Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2019
From insideHPC
Moving Mountains of Data at NERSC
Researchers at NERSC face the daunting task of moving 43 years worth of archival data across the network to new tape libraries, a whopping 120 Petabytes! "Even with all of this in place, it will still take about two years to
…
From insideHPC
Dr. Omar Ghattas Receives 2019 SIAM Geosciences Career Prize
Dr. Omar Ghattas from the University of Texas at Austin has been selected as the recipient of the 2019 SIAM Geosciences Career Prize. He is being recognized for “groundbreaking contributions in analysis, methods, algorithms,
…
From insideHPC
HPC in the Hands of Every Engineer – With Software Containers
In this special guest feature, Wolfgang Gentzsch from The UberCloud writes that we’ve never been so close to ubiquitous computing for researchers and engineers. "High-performance computing continues to progress, but the next
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
BERT for Natural Language Understanding
Was just introduced to this again, worth a a look:
BERT Technology introduced in 3-minutes By Suleiman Khan, Ph.D. in Medium
Google BERT is a pre-training method for natural language understanding that performs various NLP tasks…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Podcast, “Catalyzing Computing,” Episode 2
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the first episode of the “Catalyzing Computing” podcast, and episode 2 is available now. The podcast is hosted by CCC Program Associate Khari Douglas and features interviews…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Warnings about Risks in Algorithms
Quite interesting view. But it exists in all analytic systems. Not much mention of my favorite warning, changes in context over time. And that's just one kind of 'bad AI'. Seen it in many applications over the years.…
From insideHPC
Video: Speeding up Programs with OpenACC in GCC
Thomas Schwinge from Mentor gave this talk at FOSDEM'19. "Requiring only few changes to your existing source code, OpenACC allows for easy parallelization and code offloading to accelerators such as GPUs. We will present a short…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Contracts as Mechanisms
Thoughtful short piece that explains SC's as neither smart nor contracts, but rather mechanisms, from a legal perspective. ... In FreedometoTinker:
Abstract:
This paper critiques blockchain-based “smart contracts,” which aim to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
An AI Reading List
Good examples in the space. Some I have seen and read, some not. Worth a selective look.
An AI Reading List - From Practical Primers to Sci-Fi Short Stories
The best reading on AI, as recommended by the experts
By James Vincent…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Trusting the Blockchain
Recent article just brought to my attention. Schneier, a well known security technologist that I have followed for years. Criticizes public, consensus algorithm policed, blockchains that use some sort of underlying token…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blockchain and Government
Maybe so, but in recent conversations was struck by how nervous government was regarding the whole idea, especially how it seemed to be hiding certain uses of currency and investment. When I countered with its use as a trust…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Self-Driving Cars May Cruise Rather than Park
This points to the possibilities of 'unintended consequences', which we have to watch for when building in autonomous tech. But this alarmist view suggests that these advances won't be regulated, taxed and re-goaled by municipalities…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Governance and Knowledge Graphs
Knowledge Graphs and Data Governance
A Note from TopQuadrant's CEO, Irene Polikoff
As 2018 comes to a close we took a look back at key topics that were of most interest in our conversations with customers, prospects and at the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sentiment Analysis and Merchandising Calls
Quite a range of information is described.
Can sentiment analysis improve merchandising calls? by Brian Kilcourse in Retailwire
Through a special arrangement, what follows is a summary of an article from Retail Paradox, RSR
Marketers…
From insideHPC
Argonne Looks to Singularity for HPC Code Portability
Over at Argonne, Nils Heinonen writes that Researchers are using the open source Singularity framework as a kind of Rosetta Stone for running supercomputing code almost anywhere. "Once a containerized workflow is defined, its…
From insideHPC
Video: Frontiers of AI Deployments in HPC on Arm
In this video from Arm HPC Asia 2019, Elsie Wahlig leads a round table panel discussion on Frontiers of AI deployments in HPC on Arm. "Topics at the workshop covered all aspects of the Arm server ecosystem, from chip design,
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Seeking Quantum Resistant Crypto
Its been suggested that quantum computing will break current cryptographic methods. So work is underway to find quantum=resistant methods. Not mention of quantum-proof. NIST has beenholda competition. Note the mention of…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Computer Scientist at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre
The Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany is seeking a Computer Scientist in our Job of the Week. "The institute of Bio- and Geosciences – Agrosphere contributes to an improved understanding and reliable prediction of hydrologic…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Reducing Quantum Noise
Worked with folks at Argonne, impressive group. Regarding using simulations or agent process forimproved understanding. Data lost to noise is an interesting concept. Information can also be found in noise.
Argonne Researchers…
From insideHPC
Video: OpenHPC Update
Adrian Reber from Red Hat gave this talk at the FOSDEM'19 conference. "In this talk I want to give an introduction about the OpenHPC project. Why do we need something like OpenHPC? What are the goals of OpenHPC? Who is involved…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Conversations in Assistants with Mood
Interesting points are made. Though the analysis of mood from text is fairly straightforward, wondering if there are liabilities once one classifies mood in real time? Good interview:
Google Home's Assistant could one day know…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 9th, 2019)
Though deep learning has proven remarkably capable in many tasks like image classification, it is possible that the problems they are solving remarquably well are just simpler than we think: At its core our work shows that [neural…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI and Customer Experience
Now involved with a couple of projects in this space. In the past we discovered the concept fit well to customer solutions, but the contextual details are complex. Also, maintaining solutions in a changing world need to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Defining Customer Journies
This reminds me of the similar issue to defining business process. Its a good idea to be in agreement with others doing the same thing kind of analysis in your company, industry, context, domain, etc. That way you can compare…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: The Hawaiian Bobtail Squid Genome
The Hawaiian Bobtail Squid's genome is half again the size of a human's. Other facts: The Hawaiian bobtail squid has two different symbiotic organs, and researchers were able to show that each of these took different paths in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Plus is Going and Soon will be Gone
You will note that the G+ option for forwarding these posts is gone. I did not do this, Google did, and it is completely removing the system called Google Plus , and will soon remove all the posts that were ever done with it…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Who is a Citizen Data Scientist?
When I saw the term at first, I wondered too. In part part because of the 'scientist' part. Does this assume the particular 'method' we know, or does it just mean more casual use? Its usually also a journalist as well,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Thoughts about Validity of Trends
Or at least how we might contextually define a 'trend'. Usually a descriptive measure.
Five questions to find the truth in a trend by Mark P. McDonald in the Gartner Blog
When is a trend more than a rumor? Take the predication…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Faster remainders when the divisor is a constant: beating compilers and libdivide
Not all instructions on modern processors cost the same. Additions and subtractions are cheaper than multiplications which are themselves slower than divisions. For this reason, compilers frequently replace division instructions…
From insideHPC
BSC fosters EUCANCan Project to share and reuse cancer genomic data worldwide
Today the Barcelona Supercomputing Center announced it will foster the EUCANCan project to allow both research and cancer treatments to be shared and re-used by the European and Canadian scientific community. As demonstrated
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