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 The Eponymous Pickle
Identification of Plants and Weed
Have been testing a plant recognition system for some time. Effectiveness varies, but continues to improve.
Deere's Farm Version of Facial Recognition Coming to Fields in 2021 By CNBC
Agriculture giant Deere & Co. plans toDeere's…From The Eponymous Pickle
Effectively Mapping Business Terms
Ultimately what can make such approaches work. Have worked with TopQuadrant in the past.
WEBINAR: Automating the Mapping of Data Elements to Business Terms
Join us for this popular Webinar, offered again at more convenient time…From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Group Calling and Captioning
Had just heard of this, ways to make group calls more efficient is very useful. About to try.
Amazon’s Echo devices gain group-calling and call captioning features By Kelly Hodgkins in DigitalTrends
Can’t get together with your…From The Eponymous Pickle
AI For Vaccine Rollout and Tracking
In particular for tracking deployment in complex supply chains with complex data.
How AI is Helping with COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout and Tracking
December 17
Covid-19 Coronavirus Vaccine vials in a row macro close up in AITrends…From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM and Salesforce Collaborate
New efforts underway to address verification of health status.
IBM and Salesforce Join Forces to Help Organizations and Individuals Verify Vaccine and Health Status
ARMONK, N.Y. and SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ --…From Computational Complexity
Dr Jill Biden
(I was helped on this post by Gorjan Alagic, Andrew Childs, Tom Goldstein, Daniel Gottsman, Clyde Kruskal, Jon Katz. I emailed them for their thoughts on the issue and some of those thoughts are embedded in the post. )
TheTrivia…From The Eponymous Pickle
Electric Amoeba efficiently Solves TSP
Classic problem, usefully solved?
Electronic Amoeba' Finds Approximate Solution to Traveling Salesman Problem in Linear Time By Hokkaido University (Japan)
Researchers in Japan developed electronic amoeba, an analog computer inspired…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 19th 2020)
The Flynn effect is the idea that people get smarter over time (generation after generation). The negative effect is the recent observations that people are getting dumber. It seems that there is no negative Flynn effect after…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantum Computing Real Prblems
More advances in the quantum space.
Tiny Quantum Computer Solves Real Optimization Problem By Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden)
December 18, 2020
Researchers at Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology showed that a…From The Eponymous Pickle
On Predictability of Elections
Well done with useful links
On Predictability of Elections
By Irving Wladawsky-Berger
A collection of observations, news and resources on the changing nature of innovation, technology, leadership, and other subjects.
Are There Limits…From The Eponymous Pickle
SANS Institute: SolarWinds Attack: What You Need to Know
Presentation: The SolarWinds Supply Chain Attack: What you Need to Know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qP3LQNsjKWw
SANS Emergency Webcast: What you need to know about the SolarWinds Supply-Chain Attack
45,435 views•Dec 14,…From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Christmas Squid Memories
Stuffed squid for Christmas Eve.
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 The Eponymous Pickle
SpaceX vs Kuiper on Internet Delivery
Been following SpaceX for some time, and is use of multiple satellites to fill remote areas with high speed internet service. Now in limited test. And considering Amazon's competitive Kuiper, here is an outline of their current…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Find the Warning Signals
A classic kind of problem we addressed in practice: can we find signals of, or predictive signals of future occurrence? Powerful idea. How possible is this, very generally in streams of data? Connection to risk analysis?
Method…From The Eponymous Pickle
Using AI to Control a Military Jet
As described a considerable application, combining autonomous signals and human decisions.
In a First, USAF Uses AI on Military Jet
The Washington Post By Aaron Gregg
U.S. Air Force (USAF) officials said artificial intelligence…From The Eponymous Pickle
Solarwinds Intrusion Hack is Broadly Felt
Continued attacks and potential consequences, as indicated by Solarwinds intrusion.
More Hacking Attacks Found as Officials Warn of ‘Grave Risk’ to U.S. Government By The New York Times
The scope of the hacking appears to extend…From insideHPC
Arm Moves Production-Level EDA to the Cloud with the Help of AWS
The following is a blog announcement from Arm: Released in February, the Arm Cortex-M55 CPU became a milestone for the Arm ecosystem because it gave hardware and software developers the power to incorporate machine learning capabilities…
From insideHPC
Nvidia Launches AI, HPC Storefront on AWS Marketplace
Nvidia has issued a blog announcing the availability of more than 20 NGC software resources for free in AWS Marketplace, targeting deployments in healthcare, conversational AI, HPC, robotics and data science. The company’s NGC…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Pythagorean Theorem Day Programming Project
I’ve been doing little programming projects for my own amusement. I thought about doing Advent of Code like the cool kids are (Looking at you Mike Zamansky who among others is blogging about those challenges) but I just can’t…
From Schneier on Security
NSA on Authentication Hacks (Related to SolarWinds Breach)
The NSA has published an advisory outlining how “malicious cyber actors” are “are manipulating trust in federated authentication environments to access protected data in the cloud.” This is related to the SolarWinds hack I have…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Musings on the Goals of High School Computer Science Education
Recent conversations on Twitter and Facebook have had me thinking about the goals of teaching computer science in high school. There is no single goal and it probably varies some by teacher, school, and student population. My…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Request for Proposals: Creating Visions for Computing Research
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) invites proposals for visioning activities that will catalyze and enable innovative research at the frontiers of computing. Successful activities will articulate new research visions,…
From insideHPC
DDN’s Storage Adopted for “AI Bridging Green Cloud Infrastructure” Supercomputer in Japan
Chatsworth, CA — DDN, provider of artificial intelligence (AI) and data management software and hardware solutions enabling Intelligent Infrastructure, today announced that its AI-focused storage solution, EXAScaler, has been…
From insideHPC
AMAX Extends Line of Workstations to Support Nvidia RTX A6000 GPUs
Fremont, CA, December 15, 2020 – AMAX’s HPC and AI Solution Group announced that it is now offering a wide selection of AceleMax workstations for AI, rendering and visualization featuring the new NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU. These powerful…
From insideHPC
Atos GPU-Accelerated Quantum System to the Irish Centre for High-End Computing
Dublin and Paris – 17 December 2020 – Atos today announces it will deliver its first GPU-accelerated Atos Quantum Learning Machine Enhanced (Atos QLM E), the world’s highest-performing commercially available quantum simulator…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robots Encourage Risk-Taking Behavior in Humans
Fascinating premise, but highly context dependent, would not go into a project with this idea strongly held. Has some relationship to the 'Media Equation' concept, where trust where we trust robots more because they apparently…
From insideHPC
An Update from Women in HPC – Expanding Membership and Mission
In this interview, we hear from two leaders of Women in HPC, the worldwide organization that encourages, mentors and supports women and addresses gender issues in the high performance computing industry. Speaking for the organization…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Database and Theory
A dean of engineering Jennifer Widom was appointed as the Dean of Engineering at Stanford not long ago. No doubt her research in databases and her teaching played a major role in her selection. For example, she is known for her…
From Schneier on Security
More on the SolarWinds Breach
The New York Times has more details.
About 18,000 private and government users downloaded a Russian tainted software update – a Trojan horse of sorts – that gave its hackers a foothold into victims’ systems, according to SolarWinds…From The Eponymous Pickle
Considering Powers of Persuasion
The below was published in Foreign Policy mag.. Also in Schneier's blog here, which should have its own stream of comments. Consider implications for advertising. And the interaction of persuasive influence and behavior…