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 Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 16 February 2015
President’s Day today which means my school is closed. I can use the rest after cleaning up from the latest snow storm. I’ve lost count of the number of feet (yes FEET) of snow we have had in the last month. Probably over 6 feet…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Supply Chain Visibility and RFID
Sure visibility is increased, but then how does that provide value? Primarily by combining the information with other data, and then using analytics to feed key decisions.
From The Eponymous Pickle
iPhone Security
In Wired: Considering the security of the iPhone. (From September 18) A reminder to iPhone owners cheering Apple’s latest privacy win: Just because Apple will no longer help police to turn your smartphone inside out doesn't mean…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Choremonster Meets Disney
I see that colleague and long time connect Chris Bergman has been out in LA to meet with Disney to talk about his gamification startup Choremonster. What a natural connection. Have written much about that here. Good luck…
From insideHPC
Pointwise Adds Overset Grid Assembly to CFD Meshing Software
Today Pointwise announced the latest release of its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) meshing software featuring direct integration with overset grid assembly (OGA) software.
From Schneier on Security
New Book: Data and Goliath
After a year of talking about it, my new book is finally published. This is the copy from the inside front flap: You are under surveillance right now. Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who's with you. Your…
From insideHPC
UberCloud Community and Marketplace for Technical Computing
"The UberCloud Community brings together over 3,000 participants to pave the way for the Technical Computing Cloud. UberCloud Experiment teams explore the end-to-end process of accessing remote computing resources in HPC centers…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
ACM-W Connections - February, 2015
Welcome from the ACM-W Chair
I anticipate that 2015 will be a year of numerous exciting announcements from ACM-W as we continue to grow and increase our reach and activities around the world. The first bit of exciting news has…From The Eponymous Pickle
Integrating Smart Devices
In CWorld: Testing Hubs, a case and physical study:" .. Testing the Internet of Things: Can smart devices be united into an integrated whole?We try out the Revolv hub to see if it can really make independent smart devices work…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Business Intelligence as Organizational Knowledge
Nine page PDF with some interesting thoughts. No registration required.Business Intelligence 3.0: Revolutionizing Organizational Data ... By PanoramaThis is not said in the above doc, but I like thinking about BI as a way to…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Architect at Aikon Technologies
Aikon Technologies in Peoria is seeking an HPC Architect in our Job of the Week.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predictive Regression Trees
Regression trees were a favorite method for prediction in the enterprise. Easy to use and also easy to explain to a decision maker. Investigating their use in open source solutions. Here is one R library example. Technical…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Polyglot Data Science
Instead of automating your data science, you could take a polyglot approach that combines the three common open source tools, Mainly so you can get access to different libraries of solution value for your problem. It is not…
From insideHPC
Performance and Power Characterization of GPU-Enabled HPC Applications
"An increasing number of GPU enabled applications are available to the HPC community. The key issues are understanding the enhanced application performance and corresponding increase in power consumption due to GPUs. In most …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Prezi does Creative Visual Storytelling
Prezi announces a tool for storytelling called Nutshell. I like their original tool, this should be interesting, it is " ... the next new tool for creative visual storytelling. ... Nutshell is the mobile app that lets you…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automating Data Science
Much in the news lately, have seen at least three other examples of automating major aspects of analytical method recently. Can it put the data analyst out a job? This has been much discussed for years. The argument against…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cognitive Systems Learning Tasks
Excellent talk in today's CSIG presentation. How tasks will be learned by cognitive systems. See the demo link below for an early example.Via Jim Spohrer: Prof. John Laird (U Michigan) decribes how next generation…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
President Speaks at Cybersecurity Summit and Signs Information Sharing Executive Order
Today the White House hosted a Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection Summit at Stanford University. The event was announced last month as part of the Administration’s rollout of cybersecurity initiatives in advance of the State…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Tentacle Utensils
Neat. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
From Schneier on Security
Cryptography for Kids
Interesting National Science Foundation award: In the proposed "CryptoClub" afterschool program, middle-grade students will explore cryptography while applying mathematics to make and break secret codes. The playfulness and mystery…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
DARPA: Nobody’s Safe on the Internet
60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed Dan Kaufman, Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), for the following clip called Nobody’s safe on the Internet…
From insideHPC
DDN Joins OpenPOWER Foundation
This week DDN announced that the company has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation. DataDirect Networks Joins the OpenPOWER Foundation. Formed last year, the OpenPOWER Foundation seeks to create an open ecosystem using the IBM POWER…
From insideHPC
HPC|Music Update – An Advanced Research Project for Enabling HPC in Music Creation and Reproduction
"Through the advent of cinema, video games, in-vehicle Infotainment and virtual reality, the industry has created a roadmap for the future. A true quality upgrade of the overall audience experience is on-going. HPCmusic is here…
From insideHPC
iPlant Collaborative Bridges the Atlantic with Big Data
"Scientists from all over the world use iPlant to share data and computational methods,” said Matt Vaughn, Co-Principal Investigator of the iPlant Collaborative and site lead at TACC. “iPlant UK is a natural extension of our …
From insideHPC
Usable Exascale and Beyond Moore’s Law
"Over the last five years HPC performance growth has been slowing measurably, and in this presentation several reasons for this slowdown will be analyzed. To reach usable exascale performance over the next decade, some fundamental…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Memex is Searching the Dark Web
Those who follow the history of knowledge and the Web will remember the Memex system. Now the term points to an effort by DARPA that looks at the Dark Web. From ITWorld:" ... A “Dark Web” search engine developed by U.S. defense…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data vs Decision Science
Brought up in DataScienceCentral: What is the difference? I support making sure we include the people that understand the decision processes involved as early as possible. Else how do we hope to understand the implications…
From Schneier on Security
Samsung Television Spies on Viewers
Earlier this week, we learned that Samsung televisions are eavesdropping on their owners. If you have one of their Internet-connected smart TVs, you can turn on a voice command feature that saves you the trouble of finding the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Text Signals as Sentiment
An area that a number of groups are looking at. " ... In this burgeoning era of big data, a substantial majority of all the data is unstructured. Much of this unstructured data is textual, such as the data in reports, articles…
From Putting People First
Will the internet of things finally kill privacy?
The journalist Hamza Shaban is concerned by the contents of a new US Federal Communications Commission report that probes the privacy implications of connected devices: “That the pervasive collection of information from within…