Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2016
From Putting People First
Innovative PhD dissertations at Harvard use ethnographic methods to understand organizational culture
Three innovative PhD dissertations have been published at the Harvard Business School’s Doctoral Program on Organizational Behavior that use ethnography and qualitative research to understand and map organizational culture: Curtis…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Applying the Science of Touch
An area we worked on in R&D and Product Development, and sought to apply in retail.
The BBC examines:
From yoga pants to smart shoes: The technology of touch
By Melissa Jun Rowley ... "
From Schneier on Security
The Future of Faking Audio and Video
This Verge article isn't great, but we are certainly moving into a future where audio and video will be easy to fake, and easier to fake undetectably. This is going to make propaganda easier, with all of the ill effects we've…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Layering Realities for Better Simulation
Am a long time practitioner of industrial simulation for problem solving, so this intrigued me. Can we more effectively use VR to model worlds that represent our own? And can that can be used to test design alternatives?…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Minimizing Disaster Insurance Risk
Podcast
Wharton's Howard Kunreuther discusses his report on the insurance industry surrounding catastrophic events.
Hurricane Matthew wreaked havoc in Haiti before causing massive damage to parts of the southeastern United States…
From insideHPC
UberCloud Publishes 2016 Compendium of Engineering Cloud Case Studies
The New 2016 Compendium of Engineering Cloud Case Studies is an invaluable resource for engineers, scientists, managers and executives who believe in the strategic importance of Technical Computing as a Service, in the Cloud,…
From insideHPC
Speed Your Application with Threading Building Blocks
With modern processors that contain a large number of cores, to get maximum performance it is necessary to structure an application to use as many cores as possible. Explicitly developing a program to do this can take a significant…
From insideHPC
Call for Exhibitors: PASC17 in Lugano
"The PASC17 Conference offers a unique opportunity for your organization to gain visibility at a national and international level, to showcase your R&D and to network with leaders in the fields of HPC simulation and data science…
From XRDS
$500 prize money at the ACM SIGAI Student Essay Contest on the Responsible Use of AI Technologies! Apply now!
Do you have an opinion on the responsible use of AI technologies? Do you want to win one of several $500 cash prizes? Do you want to talk one-on-one (via skype) to one of the following AI researchers: Murray Campbell … Continue…
From insideHPC
SimScale Brings Cloud-based CAE to Academics and Students Worldwide
Today SimScale launched the SimScale Academic Program which brings cloud-based CAE software into universities, schools, and classrooms around the world. "SimScale is a new-generation CAE platform that supports Structural Mechanics…
From Computational Complexity
Moneyball for Academics
MIT and Tel Aviv business school professors Dimitris Bertsimas, Erik Brynjolfsson, Shachar Reichman and John Silberholz wrote an intriguing paper Tenure Analytics: Models for Predicting Research Impact about using metrics inMoneyball…
From insideHPC
High Performance System Interconnect Technology
Today, high performance interconnects can be divided into three categories: Ethernet, InfiniBand, and vendor specific interconnects. Ethernet is established as the dominant low level interconnect standard for mainstream commercial…
From Schneier on Security
The Pro-PGP Position
A few days ago I blogged an excellent essay by Filippo Valsorda on why he's giving up on PGP. Neal Walkfield wrote a good rebuttal. I am on Valsorda's side. I don't like PGP, and I use it as little as possible. If I want to communicate…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
New Cybersecurity Policy White Paper by the ACM Europe Policy Committee
A new policy white paper by the ACM Europe Policy Committee on “Advancing Cybersecurity Research and Education in Europe: Major Drivers of Growth in the Digital Landscape,” explores the important role of cybersecurity research…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Testing Time Series Data
Very well done, and thoughtful and technical piece on testing a time series. Have heard of backtesting, but not hindcasting. And more specifically its about making forecasts in time. What is generally known as forecasting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GE Gives out Dots for the Holidays
I am told that GE has given out free Amazon Echo 'Dots' to employees for the holidays this year. Recall that GE is also making an Alexa enabled lighting fixture to be available in 2017. A further example of the exposure of…
From Phys.org Technology News
Canada launches online hotline to report bad drone drivers
Expecting a spike in drone sales for Christmas, Canada's transportation ministry on Wednesday launched an online hotline to report bad drone pilots.
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Retail Revolution?
In Chief Marketer.
Amazon Go: A Bold Inevitable Retail Revolution
Posted on December 21, 2016 by Patricia Odell
Likely, as long as physical retail still exists. See my other recent posts on this at the tag below. We tested the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What People Really Want from Customer Service
A short HBR video on the topic. I like the way they illustrate it with short animated process diagrams, making the premise easy to understand. Even if these diagrams are not complete. they are a great place to start to think…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Performance overhead when calling assembly from Go
The Go language allows you to call C functions and to rewrite entire functions in assembly. As I have previously documented, calling C functions from Go comes with a significant overhead. It still makes sense, but only for sizeable…
From insideHPC
2017 GPU Hackathons Coming to U.S. and Europe
Today ORNL announced the full schedule of 2017 GPU Hackathons at multiple locations around the world. "The goal of each hackathon is for current or prospective user groups of large hybrid CPU-GPU systems to send teams of at least…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Teams
Have been using advanced chat capability Slack for a project. Not overly impressed. Impressed me because it was new, not because it had real value. Now Microsoft is attempting something similar:
Review: Microsoft Teams tries…
From insideHPC
CryoEM Demo on Dell PowerEdge C6320 at SC16
In this video from SC16, Garima Kochhar from Dell EMC describes the CryoEM Demo on the Dell PowerEdge C6320 rack server powered by Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi. "This demo presents performance results for the 2D alignment and…
From insideHPC
Panasas Celebrates 2016 Channel Momentum
“I think one of the things that resellers like about us is that we never take a reseller deal directly. As a channel-first company, we always drive as much business through channel as our customers allow,” said Philip Crocker…
From insideHPC
Building SCinet at SC16: The World’s Fastest Network
In this time-lapse video, a team of volunteers build the SCinet, the world's fastest network at SC16. "Created each year for the conference, SCinet brings to life a very high-capacity network that supports the revolutionary applications…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
White House Report on AI, Automation, and the Economy
The following is a blog post by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Past Chair Gregory D. Hager, Mandell Bellmore Professor of Computer Science at The Johns Hopkins University and CCC Director Ann Drobnis. The past year has…
From Schneier on Security
Encryption Working Group Annual Report from the US House of Representatives
The Encryption Working Group of the House Judiciary Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee has released its annual report. Observation #1: Any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest…
From ACM on Huffington Post
Slowing The Spread Of Viral Misinformation: Can Crowdsourcing Help?
By Kate Starbird, University of Washington, Human Centered Design & Engineering; and Emma Spiro, University of Washington
From My Biased Coin
Knuth Prize 2017 Call
The call is going out for the 2017 Knuth Prize. The call will be up on the SIGACT Web page shortly, but until it shows up there here's a pdf. Key date: deadline is February 15 for nominations.
Key info (but please read the…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Hunting Complexity in Zeta
A second look at Voronin’s amazing universality theorem Anatoly Karatsuba and Sergei Voronin wrote a book on Bernhard Riemann’s zeta function. The book was translated into English by Neal Koblitz in 1992. Among its special content…