Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2017
From The Eponymous Pickle
Snapshots of Digital Transformation
Instructive. In McKinsey:
Three snapshots of digital transformation
Financial services, food retailing, and pharma are reinventing themselves in different ways.
As companies grapple with the different dimensions of digitization…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tom Davenport Writings
Had a chat with author Tom Davenport, we have long been in touch in the Analytics and AI spaces. Here is a link to his recent writing.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Home Adds Big Retail Connects
Are the assistant's major goal to directly sell? Or prepare a new kind of channel for sales? How will this evolve? Discussion.
Will Costco, Kohl’s, Target, et al give Google Home an edge over Amazon’s Echo? by George Anderson…
From insideHPC
Earlham Institute Moves HPC Workloads to Iceland
In this video, Dr Tim Stitt from the Earlham Institute describes why moving their HPC workload to Iceland made economic sense. Through the Verne Global datacenter, the Earlham Institute will have access to one of the world’s
…
From insideHPC
Asperitas Startup Brings Immersive Cooling to Datacenters
Today Dutch startup Asperitas rolled out Immersed Computing cooling technology for datacenters. "The company's first market ready solution, the AIC24, 'the first water-cooled oil-immersion system which relies on natural convection…
From insideHPC
DDN and Lustre to Power TSUBAME3.0 Supercomputer
"The IO infrastructure of TSUBAME3.0 combines fast in-node NVMe SSDs and a large, fast, Lustre-based system from DDN. The 15.9PB Lustre* parallel file system, composed of three of DDN’s high-end ES14KX storage appliances, is
…
From insideHPC
Pascal GPUs to Accelerate TSUBAME 3.0 Supercomputer at Tokyo Tech
"TSUBAME3.0 is expected to deliver more than two times the performance of its predecessor, TSUBAME2.5," writes Marc Hamilton from Nvidia. "It will use Pascal-based Tesla P100 GPUs, which are nearly three times as efficient as…
From The Eponymous Pickle
An Advisory Hub for Health Care
An idea that we discussed in some detail, regarding advisory systems in health care. Using popular advisory systems? I like very much the idea of leveraging and especially sharing data among participants. Regulatory issues…
From insideHPC
Video: The Era of Self-Tuning Servers
"Servers today have hundreds of knobs that can be tuned for performance and energy efficiency. While some of these knobs can have a dramatic effect on these metrics, manually tuning them is a tedious task. It is very labor intensive…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Fingerprinting Techniques
In CIO Today:
" .... The new tech makes it possible to establish a unique online fingerprint based not on browser features but on features of a user's operating system and computer hardware, according to a new study by researchers…
From Schneier on Security
IoT Attack Against a University Network
Verizon's Data Brief Digest 2017 describes an attack against an unnamed university by attackers who hacked a variety of IoT devices and had them spam network targets and slow them down: Analysis of the university firewall identified…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
You’re Teaching the Wrong Programming Language
No, really you are. If someone hasn’t told you this yet it’s probably because too few people know what programming language you are teaching. Of course someone probably thinks you are teaching the right language. After all you…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Thoughts on my new laptop (Dell XPS 13 with Windows 10)
I love computers. Unlike many people, who stick to one brand and one operating system, I like to use many different systems. I own several game consoles, several types of tablets and so forth. My primary laptop for many years…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Enabling Voice Control in Simple IoT
From MIT News in CACM
" ... In anticipation of the age of voice-controlled electronics, MIT researchers have built a low-power chip specialized for automatic speech recognition. Whereas a cellphone running speech-recognition
In…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC White Paper- Safety, Security, and Privacy Threats Posed by Accelerating Trends in the Internet of Things
CCC Executive Council Member Ben Zorn from Microsoft Research contributed to this post. The Internet of Things (IoT) is already transforming industries, cities, and homes. The economic value of this transformation across all…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Addressing the Flaws of Innovation
Thoughtful piece in the Cisco blog, on how do we define and address the flaws in innovation. Have attended many, many brainstorming sessions. It was never hard to get ideas, but usually problematic to really refine these…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Whats Next for Home Assistants?
Good thoughts, especially linking to email and phone calls. I would add also better ways to support ongoing learning and tracking of conversations. Also the ability to differentiate and personalize conversations between different…
From insideHPC
Exxon Mobil Joins NCSA Private Sector Program
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) announced today that Exxon Mobil has signed on as the center's newest Private Sector Partner. "We're looking forward to building a strong, productive relationship with…
From insideHPC
Call for Panels: SC17 in Denver
SC17 has issued its Call for Panel Sessions. The conference takes place Nov. 12-17 in Denver. "As in past years, panels at SC17 will be some of the most heavily attended events of the Conference. Panels will bring together the…
From Schneier on Security
Duqu Malware Techniques Used by Cybercriminals
Duqu 2.0 is a really impressive piece of malware, related to Stuxnet and probably written by the NSA. One of its security features is that it stays resident in its host's memory without ever writing persistent files to the system's…
From insideHPC
Deep Learning & HPC: New Challenges for Large Scale Computing
"In recent years, major breakthroughs were achieved in different fields using deep learning. From image segmentation, speech recognition or self-driving cars, deep learning is everywhere. Performance of image classification,
…
From insideHPC
ISC 2017 Distinguished Talks to Focus on Data Analytics in Manufacturing & Science
Today ISC 2017 announced that it's Distinguished Talk series will focus on Data Analytics in manufacturing and scientific applications. One of the Distinguished Talks will be given by Dr. Sabine Jeschke from the Cybernetics Lab…
From The Noisy Channel
Query Rewriting: An Overview
Thus far, we’ve focused on query understanding at the character and token level. It’s time move up the stack, on to entities and the query…
From insideHPC
Six Steps Towards Better Performance on Intel Xeon Phi
"As with all new technology, developers will have to create processes in order to modernize applications to take advantage of any new feature. Rather than randomly trying to improve the performance of an application, it is wise…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Strategy and Value
Includes a mapping method I had not specifically heard of. Gets back to measures for valuing your data when applied to specific strategic needs.
Why you need a data strategy, and what happens if you don’t have one
How to map …
From Computational Complexity
Liberatus Wins at Poker
 |
| Tuomas Sandholm (center) and Ph.D. student Noam Brown (via CMU) |
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Origami Revolution
An informative video on PBS today regarding the use of Origami as a design methodology, how research on origami based models is progressing and a number of good examples. Very well done. We explored this for some packaging…
From insideHPC
IBM Machine Learning Platform Comes to the Private Cloud
"Machine Learning and deep learning represent new frontiers in analytics. These technologies will be foundational to automating insight at the scale of the world’s critical systems and cloud services,” said Rob Thomas, General…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Summit on Advances in Programming Languages 2017 Opportunity for Junior Researchers
Rastislav Bodik (University of Washington) and Shriram Krishnamurthi (Brown University) have announced an exciting, new opportunity for junior researchers – either young faculty or older graduate students – to apply to attend…
From The Eponymous Pickle
TensorFlow 1.0 Announced
Google announces what appears to be a considerable upgrade of TensorFlow.
Announcing TensorFlow 1.0 by Amy McDonald Sandjideh, Technical Program Manager, TensorFlow
In just its first year, TensorFlow has helped researchers, engineers…