Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2015
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Blasts From the Past
Is the “Forsch” awakening in complexity theory? Composite of src1, src2, src3 Max von Sydow starred as the chess-playing knight in Ingmar Bergman’s iconic 1957 film The Seventh Seal. He has the first line of dialogue in this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cognitive Sciences Exchange
An intriguing piece in Mindhacks. Which points to cognitive science resources that might be useful for building systems that aim to use cognitive models. Always question cognitive-social models, compare them with alternatives…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Topic Modeling in R
Topic Modeling. A kind of textual analysis we did long before R, using cluster based 'Content Analysis'. An examination and R code for how this can be done in the modern era. An example of unstructured text analytics. …
From insideHPC
HPC Cloud Data Management at AWS
In this video from the Cycle Computing the HPC in the Cloud Educational Series, Jeff Layton, HPC Principal Architect at Amazon Web Services, explains concepts and options around using storage in the AWS Cloud.
The post HPC Cloud…From insideHPC
Podcast: Strengthening High Performance Computing with OpenHPC
OpenHPC is a collaborative, community effort that initiated from a desire to aggregate a number of common ingredients required to deploy and manage High Performance Computing Linux clusters including provisioning tools, resource…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Linkedin Open Source Success
Despite having had a number of UI issues, you have to admire a company with over 400 million users. A system that I use by choice most every day. Also one that needs to continue present a continuing evolving face on professionalism…
From insideHPC
Video: Trends and Tech in the HPC Market
In this video from SC15, Dell's Onur Celebioglu discusses why HPC is now important to a broader group of use cases. He also provides an overview of HPC for research, life sciences and manufacturing. Participants learned more …
From Schneier on Security
Cory Doctorow on Software Security and the Internet of Things
Cory Doctorow has a good essay on software integrity and control problems and the Internet of Things. He's writing about self-driving cars, but the issue is much more general. Basically, we're going to want systems that prevent…
From Putting People First
[Report] Easier Said Than Done
![[Report] Easier Said Than Done](/system/assets/0000/1953/030209_Vanderbeeken_Mark_250.small_square.jpg?1476779420&1260281963)
Easier Said Than Done: Why we struggle with healthy behaviours and what to do about it By Nathalie Spencer RSA, December 2015 Many of us know what we should be doing to live healthily, yet many of us struggle to actually actively…
From Putting People First
[Book] The People’s Platform
The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age By Astra Taylor Picador, 288 pages April 2015 The Internet has been hailed as an unprecedented democratizing force, a place where all can participate equally…
From Putting People First
The technophiles unhappy about the tech revolution
Joel Achenbach reports in the Washington Post on how digital dissenters say human needs are getting lost in the digital revolution and start to fight the tech establishment. Taylor is a 21st-century digital dissenter. She’s one…
From Putting People First
Ethno-writing about digital infrastructure
Data & Society is a NYC-based research institute focused on the social and cultural issues arising from data-centric technological development. The institute that was founded by danah boyd, principal researcher and Microsoft …
From Writing
A Look Back at 2015
To paraphrase Bill Gates, most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year. I definitely underestimated my 2015 and found it rewarding to go back and realize just how much happened…
From Writing
A Look Back at 2015
To paraphrase Bill Gates, most people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year. I definitely underestimated my 2015 and found it rewarding to go back and realize just how much happened…
From The Eponymous Pickle
LG Announces Smart Home Hub
Looks like an Echo cylinder with a small screen and speaker. But is not voice activated. In the past have been impressed by LG's experiments with smart appliances, we used and tested several in innovation settings. beforeAlljoyn…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning is optimization
It is nice to be reminded that the math part of Machine Learning is optimization. Because that was my original training, in the form of 'Operations Research'. Course its not all about math. Its also about decision process…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Need Better Metadata Services
Favorite topic stemming from recent consulting interaction. Creative look at the implications. I always more broadly define metadata as also including contextual data. In O'Reilly: " ... We need open and vendor-neutral metadata…
From insideHPC
Podcast: HPE and Intel Alliance for High Performance Computing & Big Data
In this Chip Chat podcast, Bill Mannel, Vice President and General Manager for HPC and Big Data from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) describes the High Performance Computing Alliance between HPE and Intel. He highlights how …
From insideHPC
China’s HPC Vendors Look to US and European Markets
Who are the world’s most important vendors of supercomputers, at least as measured by the number of systems they have in the Top500? HP is the leader with a 31 per cent share; Cray is number two with just under 14 per cent. So…
From insideHPC
Dispelling the Myth “OpenMP Does Not Scale”
Ruud van der Pas from Oracle presented this talk at OpenMPcon. "Unfortunately it is a very widespread myth that OpenMP Does Not Scale – a myth we intend to dispel in this talk. Every parallel system has its strengths and weaknesses…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Code in Different Languages
The other day I found an older blog post by Rob Underwood called Code Syntax Compared. In it he wrote a very simple program in 5 different languages. He used Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP and Java. No .NET languages. So since…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My most popular posts in 2015 (part II)
Techno-optimism For several years now, I have grown more optimistic about the power of human innovation. Despite the barrage of bad news, the fact is that we are richer and healthier than we have ever been. Yes, I might not be…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Deep Learning for Decision Making and Control
Robot Deep Learning.Deep Learning for Decision Making and ControlPublished on Mar 18, 2015A remarkable feature of human and animal intelligence is the ability to autonomously acquire new behaviors. This research is concerned…
From The Eponymous Pickle
No UI is the New UI
A novel look at conversational, messenger style interfaces. Implies that the US can well understand context and even intent. What are the implications of error? No UI is the New UIOn the rise of UI-less apps and why you should …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Face Watch: Thief Recognition
Already much in use in Vegas casinos. Categorizing facial images in real time based on stored images. Implications of false positives? Experiments described in the BBC." ... A scheme widely used by UK stores to identifyUntil…
From Schneier on Security
Another Scandal Resulting from E-mails Gone Public
A lot of Pennsylvania government officials are being hurt as a result of e-mails being made public. This is all the result of a political pressure to release the emails, and not an organizational doxing attack, but the effects…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Fedex Holiday Glitch
Over holiday, Fedex apparently unable to meet increased demand. Poor forecasting of demand, resource allocation? Awaiting more information. Might be an interesting case study for highly varying demand.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Free NYC Gigabit Wifi Hubs
Saw a proposal for this quite a number of years ago. Finally NYC putting public Wifi into many old 'phone booths'. In the Verge. " ... The full network will install more than 7,500 public hubs throughout the city, each replacing…
From XRDS
An Introduction From an Interaction Designer
Hello all, my name is Andrew J Hunsucker and I’m a PhD student at Indiana University, focusing on Human Computer Interaction in the Informatics department. You might remember me from my post on Virtual Reality a couple of months…
From Schneier on Security
PayPal Authentication Still Substandard
Brian Krebs has the story. Bottom line: PayPal has no excuse for this kind of stuff. I hope the public shaming incents them to offer better authentication for its customers....