Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2020
From Schneier on Security
Enigma Machine Recovered from the Baltic Sea
Neat story:
German divers searching the Baltic Sea for discarded fishing nets have stumbled upon a rare Enigma cipher machine used by the Nazi military during World War Two which they believe was thrown overboard from a scuttled…From The Eponymous Pickle
IRS to Make ID Protection PIN Open to All
Good direction. Now how will it be effectively used? See more detail at the link.
IRS to Make ID Protection PIN Open to All in Krebs On Security
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said this week that beginning in 2021…From The Eponymous Pickle
Considering Orbit in Developer Relations
Read about this in Andreessen Horowitz. About better online communities. Involved in an effort that will need some of this.
Investing in Orbit by Martin Casado
Great communities make great companies, and community-building is…From BLOG@CACM
Computer Systems Research: The Joys, the Perils, and How to Count Beans Well
This post is meant to highlight my subjective take on the joys and the road bumps on the way to doing innovative work in computer systems.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Discusses How it Organizes Information
Below the introduction. Informative.
How Google organizes information to find what you’re looking for
By Nick Fox in the Google Blog
Vice President of Product & Design, Search and Assistant
When you come to Google and do a search…From The Eponymous Pickle
Texting to Alexa
Noted for using voice in specific context. Say for the need of privacy in conversation.
Amazon now lets you text Alexa on iOS to ask for things instead of only using your voice
By Chaim Gartenberg in MSN.com via WalterAmazon…From The Eponymous Pickle
Are Smart Things Really Smart?
Interesting challenge. Depends on what 'smart' means. Like what I have often said, its in a 'context'. Smart can be exactly what it needs to be to provide value ... or not. Marketing tries to enhance the link. Sometimes…
From insideHPC
Announcing The Rich Brueckner Scholarship Awards and GoFundMe Account
Rich Brueckner was one of the most influential (and beloved) figures in high performance computing. As editor-in-chief of insideHPC, he touched thousands of lives in our industry. He was a fixture at every HPC event as he walked…
From insideHPC
Ayar Labs Demonstrates Optical Interconnect Solution on GlobalFoundries’ Silicon Photonics Manufacturing Process
Santa Clara, CA, Dec. 2, 2020 –Ayar Labs announced it has successfully demonstrated its patented monolithic electronic/photonic solution on GlobalFoundries’ (GF) next generation photonics technology based on its 45nm platform…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Announcing New ICMI 2021 Blue Sky Papers Track
The 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2021) will be held in Montreal, Canada October 18-22, 2021. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human…
From insideHPC
Creators of MLPerf Launch MLCommons Consortium for Machine Learning Benchmarks, Metrics, Datasets, Models and Best Practices
SAN FRANCISCO – Dec. 3, 2020 – Today, open engineering consortium MLCommons launched an industry-academic partnership to accelerate machine learning innovation and broaden access to this critical technology for the public good…
From insideHPC
Lenovo Launches Storage Array, Data Management Solutions
Lenovo Data Center Group today launched edge-core-cloud data management solutions with a single set of tools and capabilities. Part of the Lenovo DM Series of storage systems, the ThinkSystem DM5100F is designed to brings high…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google General Voice Accessibility
In the Google Blog, a means of more general voice accessibility via voice on the android phone. Now updated.
ACCESSIBILITY
Use Voice Access to control your Android device with your voice
Easily use and navigate your phone byTom…From Schneier on Security
Open Source Does Not Equal Secure
Way back in 1999, I wrote about open-source software:
First, simply publishing the code does not automatically mean that people will examine it for security flaws. Security researchers are fickle and busy people. They do not…From The Eponymous Pickle
Using VisiRule to Create Chatbots
Had been looking for an easy way to create chatbots that include FAQ's. Recalled a company called VisiRule that supported rule-based expert systems. Visirule has been mentioned many times in this blog, see tag below. Decision…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alphabet's Loon Balloons for Internet Connectivity
Application of the general idea is expanding. Here with autonomous navigation.
Alphabet's Loon Balloons in Internet Connectivity
Alphabet’s Loon hands the reins of its internet air balloons to self-learning AI. The company’s…From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
womENcourage 2020 Took Place Online, 24-27th September
We are delighted to host guests on ACM-W Europe blog, and this quarter we had fantastic contributions.
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Updates on ACM-W Scholarship for Attendance of Research Conferences
Yelena Mejova is a Senior Research Scientist at the ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, a part of the Digital Epidemiology Group. Her research concerns the use of social media in health informatics, as well as tracking political…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Detecting Scientific Conflicts of Interest
With other kinds of application in compliance. But see the note about subjective aspects.
Do You Have a Conflict of Interest? This Robotic Assistant May Find It First
The New York Times, Dalmeet Singh Chawla
Frontiers, a Swiss…From Computational Complexity
Chess is Back
Back in 2005, I wrote a post titled Chess and Poker. Not really comparing the two but noting that Chess had lost its mojo while poker had high-stakes prime time tournaments. The inspiration was an NYT Op-Ed that started "CHESS…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
New Resources for Teaching and Learning about Artificial Intelligence
Earlier this week I was a guest speaker in a computer science class (via Zoom of course). It was fun to be back into a class and interacting with students. The students were asked to prepare questions for me and many of the questions…
From insideHPC
Smaller, faster and cooler: Innovations in Dell Precision mobile workstations surmount the latest thermal challenges
This white paper, “Using AI to See What Eye Doctors Can’t,” explains how Voxeleron, a leader in delivering advanced ophthalmic image analysis and machine learning solutions, is extending ophthalmology’s diagnostic horizons with…
From insideHPC
After Virtual SC20: Inspur Update Focuses on Staying Ahead in HPC and AI
In this interview, Inspur’s Global AI and HPC Director Vangel Bojaxhi sat down with us after virtual SC20 to give us an HPC- and AI-oriented update on the company. Noting that Inspur is a top three server manufacturer in the
…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Too Long, Didn’t Read
How to summarize papers Isabel Cachola, Kyle Lo, Arman Cohan, Daniel Weld are the authors of a recent paper on summarizing papers. They are all connected in various way to the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. They…
From insideHPC
After Virtual SC20: Mellanox’s Gilad Shainer Talks New-Gen InfiniBand’s Performance and Growing Top500 (and Top10) Presence
From the perspective of Nvidia-Mellanox’s Senior Vice President Marketing, Gilad Shainer, virtual SC20 “for us was a great week.” In this video, Shainer discusses the company’s conference highlights, including the introduction…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Detecting Likelihood of Suicide
Have consulted and spoke at the Veterans Administration. Here is another pattern recognition type problem of interest.
Can an Algorithm Prevent Suicide?
The New York Times, Benedict Carey
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs…From Schneier on Security
Impressive iPhone Exploit
This is a scarily impressive vulnerability:
Earlier this year, Apple patched one of the most breathtaking iPhone vulnerabilities ever: a memory corruption bug in the iOS kernel that gave attackers remote access to the entire…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Congratulations to Newly Elevated IEEE Fellows
IEEE recently named its 2021 class of newly elevated Fellows. IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAS: Four Principles of Analytics
As usual, SAS does a good job of precisely outlining analytics. Here including AI and Big Data with statistics.
It's no secret that technology's changing. A change accelerating so fast, it's hard to keep up.
Big data and AI are…From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Battling AI
Had always thought it would come to this. Mentioned it in a talk I gave in the 90s. But how well and how soon? As long as there are malicious developers out there, sooner than we thought.
This Company Uses AI to Outwit Malicious…