Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2018
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predicting Earthquakes
Had seen a number of research efforts here, another move ...
Today, A.I. helps detect tiny earthquakes. Tomorrow, it might predict the big one
Earthquakes are notoriously difficult to predict. Even major quakes often occur with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Thinking deeply about Reinforcement Learning
Remember reading about reinforcement learning, having designed more mundane neural network deep learning, and thinking, but how do you design the 'objective function' to drive its action?
Nicely constrained and goal oriented…
From insideHPC
WekaIO: Making Machine Learning Compute-Bound Again
We are going to present WekaIO, the lowest latency, highest throughput file system solution that scales to 100s of PB in a single namespace supporting the most challenging deep learning projects that run today. We will present…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIST Announces 2018 Small Business Innovation Research Funding Opportunity
From Schneier on Security
New Spectre/Meltdown Variants
Researchers have discovered new variants of Spectre and Meltdown. The software mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown seem to block these variants, although the eventual CPU fixes will have to be expanded to account for these new…
From The Noisy Channel
Search Results Presentation
Until now, we’ve mostly focused on query processing — which is to be expected, given that this series is about query understanding. But given that searchers are ultimately interested in the results, it’s also important to consider…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Iterating over set bits quickly
A common problem in my line of work is to iterate over the set bits (bits having value 1) in a large array. My standard approach involves a “counting trailing zeroes” function. Given an integer, this function counts how manyContinue…
From insideHPC
HPE wins supercomputer contract for DoD Modernization Program
Today HPE announced it has been selected to provide new supercomputers for the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) to accelerate the development and acquisition of advanced national security capabilities…
From BLOG@CACM
Deciding When the Design is Wrong in Programming Languages and Education
When do we decide that errors are due to bad design in programming languges and education?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Spotify to Build Own Speakers?
In CIO: Another competitor in the ranks. Now from a Music aggregator. What kind of other Assistant aspects will it include? Recall how Spotify was designing music based specifically on consumer demand.
Spotify is working on…
From insideHPC
Video: The Sierra Supercomputer – Science and Technology on a Mission
Adam Bertsch from LLNL gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Our next flagship HPC system at LLNL will be called Sierra. A collaboration between multiple government and industry partners, Sierra and its sister system…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at AAAI-18
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talk on AI and Blockchain this Thursday
In our CSIG group. Join us. Relates to our work underway regarding Smart Contracts ...
Date and Time : Feb 22, 2018 - 10:30am to 11:00am US Eastern
Zoom meeting Link: https://zoom.us/j/7371462221
Zoom Callin: (415) 762-9988 or…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Work on 1000 Year Clock Begins
Also known as the most famous part of the Long Now Project. About long term thinking. Followed it closely in its early days via our work with the Institute for the Future.
Jeff Bezos writes:
@JeffBezos
Installation has begun—500…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Immersive Terf
Immersive Terf. Was reminded of Qwaq, which we examined for 3D Immersive collaboration. To provide a virtual-world style collaboration. Is it useful to have cartoon-like figures representing you and your collaborating colleagues…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Platforms Extracting Corporate Knowledge
Quite a considerable claim. Can we extract all the knowledge of a company for easy use? We developed and tried systems with similar goals. Looking further.
Can This AI Platform Make You A Better Leader?
Half of executives fail…
From insideHPC
Call for Participation: MSST Mass Storage Conference 2018
The 34th International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST 2018) has issued its Call for Participation. The event takes place May 14-16 in Santa Clara, California. "The conference invites you to share…
From insideHPC
Resource Management Across the Private/Public Cloud Divide
This is the final entry in a insideHPC series of features that explores new resource management solutions for workload convergence, such as Bright Cluster Manager by Bright Computing. This article highlights how resource management…
From insideHPC
Take the Exascale Resilience Survey from AllScale Europe
The European Horizon 2020 AllScale project has launched a survey on exascale resilience. "As we approach ExaScale, compute node failure will become commonplace. @AllScaleEurope wants to know how #HPC software developers view
…
From Schneier on Security
Facebook Will Verify the Physical Location of Ad Buyers with Paper Postcards
It's not a great solution, but it's something: The process of using postcards containing a specific code will be required for advertising that mentions a specific candidate running for a federal office, Katie Harbath, Facebook's…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Keep Your Customers Coming Back
Good piece. Not at all technical, but worth repeating what you need to get done. The tech people I talk to don't seem to know these obvious things, and are always looking for some other tech magic. But if they don't get these…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Samsung Patents the Drone Screen
In our innovation center we looked at many variants of the screen. Especially as it related to in store and public retail advertising. Here something new, a drone that resents a screen. With lots of possibilities around scale…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GraphGrail AI
New to me, I like the attempt to create a broad solution ecosystem. Send me some examples of useful applications in place. Mentions Smart Contracts, which we are currently developing.
GraphGrail: AI meets Blockchain
Graphgrail…
From Schneier on Security
On the Security of Walls
Interesting history of the security of walls: Dún Aonghasa presents early evidence of the same principles of redundant security measures at work in 13th century castles, 17th century star-shaped artillery fortifications, and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Portal for Scientific Discovery
Augmentation for discovery is something we examined for research.
Networking, Data Experts Design a Better Portal for Scientific Discovery
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy…
From XRDS
How to publish about your research results for academic and non-academic audiences
As a graduate student, one of our goals is to produce research that will be useful to the world, that will be known and used by other people. This usefulness can come in many forms; for example, our work can … Continue reading…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Exploratory Advanced Research Program 2018 Broad Agency Announcement
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) issued a Presolicitation Notice for its 2018 Exploratory Advanced Research Program’s Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) with an anticipated posting date soon. Through the issuance of this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hacking Phone Pins with Sensor Data
Disturbing Situation ... You have to think about what data is being gathered by sensors, and if that new data can be used to predict other data ... and beyond. A whole stream of inference to check. Note the prediction does
Hackers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dimensions of Digital Trust
Fascinating take. A little skeptical about the approach to gathering this detailed information. Why just 4 dimensions? Worth the read.
The 4 Dimensions of Digital Trust, Charted Across 42 Countries By Bhaskar Chakravorti,…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Graphene Applications in Nanoscale Electronics
Researchers at North Carolina State University are using the Blue Waters Supercomputer to explore graphene’s applications, including its use in nanoscale electronics and electrical DNA sequencing. "We’re looking at what’s beyond…