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
The Odds of Strategy
Have not read this book, but the premise is interesting. But is strategy in context usually too broad to pin good odds on?
Strategy to beat the odds By Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit ... in McKinsey Quarterly
If…
From insideHPC
Take our AI & HPC Survey to Win an Amazon Echo Show Device
AI and Machine Learning have been called the Next Big Thing in High Performance Computing, but what kinds of results are your peers already getting right now? There is one way to find out--by taking our HPC & AI Survey. "We invite…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
A Primer on the Meltdown & Spectre Hardware Security Design Flaws and their Important Implications
The following blog was written by CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As previously reported in the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blog, two major hardware security design flaws—dubbed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Anxiety about AI Agency
How do we start dealing with faster technological changes that will put people out of work. Will it augment enough people to create 'AI workers' to do things better, faster and cheaper? And then how many jobs will be left over…
From insideHPC
State-Of-The-Art Machine Learning Algorithms and Near-Term Technology Trends
Rob Farber from TechEnablement gave this talk at the HPC Knowledge Portal 2017 meeting. "This talk will merge two state-of-the-art briefings: Massive scale and state-of-the art algorithm mappings for both machine learning and…
From insideHPC
Gen-Z Consortium Announces the Public Release of Its Core Specification 1.0
Today the Gen-Z Consortium released the Gen-Z Core Specification 1.0 on its website. As an open systems interconnect, Gen-Z is designed to provide memory semantic access to data and devices via direct-attached, switched or fabric…
From insideHPC
EasyBuild: Past, Present & Future
Kenneth Hoste from Ghent University this talk at the EasyBuild User Meeting in Amsterdam. "EasyBuild is a software build and installation framework that allows you to manage (scientific) software on HPC systems in an efficient…
From insideHPC
HPC System Management: Scheduling to Optimize Infrastructure
Whether the application is floating-point intensive, integer based, uses a lot of memory, has significant I/O requirements, or its widespread use is limited by purchased licenses, a system that assigns the right job to the right…
From Schneier on Security
Jumping Air Gaps
Nice profile of Mordechai Guri, who researches a variety of clever ways to steal data over air-gapped computers. Guri and his fellow Ben-Gurion researchers have shown, for instance, that it's possible to trick a fully offline…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robots Cooperate to open a Door
Video released today. Two Boston Dynamics SpotMini robots cooperate to open a fairly standard door:
An impressive and somewhat creepy demonstration of the advance of robotics within normal human contexts. Closer to a robot apocalypse…
From Apophenia
The Reality of Twitter Puffery. Or Why Does Everyone Now Hate Bots?
(This was originally posted on NewCo Shift.) A friend of mine worked for an online dating company whose audience was predominantly hetero 30-somethings. At some point, they realized that a large number of the “female” accounts…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for Proposals: Creating Visions for Computing Research
The mission of Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community and enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research. CCC conducts activities that…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teaching Diversity in Computing
One of the important topics in computing these days is diversity. Why? Well there are things like concern about equal opportunity. (Why Can’t Silicon Valley Solve Its Diversity Problem?) and that is part of it. It’s often hard…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Store Assistant: Wal-Mart Makes Its App Smarter
Much more detail at the link. Note the renaming of this as an assistant. Good, but the system also has to be transparent, very easy to use, bump-free financials and delivery options. What is a 'reimagined experience"? How…
From insideHPC
TACC and DOD to Co-Develop Novel Computational Approaches
Today the Texas Advanced Computing Center announced a partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense to provide researchers with access to advanced computing resources as part of an effort to develop novel computational approaches…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Towards Crowd Sourcing Conversational Agents
Intriguing thought, not sure it actually is the same as what we did and called a 'Concierge' model, linking appropriately to other smart agents or people. More like Facebook's attempt to include humans within the now defunct…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Designing Alexa Chips
Amazon designs deeper. Which ultimately will be the way you get better intelligence, conversation and engagement. Faster and more on-point.
Amazon is reportedly designing AI chips to improve Alexa
It follows in the footsteps…
From insideHPC
Google Cloud TPU Machine Learning Accelerators now in Beta
John Barrus writes that Cloud TPUs are available in beta on Google Cloud Platform to help machine learning experts train and run their ML models more quickly. "Cloud TPUs are a family of Google-designed hardware accelerators
…
From insideHPC
Optalysys Optical Processing Achieves 90 percent energy savings for DNA Sequence Alignment
The GENESYS project applied Optalysys’s unique optical processing technology to perform large-scale DNA sequence alignment. "The collaboration with EI has been a great success,” said Dr. Nick New, founder and CEO of Optalysys…
From insideHPC
CPU 24/7 Acquired by IAV GmbH for Automotive HPC Managed Services
HPC managed services provider CPU 24/7 has been acquired by IAV GmbH, a leading engineering services firm for the automotive industry. "We are very happy we found such a good home for our company”, says Dr. Matthias Reyer, Co…
From insideHPC
Alan Turing Institute Looks at Meltdown and Spectre
In this video, Mark Handley will explain what modern CPUs actually do to go fast, discuss how this leads to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, and summarize the mitigations that are being put in place. "Operating systems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Add Human Touch to Big Data
Short but thoughtful piece from SAS. But do remember that humans are also good at adding bias.
Why is it important to add a human touch to big data?
By Jay Paulson on SAS Voices
In the hype and excitement surrounding artificial…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Shopping Looking like Amazon
Continued competition in the online retail world.
Google Shopping is becoming a lot like browsing on Amazon
Search results with related items are just the start.
By Timothy J. Seppala, @timseppala in Engadget.
From Schneier on Security
Internet Security Threats at the Olympics
There are a lot: The cybersecurity company McAfee recently uncovered a cyber operation, dubbed Operation GoldDragon, attacking South Korean organizations related to the Winter Olympics. McAfee believes the attack came from a…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Center for Machine Intelligence
New efforts to address machine intelligence and Society.
Center for Machine Intelligence Launched to Help Build a Smarter and Safer Society University of Southampton
The University of Southampton in the U.K. recently launched…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What is AI?
Another look at the elusive definition. I am still of the opinion it is what it can do for us. Augment and improve our decisions. So yes then, just about everything computing is to some degree. Its how much of this it…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Trading with Reinforcement Leaning
Nice example of reinforcement learning. Not really prediction of the kind might want, below just the introduction that sets the stage, click through to more detail that makes the case for usefulness of the method. Also make…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GIS and Big Data
We were early users of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) when we helped manage Alberta Pine forests. True it predated 'Big Data', but emerged at about the same time as optimization analytics, which we used to great value…
From insideHPC
Call for Proposals: International Conference on Parallel Processing in Oregon
The 47th International Conference on Parallel Processing has issued its Call for Proposals. Sponsored by ACM SIGHPC, the event takes place August 13-16 in Eugene, Oregon. "Parallel and distributed computing is a central topic…
From insideHPC
Realizing Exabyte-scale PM Centric Architectures and Memory Fabrics
Zvonimir Bandic from Western Digital gave this talk at the SNIA Persistent Memory Summit. "Much has been debated about would it take to scale a system to exabyte main memory with the right levels of latencies to address the world…