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 insideHPC
Coposky and Russell Tapped to Lead iRODS Consortium
Industry veterans Jason Coposky and Terrell Russell have taken lead roles at the membership-based foundation that leads development and support of the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS). "With data becoming the currency…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Council Member Kathy Yelick Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
This week the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced that they had elected 84 new members and 22 new foreign members. This brings the total U.S. membership to 2,281 and the number of foreign members to 249. As noted…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Software Developers–Quantity vs Quality
Today is a snow day here in New Hampshire. My third one this week. So I have taken care of most of the errands I use snow days to take care of and have some time to think about things. One of them is developing quality developers…
From insideHPC
Best Practices – Large Scale Multiphysics
Frank Ham from Cascade Technologies presented this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "A spin-off of the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University, Cascade Technologies grew out of a need to bridge between fundamental…
From Schneier on Security
De-Anonymizing Browser History Using Social-Network Data
Interesting research: "De-anonymizing Web Browsing Data with Social Networks": Abstract: Can online trackers and network adversaries de-anonymize web browsing data readily available to them? We show -- theoretically, via simulation…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC White Paper- Advances in Artificial Intelligence Require Progress Across all of Computer Science
The following is a guest blog post by past CCC Chair Greg Hager from Johns Hopkins University. Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged into the public view as an important frontier of technological innovation with potential…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF WATCH Talk- Industry Leaders and Academic Privacy Researchers: Adversaries or Partners?
The next WATCH talk, called Industry Leaders and Academic Privacy Researchers: Adversaries or Partners? is Thursday, February 16th, from Noon-1pm EST. The presenter is Jules Polonetsky, CEO of the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
War Gaming for Training
Like the idea, we never made it formal, but tested the concept driven by competition.
Is your team’s new engineer ready to take on-call? Use wargames for training By Jeffrey Starr
At Qualtrics, our engineering organization is…
From insideHPC
Tutorial: Towards Exascale Computing with Fortran 2015
"This tutorial will present several features that the draft Fortran 2015 standard introduces to meet challenges that are expected to dominate massively parallel programming in the coming exascale era. The expected exascale challenges…
From insideHPC
Allinea Updates Code Optimization Tools Across Platforms
Today Allinea Software launched the first update to its well-established toolset for debugging, profiling and optimizing high performance code since being acquired by ARM in December 2016. "The V7.0 release provides new integrations…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Marketing Models
Marketing, Mr Clean and Shifting Models (Excerpt, read the whole thing)
P&G Super Bowl Ads Point to a Shift in the Marketing Model by Bob Gilbreath
Co-Founder & CEO at Ahalogy
Many of my friends who are current or former Procter…
From insideHPC
Podcast: IDC’s Steve Conway on China’s New Plan for Exascale
“China and the United States have been in the race to develop the most capable supercomputer. China has announced that its exascale computer could be released sooner than originally planned. Steve Conway, VP for high performance…
From insideHPC
Video: Trish Kamkroger on her New Mission at Intel
In this video from KAUST Live: Patricia Damkroger discusses her new role as Vice President, Data Center Group and General Manager, Technical Computing Initiative, Enterprise and Government at Intel. "As the former Associate Director…
From insideHPC
CoolIT Systems Issued U.S. Patent for Modular Heat-Transfer Solutions
“U.S. Patent 9,496,200 protects the invention of utilizing a modular, building block approach for datacenter cooling with direct contact liquid cooling,” said Geoff Lyon CEO, CoolIT Systems. “CoolIT’s commitment to developing…
From insideHPC
Intel Releases Optimized Python for HPC
"By implementing popular Python packages such as NumPy, SciPy, scikit-learn, to call the Intel Math Kernel Library (Intel MKL) and the Intel Data Analytics Acceleration Library (Intel DAAL), Python applications are automatically…
From Schneier on Security
Security and Privacy Guidelines for the Internet of Things
Lately, I have been collecting IoT security and privacy guidelines. Here's everything I've found: "Internet of Things (IoT) Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group, Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group, Nov 2016. "IoT…
From Computational Complexity
The Dichotomy Conjecture
Arash Rafiey, Jeff Kinne and Tomás Feder settle the Feder-Vardi dichotomy conjecture in their paper Dichotomy for Digraph Homomorphism Problems. Jeff Kinne is my academic grandchild--how quickly they grow up.
Keep in mind the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Launches Cognitive Computing Hardware
Ultimately faster and tailored hardware will be required for machine learning.
In ZDNet:
IBM launches cognitive computing hardware unit: Enter the Watson, Power 9 stack
Here's the upshot: IBM is looking to speed up training forLarry…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gaussian Processes for Modeling with Uncertainty
Gaussian Processes, like Bayesian methods introduce natural uncertainty to modeling. And provide more transparency than deep learning neural nets to the models being built and used. Already being used by many practitioners…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Algorithm vs Data
On the use of data and algorithms to predict crime in the US data. Extensive, largely non technical article.
It's Not the Algorithm, It's the Data By Keith Kirkpatrick
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 60 No. 2, Pages 21-23
" .…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF CISE Distinguished Lecture- Emerging Role of Mobile Phones in Health
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, February 15, 2017 at 2:00PM EST by Computing Community…
From Schneier on Security
Do-It-Yourself Online Privacy/Safety Guide
This online safety guide was written for people concerned about being tracked and stalked online. It's a good resource....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Outlier Detection in Time Data
Outlier detection and analysis is an important topic for any kind of data. Outliers, depending on their context, can be useful, or dangerous in the development of models. New edited: Book: Outlier Detection for Temporal …
From insideHPC
Tachyum Startup Looks to Break Performance and Cost Barriers to Intelligent Information Processing
Today Silicon Valley startup Tachyum Inc. launched, announcing its mission to conquer the performance plateau in nanometer-class chips and the systems they power. "We have entered a post-Moore’s Law era where performance hit
…
From insideHPC
Panel Discussion: The Exascale Endeavor
Gilad Shainer moderated this panel discussion on Exascale Computing at the Stanford HPC Conference. "The creation of a capable exascale ecosystem will have profound effects on the lives of Americans, improving our nation’s national…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Accuracy of In-Store Inventory
Have been involved in the analyses based on physical inventory taking. Estimation from Tlog tapes and RFID tags. Have taken laborious physical counts as well. So this question is always interesting.
In RetailWire: How good…
From insideHPC
Oak Ridge steps up to Active Archive Solutions
Today the Active Archive Alliance announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has upgraded its active archive solutions to enhance the integrity and accessibility of its vast amount of data. The new solutions allow ORNL…
From insideHPC
Startup Video: Architecting Flash for Scale and Performance in HPC
"High Performance Computing (HPC) is considered the unlimited class of computing where performance is all that matters. Increasingly, business enterprises are looking to apply the technology and techniques from HPC to help them…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Supporting Team Cognition
Ultimately quite an important topic. How do groups think? How do we make them better?
" ... our Cognitive Systems Institute Speaker Series on Thursday, February 9, 2016 at 10:30 am ET US (7:30 am PT). Our speaker is SteveUniversity…
From insideHPC
DDN Drives Discoveries at Van Andel Research Institute
“Deploying DDN’s end-to-end storage solution has allowed us to elevate the standard of protection, increase compliance and push the boundaries of science on a single, highly scalable storage platform,” said Ramjan. “We’ve also…