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
Robotic Houseplant Moves to Light
Kind of obvious, but made me think more generally about the robotics of the problem. And adding other dimensions like nutrients and water. Plus the sensors needed to do that effectively, and the dependence on the architecture…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Labs Announces Image Compression Demos
Had a need for comparing alternate methods of this recently. Technical:
Google Labs Announces Squoosh: Image Compression PWALike | by Dylan Schiemann
At the 2018 Google Chrome Developer Summit, Google announced Squoosh, an open…
From insideHPC
Podcast Looks at Exascale Computing for Forefront Scientific Problems
In this edition of Let's Talk Exascale, Fred Streitz of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describes his team's efforts to develop supercomputer applications that address forefront scientific problems by pushing the limits…
From insideHPC
HPE Powers VENTURI Formula E Team
Monaco-based VENTURI Formula E Team recently announced that HPE is now the team’s Official Technology Partner. Through the partnership, HPE is dedicating a number of world-class technical specialists to the VENTURI Formula E
…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teaching Phone Programming Should be Easier
Garth Flint and I have been independently looking at resources for teaching mobile phone application development. (Garth’s posts are linked below) I’m currently teaching a course using AppInventor which is going ok but not as…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mars and Marketing
In Gartner:
Mars and Marketing – What We Can Learn From NASA
By Christopher Ross
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Wants to be Your AI Edited News Radio
So Google will control editing and presentation of news. Placement of Ads. Assembled with AI analysis. Already being delivered to some assistants. Right now assistants stream selected radio stations. More control from mega…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Conversationally Constructs Playlists
This is something of interest, playlist conversational construction. If you think of a playlist as a goal, could this be applied to business efforts? Was thinking something related for business application, is this far away…
From The Eponymous Pickle
China take on Cashierless Tech
Alternative tech idea:
Why China's take on cashierless tech might be the right one in Axios
China's retail giants might be ahead of US innovators, such as Amazon, in creating no-checkout retail locations, Erica Pandey writes. While…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Assessing Progress in Automation Technologies
Useful coverage of automation. I like that this is defined broadly.
Assessing progress in automation technologies In O'Reilly by Ben Lorica.
When it comes to automation of existing tasks and workflows, you need not adopt an “all…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A ChatBot Asset Exchange
Brought to my attention by the talk this morning on Bots integrated with AR/VR . Slides here. The slides include instructive videos. IBM Sponsored. I will extract some additional examples.
Some interesting examples of Bot use…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Asking the right question is more important than getting the right answer
Schools train us to provide the right answers to predefined questions. Yet anyone with experience from the real world knows that, more often than not, the difficult part is to find the right question. To make a remarkable contribution…
From Schneier on Security
Your Personal Data is Already Stolen
In an excellent blog post, Brian Krebs makes clear something I have been saying for a while: Likewise for individuals, it pays to accept two unfortunate and harsh realities: Reality #1: Bad guys already have access to personal…
From insideHPC
Beyond Semiconductors: New Quantum Materials could Pave the Way
Researchers from Intel and UC Berkeley are looking beyond current transistor technology and preparing the way for a new type of memory and logic circuit that could someday be in every computer on the planet. In a new paper published…
From insideHPC
A Look inside the new HPE Adaptive Rack Cooling System for HPC
In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Larry Keller from HPE describes the company's innovative new Adaptive Rack Cooling System for HPC. "Efficient high-performance computing is a key to success in any business. But it can be daunting…
From insideHPC
How FPGAs Provide Versatile Acceleration for HPE Servers
In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Osama Sarfaraz from HPE describes how the company is using Intel FPGA's to deliver Programmability, Flexibility, and Upgradability for HPC users. "The FPGA is designed to actually be configured…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Echo Devices now Support Skype Calling
In further indication of a link between Microsoft and Amazon, Voice and Video Skype calls can now be made-hands free on Echo devices. I frequently use Skype for international communications. Signed up for this and it worked…
From My Biased Coin
NIPS 2018 Post
Today was my first day at a NIPS conference. Advertising note, before my thoughts on the experience:
Tomorrow I'll be stationed at a poster 10:45 AM -- 12:45 PM @ Room 517 AB #169
A Model for Learned Bloom Filters and Optimizing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talk: How Bots Fit into the AR/VR Space
Join us Dec 6, at 10:30am US Eastern - hear @anamitag at @IBMDeveloper on
Talk Title: How Bots Fit in the AR/VR Space
Speaker: Anamita Guha
Abstract: This talk will describe the use cases of chatbots in AR/VR that are in existence…
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G Responding to Changing Customer Preferences
Intriguing directions, especially regarding customization. How does a big company react to customer preferences, when it can no longer direct them?
Q&A | How P&G Responds to Changing Customer Preferences in SupplychainBrain…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
2018 ACM Fellows Announced
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) just announced their 2018 ACM Fellows. The ACM Fellows award is ACM’s “most prestigious member grade,” which “recognizes the top 1% of ACM members for their outstanding accomplishments…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Better Facial Recognition, Says NIST
Interesting stats. Our own experience says it depends strongly on the contextual aspects of the image acquisition. And often out of complete control. Introduce the metadata of context? But the improvement continues.
Facial…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Protein Folding with Alphabet Deep Mind
A big, big deal we took a look at for industry, even suggested a neural net possibility, but methods were still too primitive at the time, here looks to be a step forward.
Alphabet's DeepMind AI Algorithm Wins Protein-Folding
V3…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Where Does Computer Science Fit–Revisited
David Renton is teaching his students at Porter-Gaud how to program virtual reality projects. He posted a video of some of these projects a few days ago.
These are pretty cool, Virtual Reality apps created by [David’s] Porter-Gaud…From insideHPC
Video: Oracle Steps Up with Bare Metal for HPC Cloud Infrastructure
In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Taylor Newill from Oracle describes the company's new Bare Metal for HPC Cloud Infrastructure. "Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services (BMCS) public cloud infrastructure. Oracle BMCS is a new generation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Will Make You Smarter Through Augmentation
Course that is what we are aiming at, it augments us. Conversation is a great start.
Artificial intelligence will make you smarter
People plus machines will surpass the capabilities of either element alone.
By Terrence Sejnowski…
From Computational Complexity
Remembering George H. W. Bush
From insideHPC
New Paper: A First Step towards Quantum-Powered Machine Learning
"Given the remarkable performance improvements over many generations of classical microprocessors [7] and the impressive algorithmic improvements in mixed-integer programming tools like Gurobi [29] over the past several decades…
From Schneier on Security
Security Risks of Chatbots
Good essay on the security risks -- to democratic discourse -- of chatbots....
From insideHPC
Video: Speeding HPC Administration with HPE Performance Cluster Manager
In this video from SC18, Leslie Tung describes the advantages of HPE Performance Cluster Manager. HPE Performance Cluster Manager is HPE’s first fully integrated system management software for all Linux-based HPE HPC systems
…