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 Putting People First
Reinventing cancer surgery—by designing a better hospital experience
Memorial Sloan Kettering’s new $300 million cancer center in New York focuses on the well-being of the patient—even as they move you through the process as quickly as possible. Inside the nearly-finished Josie Robertson Surgery…
From Putting People First
Reinventing cancer surgery—by designing a better hospital experience
Memorial Sloan Kettering’s new $300 million cancer center in New York focuses on the well-being of the patient—even as they move you through the process as quickly as possible. Inside the nearly-finished Josie Robertson Surgery…
From Putting People First
Peeps Magazine: anthropology for non-anthropologists
Today we received a hard copy of Peeps, a new and impressive magazine that presents itself as “anthropology for non-anthropologists”, aimed at putting “culture and context before events, bringing investigative stories from corners…
From Putting People First
Peeps Magazine: anthropology for non-anthropologists
Today we received a hard copy of Peeps, a new and impressive magazine that presents itself as “anthropology for non-anthropologists”, aimed at putting “culture and context before events, bringing investigative stories from corners…
From Computational Complexity
Moonshots
In 1961 Kennedy said "this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth". In 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Computer-Aided Personalized Education Visioning Workshop
The following post was co-authored by Andrew Lan, a PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. Andrew recently attended the Computing Community Consortium Computer-Aided Personalized…
From Schneier on Security
Worldwide Cryptographic Products Survey: Edits and Additions Wanted
Back in September, I announced my intention to survey the world market of cryptographic products. The goal is to compile a list of both free and commercial encryption products that can be used to protect arbitrary data and messages…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Work
Good piece with some innovative points. By Guy Bieber, 2015_11_24O’Reilly saw a major problem brewing in the workplace and affecting the economy, so they decided to bring people from government, businesses, and organizations…
From Putting People First
Why content reigns supreme in UX design
In this piece, Jerry Cao, Kamil Zieba and Matt Ellis of UXPin dive into four reasons why we recommend a content-first design approach: 1. Design may impress, but content hooks users In the end, users will care more about content…
From Putting People First
Why content reigns supreme in UX design
In this piece, Jerry Cao, Kamil Zieba and Matt Ellis of UXPin dive into four reasons why we recommend a content-first design approach: 1. Design may impress, but content hooks users In the end, users will care more about content…
From Putting People First
Can “co-creation” help cities find a new way to solve their problems?
An increasing number of cities are using co-creation platforms to tackle challenging issues like mobility, air quality and urban regeneration too. The Nexthamburg project, for example, was launched in 2009 to source innovative…
From Putting People First
Can “co-creation” help cities find a new way to solve their problems?
An increasing number of cities are using co-creation platforms to tackle challenging issues like mobility, air quality and urban regeneration too. The Nexthamburg project, for example, was launched in 2009 to source innovative…
From Putting People First
Can human-centered design help people prevail over machines in the workplace?
Instead of asking ourselves which jobs will be replaced, writes Brooks Rainwater, we need to shift the conversation to answer the question: what jobs do we want humans to do? We must move the policy discussion away from job retraining…
From Putting People First
Can human-centered design help people prevail over machines in the workplace?
Instead of asking ourselves which jobs will be replaced, writes Brooks Rainwater, we need to shift the conversation to answer the question: what jobs do we want humans to do? We must move the policy discussion away from job retraining…
From Putting People First
Free usability help for privacy toolmakers
The non-profit Simply Secure is launching a new series of usability programs for organizations, companies and individuals who are making cryptographic/privacy/security tools. Simply Secure’s mission is to help make privacy tools…
From Putting People First
Free usability help for privacy toolmakers
The non-profit Simply Secure is launching a new series of usability programs for organizations, companies and individuals who are making cryptographic/privacy/security tools. Simply Secure’s mission is to help make privacy tools…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Students are Creative and that is a Good Thing
I love the creativity of students. We worked on a whack a mole game in class today. The purpose was to create a user control but of course students want to do more. Or at least different. Clearly the images I provided are too…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Visual History of the Nobel Prize
Nicely done example of what I would call artistic visualization. Not necessarily useful for interacting with the data. But does provide some narrative about the data that is surprising. " ... Visualized for each laureate are…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Great Innovative Idea- Python Tutor
The following Great Innovative Idea is from Philip J. Guo, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. Philip recently attended the Computing Community Consortium Computer-Aided Personalized…
From insideHPC
How Can HPC Best Help Pharma R&D?
"The challenges facing informatics systems in the pharmaceutical industry’s R&D laboratories are changing. The number of large-scale computational problems in the life sciences is growing and they will need more high-performance…
From insideHPC
Video: Dell Panel Discussion on the NSCI initiative from SC15
In this video from SC15, Rich Brueckner from insideHPC moderates a panel discussion on the NSCI initiative. "As a coordinated research, development, and deployment strategy, NSCI will draw on the strengths of departments and …
From insideHPC
OpenPOWER Summit Returns to GTC in San Jose in April, 2016
Registration is now open for the 2016 OpenPOWER Summit, which will take place April 5-7 in San Jose, California in conjunction with the GPU Technology Conference. With a conference theme of "Revolutionizing the Datacenter," the…
From insideHPC
Student Cluster Teams Learn the Tools of Performance Tuning at SC15
In this video from SC15, Rich Brueckner from insideHPC talks to contestants in the Student Cluster Competition. Using hardware loaners from various vendors and Allinea performance tools, nine teams went head-to-head to build …
From insideHPC
Green Revolution Cooling Helps Tsubame-KFC Supercomputer Top the Green500
Today Green Revolution Cooling announced that their immersive cooling technology is used by the most efficient supercomputers in the world as ranked in the latest Green500 list. For the third consecutive year, the Green Revolution…
From insideHPC
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Showcases Benefits of Code Modernization
"We've tailored our story for the HPC developers here, who are really worried about applications and performance of applications. What's really happened traditionally is that the single-threaded applications had not really been…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robot and AI Reads
I see that MIT Technnology review is putting this out, following, provided some things I had not seen:Recommended Robot and AI Reads This WeekA roundup of interesting stories on robotics and artificial intelligence from other…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GE Thermal Innovation Lab
GE opens lab to improve combat aircraft thermal managementGE Aviation has opened a $13 million Vehicle Energy Systems Integration Lab (VESIL), at its Evendale, Ohio facility, to improve thermal management capabilities for advanced…
From Blog@Ubiquity
Sirens’ Song of the IoT
These days we are witnessing a gold rush to the shining, promising new trillions of dollars market consisting of 30-50 billion devices interconnecting anything and everything. The Internet of Things (IoT) looks to be the promised…
From Schneier on Security
Security vs. Business Flexibility
This article demonstrates that security is less important than functionality. When asked about their preference if they needed to choose between IT security and business flexibility, 71 percent of respondents said that security…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Density of Information
A look at the graphical density of language. I supported a project in school that looked at this topic. Is Mandarin denser than English? By what metric? Examples.