine changes that would influence harvesting…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Memory parallelism: AMD Rome versus Intel
When thinking about “parallelism”, most programmers think about having multiple processors. However, even a single core in a modern processor has plenty of parallelism. It can execute many instructions per cycle and, importantly…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automated Program Repair
Not too far off from Machine Programming. Or programming from pre-set templates, which we often did in enterprise. Another argument for the demise of hand programming. Much more at the link.
Automated Program Repair
By Claire…
From insideHPC
WekaIO Takes Top Spot on IO500
The Weka File System (WekaFS) running on Amazon Web Services (AWS) set a record on the IO-500 benchmark with an overall number of 938.949—51% better performance than the prior record set at International Supercomputing Conference…
From insideHPC
SDSC Conducts 50,000+ GPU Cloudburst Experiment with Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center
In all, some 51,500 GPU processors were used during the approximately two-hour experiment conducted on November 16 and funded under a National Science Foundation EAGER grant. The experiment used simulations from the IceCube Neutrino…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automotive Industry Warned Against Hacking
Expect hacking everywhere, especially where it can be effectively leveraged by finance or influence.
FBI warns automakers they’re being targeted by hackers By Duncan Riley in SiliconAngle
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation…
From insideHPC
Hyperion Research HPC Market Briefing Breakfast at SC19
In this video from SC19, Earl Joseph hosts the Hyperion Research HPC Market Briefing Breakfast at SC19. "Our industry experts are the former IDC high performance computing (HPC) analyst team, which remains intact and continues…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
What’s In A Name?
Naming things seems to be a continual problem with programming students. I’ve written about this before (two years ago A Rose By Any Other Name Gives An Error ). I can’t seem to get a handle on it with students. I think partCase…