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 The Eponymous Pickle
Look at Amazon Echo as Assistant
Have much enjoyed the Amazon Echo's capabilities over the last year. As the article suggest, it works well in unusual, sound challenging environments. That is a plus. It does quite well as an always-on attentive assistant.…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Computer Science Goes Beyond Coding
CSTA’s very own Board Member, Sheena Vaidyanathan has been featured in a December edSurge article, titled “Computer Science Goes Beyond Coding.” The “teach kids to code” movement has many thinking that computer science is just…
From insideHPC
Video: GPUltima – The Ultimate in GPU Networks
Steve Cooper from One Stop Systems presented this talk at SC15. “The OSS GPUltima is the densest and most cost-effective petaflop solution for scalable data center infrastructures," said Steve Cooper, OSS CEO. “Supporting up …
From insideHPC
Intel Completes Altera Acquisition
Today Intel Corporation announced that it has completed the acquisition of Altera, a leading provider of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The acquisition complements Intel's leading-edge product portfolio and …
From insideHPC
2016 Predictions from Radio Free HPC
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team makes their tech predictions for 2016. Will secure firmware be the key differentiator for HPC vendors? Will this be the year of FPGAs? And could we see a 100 Petaflop machine on the TOP500…
From The Eponymous Pickle
R for Big Data: PivotalR
Just examining. Addressing the usability of languages like R and Python in Big Data computing environments." ... When discussing data science tools, it’s common for folks to passionately debate about algorithm breadth, scalability…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Top Posts from 2015
I decided it was time to take a look at my most read posts from the last year. This is an interesting exercise for several reasons. One is the inconsistency of statistics. I have two sources (Google Analytics and Blogger’s native…
From Schneier on Security
DMCA and the Internet of Things
In theory, the Internet of Things -- the connected network of tiny computers inside home appliances, household objects, even clothing -- promises to make your life easier and your work more efficient. These computers will communicate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Winning at Work
Useful thoughts: In the HBR: Research-Based Ways to Win at Work in 2016 by Sarah Green CarmichaelNone of these points are that surprising. Each suggestion has a link that leads to related research. All from other articles…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Media Spending Slower Growth
From McKinsey: A key measure. Overall expenditures rose marginally year on year in 2014, but slower growth is coming.
From Geeking with Greg
Working at Microsoft
I'm joining Microsoft! I'll be part of the excellent Analytics and Experimentation team, helping people learn from data. I'm excited! I've been geeking out with big data from before data science was a thing and before being a…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Alan Gara on the Intel Scalable System Framework
In this Intel Chip Chat podcast, Alan Gara describes how Intel’s Scalable System Framework (SSF) is meeting the extreme challenges and opportunities that researchers and scientists face in high performance computing today. He…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Computer (and Math) Humor
I like this one in part because it is subtle. There are two basic standards for opening the curly brace in C-type languages. Not everyone will pick up on it. Is it important which way you do it? Actually no. It may not even…
From The Eponymous Pickle
BMW Pushes Gesture Control
Always had my doubts about gestures control in cars, but BMW is pushing it:In TheVerge:Last CES, BMW teased the future of its human-machine interface with a gesture control demo — a capability that debuted later in 2015 on the…
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: EMiT 2016 Emerging Technologies Conference
The EMiT 2016 Emerging Technologies Conference has issued its Call for Papers. Hosted by the Mont-Blanc project and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the event takes place June 2-3, 2016 in Barcelona.
The post Call for Papers…From insideHPC
Video: Profiling at Scale
"Developers of modern HPC applications face a challenge when scaling out their hybrid (MPI/OpenMP) applications. As cluster sizes continue to grow, the amount of analysis data collected can easily become overwhelming when going…
From Computational Complexity
Complexity Year in Review 2015
We had an incredible year for theorems in 2015, the strongest year in computational complexity in the last decade. Topping the list as the theorem of the year is László Babai's quasipolynomial-time algorithm for graph isomorphism…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My most popular posts in 2015… (part I)
Programming If you want the world to get progressively better, you have to do your part. Programmers can’t wait passively for hardware to get better. We need to do our part. In particular, we need to better exploit our CPUs if…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Disease Diagnosis, Data Analysis
Instructive, technical piece on disease diagnosis using Bayesian analysis. Includes R code for implementation. Cautionary analysis of the results. Particular attention paid to false alarm rate. Useful for analyzing many kinds…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Philip Tetlock and Super Forecasting
Recently covered in the BBC with an introductory article and broadcast. About the gradual improvement of forecasting and the use of tournaments to drive them. This topic has been covered here for some time. Precision…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Introduces Open Location Codes
Long time fascination with maps and location. Google Earth and Google Maps, linked to satelite imagery amazed me in the way they brought interactive maps to anyone. Further Google has recently added open location codes ..…
From Schneier on Security
NSA/GCHQ Exploits Against Juniper Networking Equipment
The Intercept just published a 2011 GCHQ document outlining their exploit capabilities against Juniper networking equipment, including routers and NetScreen firewalls as part of this article. GCHQ currently has capabilities against…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 28 December 2015
I just realized that this will be the last interesting links post of 2015. What a year it has been. Last week I spent less time online or thinking about school and computer science than usual. School was out for me but I hadThe…
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: InterCloud-HPC 2016 in Austria
The InterCloud-HPC 2016 conference has issued its Call for Papers. As part of The International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS 2016), the event takes place July 18-22 in Innsbruck, Austria.
The post…From insideHPC
Video: The SeqAn C++ Library for Efficient NGS Sequence Analysis
"SeqAn (www.seqan.de) is an open-source C++ template library (BSD license) that implements many efficient and generic data structures and algorithms for Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) analysis. It contains gapped k-mer indices…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Why Is Discrete Math Hard To Teach?
A new approach to teaching discrete math René Descartes and François Viète are mathematicians who have something in common, besides being French. Let’s get back to that shortly. I am about to teach our basic discrete math class…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why Book: On Causes
Reading excellent book that addresses a favorite, fundamental topic. Non Technical.Why: A Guide to Finding and Using Causesby Samantha Kleinberg"Kleinberg expertly guides readers on a tour of the key concepts and methods for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Homekit Thermostat for a Smart Home
The humble home thermostat has always been a model for the sensing device. Even for the future of pattern matching AI. Have been examining examples like the Nest as a starting point for the smart home. And Echo as a means…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Whats a Data Lake?
Nicely done overview. In a world of cheaper storage, more data and metadata, better BI and deep analytics, toward automated modeling methods .... makes much sense. How about an automated way to scour the lake to find leverage…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Signage 2.0 Advances as Data Art
Good overview of the advance of digital signage. We spent much time trying to understand its effective in store use. Beyond retail grocery retail? Perhaps. " .... Their secret weapon is "data art," a new breed of highly…