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 Putting People First
Understanding people’s financial behaviors
Erin Taylor and Gawain Lynch of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (UCI) lead a research project aimed at understanding people’s financial behaviors. Their project, Consumer Finance Research: Global Approaches…
From Apophenia
Why I Joined Dove & Twitter to #SpeakBeautiful
I’ve been online long enough to see a lot of negativity. I wear a bracelet that reads “Don’t. Read. The. Comments.” (a gift from Molly Steenson) to remind myself that going down the path of negativity is not helpful to my soul…
From Schneier on Security
NSA/GCHQ Hacks SIM Card Database and Steals Billions of Keys
The Intercept has an extraordinary story: the NSA and/or GCHQ hacked into the Dutch SIM card manufacturer Gemalto, stealing the encryption keys for billions of cellphones. People are still trying to figure out exactly what this…
From insideHPC
Nearly 200 Years after Ada, Women Becoming More Visible in Scientific Computing
In this special guest perspective from Scientific Computing World, Tom Wilkie considers some initiatives to counter the widespread impression that scientific computing is solely the preserve of nerdy men. At the beginning of …
From Putting People First
[White paper] Digital assurance: Reaching a seamless customer experience
Digital Assurance: Reaching a Seamless Customer Experience by Shawndra Hill (Wharton professor of operations and information management) and Kumudha Sridharan (vice president and global head of testing services at Wipro Technologies)…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
USACM Congratulates New EAC Commissioners
USACM has sent letters to each of the three newly sworn-in Commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC): Thomas Hicks, Matthew Masterson and Christy McCormick. In the letters, USACM congratulates the new Commissioners…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Are Robots Our Friends?
There has been a tremendous amount of press on the astonishing advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and the negative impacts that it could have on our society. Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member…
From Schneier on Security
Database of Ten Million Passwords
Earlier this month, Mark Burnett released a database of ten million usernames and passwords. He collected this data from already-public dumps from hackers who had stolen the information; hopefully everyone affected has changed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Archiving the Internet and Searching it with the Wayback Machine
Many people think that everything that is on the net stays there. That is not entirely true, though it is a good idea to operate as though that is the case. A system called the Internet Archive is an attempt to archive large…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Re-Threading Topics Here
At some users requests have completed re-threading a few topics here. This usually has to be done because some of the links provided when the posts were done are no longer active. Not all sites maintain their content. Sometimes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning Goes Mainstream
In Forbes: Machine learning being used in our information technology environments, here a good example. Also pointer to an academic paper on the depth of 'understanding' in learning:" ... Machine Learning Goes Mainstream I:…
From insideHPC
Video: Introduction to Bridges Supercomputer at PSC
Bridges is a uniquely capable supercomputer designed to help researchers facing challenges in Big Data to work more intuitively. Called Bridges, the new system will consist of tiered, large-shared-memory resources with nodes …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Internet of Things from a Consumer Perspective
In Retailwire, from the Oracle Blog: " ... To take advantage of new data sources from sensors and machines emerging from the Internet of Things, it helps to consider what it all means to the now commonplace mobilized consumer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
February Analytics Mag Emphasis on Data Visualization
February 2015 Informs monthly on analytics, the leading professional organization for analytics practice. The most practical and largely non technical periodical I receive on the topic. Examples, hints and value examples. In…
From insideHPC
Optalysys to Power Genomics with Optical Computing
Today the TGAC Genome Analysis Centre and Optalysys announced a collaboration to develop and implement an energy-efficient optical processing device for large-scale DNA sequence searches.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Stanford DeepDive
Brought to my attention. Another example of the automation of analytics." .... DeepDive is a new type of system that enables developers to analyze data on a deeper level than ever before. DeepDive is a trained system: it uses…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Jobs Susceptible to Computerization
Working on a related problem. What jobs or part of jobs are likely to be replaced vs augmented? What is the influence of Cognitive methods?The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization.Carl BenediktAbstract…
From insideHPC
ARCHER Scales 118K Cores with Allinea MAP
Today the ARCHER national supercomputing service in the U.K. announced that it has deployed the Allinea MAP profiling tool to enable computational scientists and developers to tackle scalability and performance in key scientific…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
2015 CSTA annual conference – Registration is Open
Registration is now open for the CSTA annual conference. CSTA 2015 is a professional development opportunity for computer science and information technology teachers who need practical, classroom-focused information to help…
From insideHPC
Inside Lustre Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)
There is always different levels of importance assigned to various data files in a computer system, specifically a very large system that is storing petabytes of data. In order to maximize the use of the highest speed storage…
From Schneier on Security
The Obsolescence of Submarines
Interesting article on the submarine arms race between remaining hidden and detection. It seems that it is much more expensive for a submarine to hide than it is to detect it. And this changing balance will affect the long-term…
From Computational Complexity
And the Winners Are...
I always like that the announcement of accepted papers for the Computational Complexity Conference happens around the time of the Academy Awards. These acceptances are the Oscars for our community that shares its name with this…
From insideHPC
Video: SGI UV Finds the Needle in the Big Data Haystack
According to IDC, SGI has shipped approximately 8 percent of of all the Hadoop servers in production today. In fact, did you know that SGI introduced the word "Big Data" to supercomputing in 1996? Jorge Titinger, SGI President…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Challenges Deodorant
CPG, beware of Google competition. Wearable removes odors? Patents the idea anyway. At first this sounded like it was a very clever sensor idea, with electronic removal of odors? Wow. Impressive plan. But then seeing how…
From insideHPC
Kati Antypas to Keynote OFA Developer’s Workshop
The OpenFabrics Alliance has announced the keynote talk for the Developers’ Workshop Sunday March 15th at 7.30 PM at the Marriott in Monterey CA. Katie Antypas, a department head at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Trusting Machines vs People
A long time interest. To what degree do people trust machines? Our early look at automated marketing engines gave a different view. Here in Knowledee@Wharton. A key issue for advisory systems. Podcast and Transcript" ..…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
2015 NSF Early-Career Investigators Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems in Smart Cities
The 2015 NSF Early-Career Investigators Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems in Smart Cities will be held in Seattle, WA on April 13-17, 2015. This year’s workshop is implemented in conjunction with the IEEE/ACM CPS Week 2015 –…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Frugal Innovation
Frugal Innovation, by Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu, The Economist, Book brought to my attention. Today we have many more resources than ever before. Via IdeaConnection.
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Phase Advisor for Industrial Chemical Engineering
A recent conversation with a chemical engineer at MIT led me to remember an expert system a member of our AI group, Dan T. Davis wrote in the late 1980s. It was meant to provide advisory consulting in the surfactant chemistry…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Large well-funded laboratories…
Your intuition is probably that large well-funded research laboratories produce more research… One part of this intuition is flat out wrong. Small teams are consistently more productive: (…) small sized laboratories are more…