acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

Blogs Archive


Archives

The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.

December 2017


From The Eponymous Pickle

Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity

A piece that looks at the history and math background of modern cyber security.    Not overly technical video.

Cybersecurity, Nuclear Security, Alan Turing, and Illogical Logic
Martin E. Hellman discusses "Cybersecurity, Nuclear…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Better Recommendation Engines

Better Recommendation Engines

Researchers Devise Better Recommendation Algorithm 
Improved recommendation algorithm should work especially well when ratings data are “sparse.”

MIT News  By Larry Hardesty

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Document Classification with Deep Learning

Document Classification with Deep Learning

Once again, a good introduction.  And demonstration of how these systems can be constructed.

Best Practices for Document Classification with Deep Learning   by Jason Brownlee

Text classification describes a general class of problems…


From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

P=NP: Perhaps I Change My Mind

An old result put a new way Albert Meyer knows circuit lower bounds. He co-authored a paper with the late Larry Stockmeyer that proves that small instances of the decision problem of a certain weak second-order logical theory…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Ultimate PDF Converter

Ultimate PDF Converter

Always interested in making things more productive.   I was told about this method and giving it a try.   Remember having some messy experiences with the problem of OCR conversion from PDFs, especially in varying contexts when…


From insideHPC

NVIDIA TITAN V GPU Brings Volta to the Desktop for AI Development

NVIDIA TITAN V GPU Brings Volta to the Desktop for AI Development

Today NVIDIA introduced their new high end TITAN V GPU for desktop PCs. Powered by the Volta architecture, TITAN V excels at computational processing for scientific simulation. Its 21.1 billion transistors deliver 110 teraflops…


From insideHPC

Video: DDN Applied Technologies, Performance and Use Cases

Video: DDN Applied Technologies, Performance and Use Cases

James Coomer gave this talk at the DDN User Group at SC17. "Our technological and market leadership comes from our long-term investments in leading-edge research and development, our relentless focus on solving our customers’…


From insideHPC

Data Vortex Technologies Teams with Providentia Worldwide for HPC

Data Vortex Technologies Teams with Providentia Worldwide for HPC

Data Vortex Technologies has formalized a partnership with Providentia Worldwide, LLC. Providentia is a technologies and solutions consulting venture which bridges the gap between traditional HPC and enterprise computing. The…


From The Computing Community Consortium Blog

CS Education Week 2017!

CS Education Week 2017!

The following is a letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering…


From insideHPC

Intel Supports open source software for HPC

Intel Supports open source software for HPC

In this video from SC17, Thomas Krueger describes how Intel supports Open Source High Performance Computing software like OpenHPC and Lustre. "As the Linux initiative demonstrates, a community-based, vendor-catalyzed model like…


From Daniel Lemire's Blog

Science and Technology links (December 8th, 2017)

Science and Technology links (December 8th, 2017)

Facebook’s leading artificial-intelligence researcher Yan Lecun wrote: In the history of science and technology, the engineering artifacts have almost always preceded the theoretical understanding: the lens and the telescopeContinue…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble

Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble

Glad to have contributed to innovation and co-innovation at these companies for many years. Lets keep it all moving along. 

Technology Innovation Isn’t Just for Tech Companies
Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble make the top 20 for innovation…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Electronic Health Data And Drugs

Electronic Health Data And Drugs

Fascinating thought.  Like the leveraging of 'public' data like the Wikipedia too.  Taking a look.

Mining electronic health records and the web for drug repurposing

Kira Radinsky describes a system that mines medical records and…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Satellites for Business

Satellites for Business

The ultimate large scale sensory play.   At an early time we looked at them for supply chain data, to support decisions, modeling and analytics.  I continue to follow advances.

This Company Has the Largest Fleet of Orbiting Satellites…


From Schneier on Security

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Embryos Coming to Life

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Embryos Coming to Life

Beautiful video. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here....


From Schneier on Security

Security Vulnerabilities in Certificate Pinning

Security Vulnerabilities in Certificate Pinning

New research found that many banks offer certificate pinning as a security feature, but fail to authenticate the hostname. This leaves the systems open to man-in-the-middle attacks. From the paper: Abstract: Certificate verification…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Walmart Enters Meal-Kit Fray

Walmart Enters Meal-Kit Fray

Good margin I assume,  but is this really worth the effort?   Going to Wal-mart or an App versus ordering online?

