Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2016
From The Eponymous Pickle
Services and the IOT
The Internet of Things: Why Success Lies in ServicesThe Internet of Things is a fast-growing phenomenon in which formerly dumb devices get chips and sensors to become smart gadgets, connected to a network as part of variousRhee…
From Schneier on Security
Fitbit Data Reveals Pregnancy
A man learned his wife was pregnant from her Fitbit data. The details of the story are weird. The man posted the data to Reddit and asked for analysis help. But the point is that the data can reveal pregnancy, and this might…
From insideHPC
Cray Hits Record $724 Million Revenue for 2015
Today Cray announced financial results for the year and fourth quarter ended December 31, 2015. The company reported total 2015 revenue of $724.7 million, which compares with $561.6 million for 2014.
The post Cray Hits Record…From The Eponymous Pickle
Monitoring Machine Operation
Recall I mentioned Thingworx In SiliconAngle: " ... Machine-generated data returned to the agenda last week after industrial heavyweight PTC Inc. and ServiceMax Inc. combined forces to give organizations much-needed visibility…
From insideHPC
Video: Optimizing Applications for the CORI Supercomputer at NERSC
In this video from SC15, NERSC shares its experience on optimizing applications to run on the new Intel Xeon Phi processors (code name Knights Landing) that will empower the Cori supercomputer by the summer of 2016. "A key goal…
From insideHPC
Share Your HPC Code in the PRACE CodeVault
Today the European PRACE infrastructure announced the PRACE CodeVault, an open repository containing various high performance computing code samples for the HPC community. The CodeVault is an open platform that supports self-education…
From insideHPC
AWS to Aquire Italy’s NICE Software
Today NICE software in Italy announced that the company is to be acquired by Amazon Web Services, the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. With its remote visualization platform, NICE delivers comprehensive…
From Schneier on Security
Determining Physical Location on the Internet
Interesting research: "CPV: Delay-based Location Verification for the Internet": Abstract: The number of location-aware services over the Internet continues growing. Some of these require the client's geographic location for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson Analytics for Superbowl Front Office Data Analysis
Good, fairly simple example of the automation of analytics. Here using Watson analytics. With commonly used exploratory goals. Explore it for free:In Business Insider:" ... In order to help sports fans get started, IBM uploaded…
From The Eponymous Pickle
K Nearest Neighbor Using Python
Good instructional piece for a common kind of machine learning. Clustering. Easier to do in R, but the comparison is also very useful. In DSC: K-nearest neighbor algorithm using Python Posted by Laetitia Van Cauwenberge
From The Eponymous Pickle
Beyond Automation
Talk today by Tom Davenport: In particular how can we look at the current influence of fognitive/AI in the workplace? ... “Beyond Automation: Smart Machines + Smart People”, where he talks about some of the material in his forthcoming…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Model Discovery, Process Mining with Fluxicon
This software, Fluxicon Disco, was new to me. Described in KDNuggets. I recall doing something similar in R, but this appears to cover the whole realm of process flow modeling. Discovers a model from data, as opposed to…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Fiscal Year 2017 Budget Request
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Director France A. Córdova outlined President Obama’s fiscal year (FY) 2017 budget request to Congress for NSF. The FY17 request calls for $8 billion for NSF, an increase of 6.7 percent or…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Crowdoscope from Unilever
Of interest is the involvement of the CPG giant Unilever. A data source, likely linked to real time analytics.Crowdoscope – a breakthrough survey and discussion tool developed by Unilever and Silverman Research. Silverman Research…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Beyond the PC toward virtual and augmented reality
PC sales have entered a slow decline. Today, you can literally work on your Microsoft Office documents no matter where you are, no matter what computing device you have. Predicting the short-term future is easy: the next smartphones…
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: International Workshop on Performance-Portable Programming Models for Accelerators
The first annual International Workshop on Performance Portable Programming Models for Accelerators has issued its Call for Papers. Known as P^3MA, the workshop will provide a forum for bringing together researchers, vendors,…
From Schneier on Security
Worldwide Encryption Products Survey
Today I released my worldwide survey of encryption products. The findings of this survey identified 619 entities that sell encryption products. Of those 412, or two-thirds, are outside the U.S.-calling into question the efficacy…
From insideHPC
Creating an Exascale Ecosystem Under the NSCI Banner
“We expect NCSI to run for the next two decades. It’s a bit audacious to start a 20 year project in the last 18 months of an administration, but one of the things that gives us momentum is that we are not starting from a clean…
From insideHPC
UW Projects Awarded 42 Million Core Hours on Yellowstone Supercomputer
"A new supercomputer, dubbed Cheyenne, is expected to be operational at the beginning of 2017. The new high-performance computer will be a 5.34-petaflop system, meaning it can carry out 5.34 quadrillion calculations per second…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Molly Rector from DDN on the Changing Face of HPC Storage
In this Graybeards Podcast, Molly Rector from DDN describes how HPC storage technologies are mainstreaming into the enterprise space. "In HPC there are 1000s of compute cores that are crunching on PB of data. For Oil&Gas companies…
From insideHPC
MultiLevel Parallelism with Intel Xeon Phi
"The combination of using both MPI and OpenMP is a topic that has been explored by many developers in order to determine the most optimum solution. Whether to use OpenMP for outer loops and MPI within, or by creating separate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Stories can be Dangerous
Have been always intrigued by storytelling, establishing a narrative, as a powerful way to convince, to advertise, to market. It also a way to convert your analytics, your data, your trends, your discovered patterns into convincing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kognit for Mixed Reality
Brought to my attention, understanding the limits of cognition and how it can be augmented with accessory augmentation. Note the use of the term: 'Mixed Reality'Cognitive Models and Mixed Reality for Dementia PatientsIn Kognit…
From Computational Complexity
Test of Time Award- a good idea but...
The ESA Conference (European Symposium on Algorithms) has a test-of-time award which recognizes outstanding papers in algorithms research that were published in the ESA proceedings 19-21 years ago and which are still influential…
From Schneier on Security
Make Privacy a 2016 Election Issue
EPIC has just launched "Data Protection 2016" to try to make privacy an issue in this year's elections. You can buy swag....
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
First Canadian Celebration of Women in Computing (CAN-CWIC)
For the first time ever, I attended a women-in-computing conference with absolutely no student affiliation whatsoever (I recently de-registered from my PhD for the time being). But that's not what made the first ever Canadian…
From Schneier on Security
AT&T Does Not Care about Your Privacy
AT&T's CEO believes that the company should not offer robust security to its customers: But tech company leaders aren't all joining the fight against the deliberate weakening of encryption. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said this…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Lift Ticket Project
Have you bought lift tickets at a ski resort lately? There are a lot of options. Different age groups, different days (week days, weekends, holidays) and different options for how long you will be skiing or which hills you will…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Intelligence in the Workplace
From the Cisco Blog: Some interesting thoughts on intelligence and an interview with Marvin Minsky. I like the comment about Minsky saying big business is stalling progress: But I don't recall him not willing to take the money…
From insideHPC
OSC to Deploy New Dell Supercomputer in Ohio
Today the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) announced plans to boost scientific and industrial discovery and innovation with a powerful new supercomputer from Dell. To be deployed later this year, the new system is part of a $9…