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
Orchard Planting
Also popped up, the 'Orchard Planting Problem', new to me. This Wolfram article looks at it in great depth, combinatorially and visually .... Perhaps this would have been of more interest when we managed softwood forests.…
From Schneier on Security
Water Utility Infected By Cryptocurrency Mining Software
A water utility in Europe has been infected by cryptocurrency mining software. This is a relatively new attack: hackers compromise computers and force them to mine cryptocurrency for them. This is the first time I've seen it…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
National Academy of Engineering Elects New Members
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected 83 new members and 16 foreign members. This brings the total U.S. membership to 2,293 and the number of foreign members to 262. Many of the newly elected members work in fields…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Is that a Trick Question?
For me at least writing test/quiz questions for programming students is hard. Most of what I assign and grade are projects but sometimes I like to toss out a quiz to see if I can figure out what students really know. And frankly…
From insideHPC
Addressing Fault Tolerance and Data Compression at Exascale
In this Let's Talk Exascale podcast, Franck Cappello from Argonne National Laboratory describes the VeloC project. "The VeloC project endeavors to provide ECP applications an optimal fault-tolerance environment, while the aim…
From insideHPC
Hayward Fault Earthquake Simulations Increase Fidelity of Ground Motions
Researchers at LLNL are using supercomputers to simulate the onset of earthquakes in California. "This study shows that powerful supercomputing can be used to calculate earthquake shaking on a large, regional scale with more
…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity
National Academy of Sciences’ Sackler Colloquium on Creativity and Collaboration: Revisiting Cybernetic Serendipity will be in Washington, DC at the National Academy of Sciences (2101 Constitution Avenue, NW Washington, District…
From insideHPC
Big 3 Cloud Providers Join with Nsf to Support Data Science
"NSF’s participation with major cloud providers is an innovative approach to combining resources to better support data science research," said Jim Kurose, assistant director of NSF for Computer and Information Science and Engineering…
From insideHPC
Podcast: The Age of Quantum Computing Is (almost) Here
In this WSJ Podcast, scientists from the IBM’s T J Watson Research Center describe how quantum computing will enable a new age of scientific discovery. Quantum computers are incredibly powerful machines that take a new approach…
From insideHPC
Vectorization Now More Important Than Ever
Vectorization, the hardware optimization technique synonymous with early vector supercomputers like the Cray-1 (1975), has reappeared with even greater importance than before. Today, 40+ years later, the AVX-512 vector instructions…
From Computational Complexity
For the Love of Algorithms
Wired magazine labelled 2017 as The Year We Fell Out of Love with Algorithms. The article goes on to talk about how algorithms give us filter bubbles, affect elections, propagate biases and eliminate privacy. The article at the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
General Data Protection Regulation
New European Data Privacy Regulation
Tech Giants Brace for Europe’s New Data Privacy Rules in the NYTimes By Sheera Frenkel ....
General Data Protection Regulation GDPR
Welcome to gdpr-info.eu. Here you can find the official…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Nsf Watch Talk Server-Side Verification of Client Behavior
The next WATCH talk, called Server-Side Verification of Client Behavior is Thursday, February 15th, from 12PM -1PM ET from Michael Reiter at UNC-Chapel Hill. Michael Reiter is the Lawrence M. Slifkin Distinguished Professor in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cortana as Assistant in Context
Not enough out there about Cortana as an assistant. Here is a start. Saw a demonstration of building a skill and using it as a chatbot assistant. It doesn't get the same respect as other assistants because MSFT is not providing…
From insideHPC
Video: Lustre Generational Performance Improvements & New Features
Adam Roe from Intel gave this talk at LAD'17 in Paris. "Lustre has had a number of compelling new features added in recent releases; this talk will look at those features in detail and see how well they all work together from…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Voices in AI
Well done podcasts:
GigaOM: Voices in AI
Artificial Intelligence Podcast
Today's Leading Minds Talk AI with Host Byron Reese .... "
From The Eponymous Pickle
Macy's Promotes Pop-Ups in Markets
I cover the local chain Macy's retail Innovations, they have been quite innovative. Will Pop-up stores work in a brick store environment? Jungle Jim's does this, but it seems not to great success. Likely to do specifically…
From insideHPC
John Elmer Joins Nag Board of Directors
Today the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) in the UK announced the appointment of John Elmer to its Board of Directors. "I am delighted that John Elmer is joining the NAG Board,” said Rob Meyer, CEO, NAG. “His track record of…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Computational Scientist at Washington State University
The Center for Institutional Research Computing at Washington State University is seeking a Computational Scientist in our Job of the Week. "This position will play a key role in assisting the research community in the development…
From insideHPC
One Stop Systems Rolls Out High Bandwidth Nvme Ion Flash Storage Array
Today One Stop Systems introduced the new 2U Ion Accelerator Flash Storage Array. The new array offers flexible capacity while maintaining the high-bandwidth and low-latency pedigree of Ion Accelerator arrays deployed in hundreds…
From insideHPC
Exploiting Modern Microarchitectures: Meltdown, Spectre, and Other Attacks
Jon Masters from Red Hat gave this Keynote at FOSDEM 2018. "Recently disclosed vulnerabilities against modern high performance computer microarchitectures known as 'Meltdown' and 'Spectre' are among an emerging wave of hardware…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brain Pacemaker
Is something that can be described as a 'brain pacemaker' a viable idea? Brains are very different from hearts. From my connection to Ideaconnection. With video.
Brain Pacemaker Could Treat Alzheimer's
An innovative brain pacemaker…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More on Echo Look
Had not heard about Amazon's Style Assistant, called Amazon Look for a while. Of interest because we also examined many 'style' assistants here over the years. Still unclear how well this would work. Intrigued by the approach…
From Schneier on Security
Cabinet of Secret Documents from Australia
This story of leaked Australian government secrets is unlike any other I've heard: It begins at a second-hand shop in Canberra, where ex-government furniture is sold off cheaply. The deals can be even cheaper when the items in…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Doing Mod N Via Mod R
Variations on Montgomery’s trick Peter Montgomery is a cryptographer at Microsoft. Just recently, Joppe Bos and Arjen Lenstra have edited a book titled Topics in Computational Number Theory Inspired by Peter L. Montgomery. The…
From insideHPC
How Deep Learning Is Causing a ‘seismic Shift’ in the Retail Industry
These days, taking big data further and integrating machine and deep learning means having a competitive edge in the retail industry. Analytics — and their analysis — have always been a cornerstone of retail success. And now…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Charting Common Machine Learning Methods
Vincent Granville in DSC republishes a chart that shows and classifies commonly used machine learning methods. With some additional useful comments. And links to other introductory DSC articles on related topics.
Great place…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple Patents Drawing in the Air
So they ask us to speculate: This would allow us to mark up the world using augmented reality.
Apple's latest patent teases a Pencil that can draw in mid-air
Time to start speculating. ...
By Timothy J. Seppala, @timseppala…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wikibon Research
Again brought my attention, have used a few times.
Wikibon is a community of business technology practitioners founded to deliver the most actionable and real-time information available in the marketplace. Since 2007, Wikibon's…
From insideHPC
Dell Emc Steps up with Amd Epyc Servers For Hpc, Sdn, and the Edge
Today Dell EMC announced three new servers powered by AMD EPYC processors. "The Advanced High-Performance Computing Center at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville runs Molecular Dynamics simulation the open-source code: LAMMPS…