Walmart sells meal kits to challenge Amazon and Blue Apron
Conveniently, it also sells the kitchenware you need to…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Customer Service via Cognitive Solutions and BPM

Customer Service via Cognitive Solutions and BPM

Found this customer service example to be interesting ... in particular that it uses Business Process Modeling (BPM)  and Watson.    I believe any such problem should include a BPM analysis.

 " ... Customer insight gathered from…


From insideHPC

System Fabric Works adds support for BeeGFS Parallel File System

System Fabric Works adds support for BeeGFS Parallel File System

Today System Fabric Works announced its support and integration of the BeeGFS file system with the latest NetApp E-Series All Flash and HDD storage systems which makes BeeGFS available on the family of NetApp E-Series Hyperscale…


From The Computing Community Consortium Blog

NSF Partnerships for Innovation Webinar

NSF Partnerships for Innovation Webinar

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Partnerships for Innovation program (PFI) offers researchers the opportunity to transform new knowledge into societal benefits through translational research and technology development efforts…


From insideHPC

DDN’s HPC Trends Survey: Complex I/O Workloads are the #1 Challenge

DDN’s HPC Trends Survey: Complex I/O Workloads are the #1 Challenge

Today DDN announced the results of its annual HPC Trends survey, which reflects the continued adoption of flash-based storage as essential to respondent’s overall data center strategy. While flash is deemed essential, respondents…


From insideHPC

Job of the Week: Senior HPC Architect at Xtreme Design

Job of the Week: Senior HPC Architect at Xtreme Design

Xtreme Design is seeking a Senior HPC Cloud Architect in our Job of the Week. "XTREME Design is seeking an HPC-focused Cloud Architect to join our team and continue development of the XTREME family of products and solutions, …


From Computational Complexity

Razor's Edge

Informally the sensitivity conjecture asks whether every hard Boolean function has a razor's edge input, where flipping a random bit has a reasonable chance of flipping the output.






Let's be more precise. We consider functions…


From insideHPC

Intel Select Solutions: BigStack 2.0 for Genomics

Intel Select Solutions: BigStack 2.0 for Genomics

BIGstack 2.0 incorporates our latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel 3D NAND SSD, and Intel FPGAs while also leveraging the latest genomic tools from the Broad Institute in GATK 3.8 and GATK 4.0. This new stack provides…


From insideHPC

Intel Parallel Studio XE AVX-512: Tuning for Success with the Latest SIMD Extensions and Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512

Intel Parallel Studio XE AVX-512: Tuning for Success with the Latest SIMD Extensions and Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512

With the introduction of Intel Parallel Studio XE, instructions for utilizing the vector extensions have been enhanced and new instructions have been added. Applications in diverse domains such as data compression and decompression…


From The Eponymous Pickle

MIT: An Ink that is a Sensor

MIT: An Ink that is a Sensor

Possible packaging applications.

MIT researchers made a living ink that responds to its surroundings
The 3D-printed, bacteria-loaded gel can be used as a sensor.

By Mallory Locklear, @mallorylocklear

Researchers at MIT have developed…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Kaiser Fung on the Limitations of AI

Kaiser Fung on the Limitations of AI

Colleague Kaiser Fung  on on hype and limitations of AI today.   Some useful thoughts.  In his always interesting Junkcharts blog.  I too have lived through several waves of AI hype, seeing it from an enterprise perspective. …


From Putting People First

Game Your Brain: The neurological impact of UX

Game Your Brain: The neurological impact of UX

The world is experiencing a merging of media and minds that we haven’t yet created a vocabulary for. We know that user experience design has the power to respond to what algorithms deem “suitable” to us, but have we understood…


From Putting People First

Game Your Brain: The neurological impact of UX

Game Your Brain: The neurological impact of UX

The world is experiencing a merging of media and minds that we haven’t yet created a vocabulary for. We know that user experience design has the power to respond to what algorithms deem “suitable” to us, but have we understood…


From insideHPC

Cray Joins Big Data Center at NERSC for AI Development

Cray Joins Big Data Center at NERSC for AI Development

Today Cray announced the Company has joined the Big Data Center at NERSC. The collaboration between the two organizations is representative of Cray’s commitment to leverage its supercomputing expertise, technologies, and best…