Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2015
From The Eponymous Pickle
Planograms for Profits
Planograms are diagrams of where goods are placed in a physical retail store. We did much work on how to implement them consistently and to comply with manufacturer - retailer agreements, and produce value. Linking them to…
From insideHPC
HP Sports AMD FirePro GPUs in ProLiant DL380 Gen9 Servers
"Featuring the first AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture specifically with compute workloads in mind, the AMD FirePro S9150 server GPU supports enhanced double precision floating point computation and breaks the 2.0 TFLOPS…
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: ISC Cloud & Big Data
The inaugural ISC Cloud & Big Data conference has announced its Call for Research Papers. The event takes place Sept. 28-30 in Frankfurt, Germany. The organizers are looking forward to welcoming international attendees – IT professionals…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Lessons in Time
The other day I was microwaving some food to heat it up. Ten seconds seemed like forever. I was actually able to do several other things while I waited. The microwave has changed my perception of time in some ways. As I thought…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Enterprises Use AI
In CWorld: Good overview of the expansion of the use of cognitive, AI and links to Machine learning. Based on learnings at the recent AAAI meeting. My experience and connections, have led to getting lots of queries about…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Service Innovation in a Digital World
In McKinsey Quarterly: New Business models for services. Discussion of key technologies that are modifying service delivery." ... New digital upstarts are threatening the bottom lines, growth prospects, and even business models…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google for the Enterprise
We participated in several Google tests at work, starting with internal search and knowledge organization methods. Now they are taking another run at the enterprise workplace via Android: " ... On Wednesday, Google Inc. announced…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bluetooth Weaving a Mesh
In CWorld: A natural next step is outlined. " ... Bluetooth starts weaving its mesh for IoT ... Low-power Bluetooth devices should get a standard way to organize themselves in networks next year .... "
From Schneier on Security
Everyone Wants You To Have Security, But Not from Them
In December, Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was interviewed at the CATO Institute Surveillance Conference. One of the things he said, after talking about some of the security measures his company has put in place post…
From insideHPC
Performance Challenges Using OpenACC to Port O&G Apps
"John Levesque is the Director of the Cray’s Supercomputer Center of Excellence based at Oakridge National Laboratory. He is responsible for the group performing application porting and optimization for break-through science …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Good Bad and the Ugly about Big Data
What is next? Wondering what to expect? Check out this presentation from Juan Miguel Lavista, Principal Data Scientist. Bing. 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly about Big Data & Data Science': Requires registration.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
The Future of Work in the Age of the Machine
The evolution of smart machines has transformed and will continue to transform our economy. As smart machines become more advanced, the human and the machine will become even closer coworkers. This has sparked much needed conversations…
From Schneier on Security
Snowden-Greenwald-Poitras AMA
Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Edward Snowden did an "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit. Point out anything interesting in the comments. And note that Snowden mentioned my new book: One of the arguments in a book I read recently…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sample Naive Bayes Text Classification in Python
Via O'Reilly: Nice Python example of using Naive Bayes for text classification. With actual code, and links to talk and slides." ... Full repo here: https://github.com/arnicas/NLP-in-PythonThis is an example of going from labeled…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gamification for Testing and Learning Analytic Tools
In the HBR: Gamification Can Help People Actually Use Analytics Tools ... We did this to test a supply chain design alternatives ... since any game includes a simulation to evaluate a particular set of parameters, typically…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The hopeless ones become college professors.
Many people justify their choice of pursuing graduate school by a desire to explore new ideas and satisfy their intellectual curiosity, an euphemism for goofing off. These students use graduate school as a cultural hack… they…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pringles as Global Kelloggs Snack Equity
Was a participant in the design of Pringles supply chain. I saw first hand how widely it was sold in Japan. In clothing stores? It is interesting to see how this very global brand, after its sale to Kellogg, has changedin…
From insideHPC
Mellanox Shows Record Performance with ConnectX-4 100Gb/s Interconnect Adapters
Today Mellanox announced world-record performance on its ConnectX-4 EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand adapters.
From insideHPC
DDN Powers Fight Against Ebola at VBI
Today DDN announced that the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute is using the company's GRIScaler storage solutions to perform rapid, accurate Ebola outbreak modeling for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Status and New Product Adoption
In Knowledge@Wharton: " ... Certain consumers are keen about adopting new products and are prone to mimicking the product choices of others. But when it comes to status-enhancing products, people in the middle of the status hierarchy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hospitality Innovation at Starwood
We worked with groups in the hospitality industry to brainstorm the future of business mobility. So the industry has always fascinated me. Now in McKinsey: " ... Redefining service innovation at Starwood. The head of theNotably…
From insideHPC
NERSC Honors HPC Achievement Award Winners
This week NERSC announced the winners of its third annual HPC Achievement Awards. The awards recognize NERSC users who have demonstrated an innovative use of HPC resources to solve a scientific problem or whose work has had an…
From insideHPC
Penguin Computing Launches Scyld ClusterWare for Hadoop
Today Penguin Computing announced Scyld ClusterWare for Hadoop, adding greater capability to the company’s existing Scyld ClusterWare high performance computing cluster management solution.
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Look at Correlation
A useful, only mildly technical tutorial by Vincent Granville. How can you determine if a correlation is spurious? Understanding this point is one of the most important aspects of using analytics in business. It matches a…
From Schneier on Security
"Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems"
New paper: "Surreptitiously Weakening Cryptographic Systems," by Bruce Schneier, Matthew Fredrikson, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Thomas Ristenpart. Abstract: Revelations over the past couple of years highlight the importance of understanding…
From insideHPC
Video: Assisting User’s Transition to Titan’s Accelerated Architecture
In this video from the University of Houston CACDS HPC Workshop, Fernanda Foertter from ORNL presents: Leveraging Leadership Computing Facilities: Assisting User's Transition to Titan's Accelerated Architecture.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Storytelling, Context and Persuasion
All data tells a story, in a context, and suggests a future." ... In a world increasingly saturated with data and information, visualizations are a potent way to break through the clutter, tell your story, and persuade people…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Washington News – Alerts and Updates
* USACM sent congratulatory letters to the three new Commissioners of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. The letter recommends reestablishing the Technical Guidelines Development Committee, updating the Voluntary Voting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Yo Store
Why? , its a one stop shopping place for sensing online events. In Fastcompany. " ... Eight months after bewildering the tech world, Yo is getting a substantial revamp, according to TechCrunch. Today, the startup launched…
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G's Strategic CIO
In CIO Mag:by Phil Weinzimer: P&G's Filippo Passerini Stands Out as Stellar Example of a Strategic CIO ... I didn't know what to expect when Procter & Gamble CIO Filippo Passerini agreed to be interviewed for my book, The Strategic…