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 The Eponymous Pickle
The Specificity of Algorithms
Algorithms imply a precise specification, and when I see one I always want a close specification of context and derivation.
Want Less-Biased Decisions? Use Algorithms. by Alex P. Miller in HBR
A quiet revolution is taking place…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robotics at Wal-Mart, Amazon and Kroger
A considerable overview of the many new announcements at major retailers. This will certainly change the type of jobs that will be available. Not unexpected as we digitize, automate, do better prediction and classification…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Killing the Password
When we traveled in the enterprise we always took a key generating device with us as a means to replace the password, which was then combined with the use of a pin Nice to see this is becoming more broadly used.
Your New Yubikey…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Eye Tracking Helps Augmented Reality
Pointed at by some of our retail experiments.
Eye-Tracking Technology Could Help AR
The Dartmouth by Anthony Robles
Dartmouth College researchers have developed battery-free eye-tracking glasses that could enhance augmented
From The Eponymous Pickle
Architecture for Complete Talking Buildings
Smart homes are still built up in fairly unstructured ways. Mine still has pieces of it fail, and can be difficult to repair or add to if the supplier pieces are not well designed. Several of those things have struck me
The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microlearning and the Brain
Interesting idea for thinking about how to classify useful learning.
Microlearning and the Brain
Microlearning is effective for hard skills but detrimental when it comes to people and emotional skills. by Todd Maddox in Clomedia…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nature of Human Trust in Machines
This topic came up in a recent discussion of AI. Past evidence had said that in certain contexts people trust AI better than humans, simplistically because the machines have no ulterior human motives. But it came up that
New…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 15th 2018)
Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. There is weak correlation between grades and job performance. Grant reviews the evidence in details in his New York Times piece.When recruiting research assistants…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Data Scientist at Booz Allen
Booz Allen is seeking a Data Scientist in our Job of the Week. "We have an opportunity for you to use your analytical skills to improve geospatial intelligence. You’ll work closely with your customer to understand their questions…
From insideHPC
Atos to Build Bull Supercomputer for C-DAC in India
Today Atos announced a HPC announced plans to deploy a large-scale supercomputer at C-DAC in India. This contract is part of the NSM (National Supercomputing Mission), a 7-year plan of INR 4500 crores (~650M$) led by the Government…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Explaining The Jaccard Metric
Why is it a metric? Composite of source 1, source 2 Paul Jaccard was a botanist who worked at ETH in Zurich during much of the first half of the 20th century. He created, or discovered, the similarity notion that became the Jaccard…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Radical New Neural Network Design
Less definition of the architecture it seems and training adapts to results.
Radical New Neural Network Design Could Overcome Big Challenges in AI in Technology Review
By Karen Hao December 12, 2018
Researchers at the University…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Learn Chinese from a Smart Speaker
Have been experimenting with smart speakers to learn, teach and improve conversational language skills.
Here is an example from Indiegogo. Note this is still in funding stages, with the usual warnings about it ever being a viable…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
ACM-W Connections — December 2018
Letter from ACM-W Chair News from ACM-W Celebrations News from ACM-W Student Chapters Grace Hopper India 2018 News from ACM-W Europe Welcome from the ACM-W Chair It’s the most wonderful time of the year…or so a popular holiday…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google to Stop Selling Facial Recognition for Now
Hmm, most everyone else will be selling face recognition products. Can they also be also be 'having no potential for evil'? Other technical topics of this sort continue to pop up, the ethical conundrums continue to expand…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mastering Conversations
In the Google Blog, some useful thoughts on conversations. We need to think about how we talk to machines, and with people.
How the Google Assistant masters conversations—and you can, too, this holiday season
Heading home for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sensing in Complete Darkness: One Photon Per Pixel
Appears to be a very valuable development in a number of sensing domains.
MIT engineers have found a way to use AI to reveal objects in total darkness–even transparent materials like glass and tissue. In Fastcompany By Jesus…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon and Medical Records
Amazon is Showing Healthcare is the Next Big Thing for Machine Learning
Amazon will save Healthcare industry $Billions via machine learning algorithm that extracts key data from patient records — it’s an EMR revolution by AI.
Michael…
From insideHPC
IBM Publishes Compendium of Ai Research Papers
Today IBM Research released a 2018 retrospective and blog essay by Dr. Dario Gil, COO of IBM Research, that provides a sneak-peek into the future of AI. Today we released a 2018 retrospective that provides a sneak-peek into the…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Sub Goal Labeling in Computer Science
One of the interesting ideas in teaching computer science I have been looking at is sub-goal labeling. I’m experimenting with it but to be honest I don’t feel near ready to share what I am doing.
As a wrote recently (The Problem…From insideHPC
Oracle Offers Bare Metal Instances for HPC in the Cloud
In this video from SC18, Karan Batta from Oracle describes how the company provides high performance computing in the Cloud with Bare Metal speed. "Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services (BMCS) public cloud infrastructure. Oracle BMCS…
From Schneier on Security
Real-Time Attacks Against Two-Factor Authentication
Attackers are targeting two-factor authentication systems: Attackers working on behalf of the Iranian government collected detailed information on targets and used that knowledge to write spear-phishing emails that were tailored…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: More Problems with the Squid Emoji
Piling on from last week's post, the squid emoji's siphon is in the wrong place. 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…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA Sets Six Records in AI Performance
This week NVIDIA announced that the company has broken a total of six performance records on a broad set of AI benchmarks. As a full suite, the benchmarks cover a variety of workloads and infrastructure scale – ranging from 16…
From insideHPC
Video: How Altair Powers HPC with PBS Works
In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Altair CTO Sam Mahalingam describes how the company's PBS works software helps manufacturers build better products with design innovation driven by HPC. Now, with advent of Machine Learning
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blockchain Disruptive force for Car Connects?
Despite all the questioning press, large tech and automotive companies are still studying how to apply Blockchain for key applications, like trusted interaction. ...
IBM Study: Blockchain Brings Trust to How Companies, Consumers…
From Computational Complexity
Inverting Onto Functions
Here's an open question that goes back to a 2003 paper that I wrote with Steve Fenner, John Rogers and Ashish Naik. The conference paper goes back to 1996.
In that paper we discuss two hypothesis we badly called Q and Q' and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tuya Introduces Family level security for Smart Homes
Via RFID Journal, have experimented with their IOT offerings.
Tuya Smart Intros Smart-Home IOT Security System Using Facial Recognition
Tuya Smart, which produces the AIoT (AI+IoT) platform, has unveiled a smart-home security…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Patents a form of Healthcare Assistance?
Only a patent, so its hard to say where this might go. Look at the link for more details. Implying a diagnosis and prescribing a remedy seems a dangerous direction. But looking at it more broadly and then curating a shopping…
From Schneier on Security
Marriott Hack Reported as Chinese State-Sponsored
The New York Times and Reuters are reporting that China was behind the recent hack of Mariott Hotels. Note that this is still uncomfirmed, but interesting if it is true. Reuters: Private investigators looking into the breach…