Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2018
From Putting People First
Daniel Kahneman on cutting through the noise
You might be surprised by what occupies Daniel Kahneman’s thoughts. “You seem to think that I think of bias all the time,” he tells esteemed economist Tyler Cowen. “I really don’t think of bias that much.” These days, noise might…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Looking Back on CS Education in 2018
The last few years I have written start of the year posts about things I want to track in Computer Science education in the new year. Last year’s post is at Computer Science Education Things I'm Watching in 2018 At the end of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Copyrights Expire
How important is this? 95 year ago. What is the most iconically valuable thing from 1923 that could be repurposed, for free? Fascinating writeup. From Motherboard:
A Massive Amount of Iconic Works Will Enter the Public Domain…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Large Scale Tech Transformations
Analysis of a survey of CEO's about transformations.
The cornerstones of large-scale technology transformation
By Michael Bender, Nicolaus Henke, and Eric Lamarre in McKinsey
A clear playbook is emerging for how to integrate and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Internet Pioneer Larry Roberts Obit
We utilized some of his earliest work in the Darpanet. Was impressed then by the basic simple architecture and noted even then how people quickly re-purposed it for other needs, like email.
Net's founding father Dr Larry Roberts…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Reviews Highlights from the CHPC Conference in South Africa
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks back at the highlights of the 2018 CHPC Conference in South Africa. With over 500 attendees, the event featured a set of keynotes on high performance computing as well as a Student…
From insideHPC
Video: Centralizing Storage without going off the Rails
In this video from the DDN booth at SC18, Laura Carriere from NCCS in Singapore presents: Centralizing Storage without going off the Rails. "The National Climate Change Secretariat (NCCS) was established on 1 July 2010 under
…
From Computational Complexity
Complexity Year in Review 2018
Result of the year goes to
Oracle Separation of BQP and PH by Ran Raz and Avishay Tal
which we wrote about in June. This work solves one of the original open questions in quantum complexity using tools from both quantum and…
From Schneier on Security
China's APT10
Wired has an excellent article on China's APT10 hacking group. Specifically, on how they hacked managed service providers in order to get to their customers' networks. I am reminded of the NSA's "I Hunt Sysadmins" presentation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building Trust for an AI Project
Sounds of interest, about to check this out. But as often comes to mind, what is the risk involved? How is it measured and addressed?
The Right Amount of Trust for AI Podcast, Slides: Summary In InfoQ
Chris Butler discusses…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Important science and technology findings in 2018
The Gompertz-Makeham law predicts statistically the mortality rate of human beings. The key takeaway is that it is an exponential function. Every few years, the mortality rate of a human being doubles. It is not unique to human…
From insideHPC
HPE to Build 24 Petaflop Supercomputer with 64-Core AMD EPYC Processors for HLRS
HPE is now under contract to build and install a new AMD-powered supercomputer at HLRS in Germany. Called "Hawk, the new computing system will be 3.5 times faster than the existing HLRS supercomputer, Hazel Hen, and will be the…
From insideHPC
Video: Quo vadis HPC – Facing the Future
In this talk from Computing Systems Week in Heraklion, Bastian Koller from the University of Stuttgart / HLRS asks whether HPC has come to a dead-end in Europe. He argues that real-life uses for applications are more important…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Verge's Report Card for AI in 2018
Nicely put piece in the Verge gives it a B grade. Refers to some its own writing. Not enough about how internal company work is improving efficiency and thus resource use. And also not much about the resulting change in labor…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Autonomous Freight Rail in Australia is Operational
Interesting application for 'largest robot', it seems to decrease use of human engineers for some networks.
Mining company says first autonomous freight train network is fully operational
The system reduces the number of times
By…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Artificial Bee Colonies
Examples to how we can build agents and simulate them. Use them to understand better architectures and models for enhancing and supporting human work?
Searching an Artificial Bee Colony for Real-World Results
Kanazawa University…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Collision of Demographics, Automation Inequality
I previously referenced this Bain report when I spoke about automation and AI, thinking that might be the biggest influence. Worth reposting it here.
Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality
The business…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bixby Assistant Speaker Imminent
Notable because Samsung make many home appliance, connecting them naturally to the Smart Home. I noticed last year that Samsung was mentioning their language Bixby in most materiel about their appliances, though usually it…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Illinois Biometric Privacy Act and Google
Notable use of legal regulation against new AI applications. in TheVerge. More details at the link, see also the link to the Illinois Privacy Act, which was at issue.
Google just got an important lawsuit over facial recognition…
From The Eponymous Pickle
a16z Podcast on Talent Tech and Culture
Broad look at tech and more:
a16z Podcast: Talent, Tech Trends, and Culture
with Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Tyler Cowen
This episode of the a16z Podcast features the rare combination of a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and…
From insideHPC
Video: Overview of DDN’s Accelerated, Any-Scale AI
In this video from DDN booth at SC18, Kurt Kuckein from DataDirect Networks presents an overview of DDN A3i: (Accelerated, Any-Scale AI). "Engineered from the ground up for the AI-enabled data center, DDN A³I solutions are fully…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Systems Software Engineer for NvStreams at NVIDIA
NVIDIA is seeking a Systems Software Engineer for NvStreams in our Job of the Week. "This position will be part of a dynamic crew that develops and maintains systems software for complex heterogeneous computing systems that power…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 29th, 2018)
Low-dose radiation from A-bombs elongated lifespan and reduced cancer mortality relative to un-irradiated individuals (Sutou, 2018): The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) presented the linear no-threshold hypothesis (LNT)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Role of Context in Human Machine Interaction
Its always about context. Every interaction has context, it can be deep or very simple. Context also contains metadata, that is data that is required by the context, Whether it be delivering an analytic business solution, …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Conversation on Explainable AI
Ajit Joakar makes some good points... in DSC. Yes, explain-ability is often useful, but depending on context is not always a requirement. One way its useful is it helps you build yet further intelligence.
Why I agree with Geoff…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Focused Menus in Croatia
This is almost over: From 1 December 2018 -- 6 January 2019, Days of Adriatic squid will take place at restaurants all over north-west Istria. Restaurants will be offering affordable full-course menus based on Adriatic squid,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Toyota Wants to put an Assistant Friend in Every Home
And more. Must it be a robot, an android, a face, a smile or just a voice? Healthcare also mentioned, and more. Human Support Robot (HSR), new term to me. Is support enough?
Toyota Wants to Put a Robot Friend in Every Home…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Assistants as Homecare Help
Our devices are already something we much rely on. So why not. What does it mean to be a companion though? Conversations probably, that include strong context. But one could argue that there has to be an element of humanity…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at Santa’s Big Data Challenges
In this podcast video, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the monumental IT challenges that Santa faces each Holiday Season. "With nearly 2 billion children to serve, Santa’s operations are an IT challenge on the grandest scale…
From Schneier on Security
Click Here to Kill Everybody Available as an Audiobook
Click Here to Kill Everybody is finally available on Audible.com. I have ten download codes. Not having anything better to do with them, here they are: HADQSSFC98WCQ LDLMC6AJLBDJY YWSY8CXYMQNJ6 JWM7SGNUXX7DB UPKAJ6MHB2LEF M85YN36UR926H…