Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2020
From The Eponymous Pickle
Autonomous Cars and the Drive Thru
A considerable discussion and walk-through example of the potential interactions of drive thrus and autonomous cars. With detailed consideration of the business implications. Had given this some thought before as how the
AI…
From insideHPC
HLRS Inaugurates Hawk Supercomputer from HPE
HLRS officially dedicated their new Hawk supercomputer computer this week at a ceremony in Stuttgart, Germany. With a peak performance of approximately 26 Petaflops, Hawk is an HPE Apollo 9000 System and is among the fastest
…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Preparing for HPC & AI Convergence in the Enterprise
In this interview, Dr. Meyer discusses AMAX’s focus on appliances for storage, cloud, and hyper-scale integration. Dr. Meyer goes into more depth about why training in AI is now moving to deploying models at the edge, and why…
From insideHPC
CUDA-Python and RAPIDS for blazing fast scientific computing
Abe Stern from NVIDIA gave this talk at the ECSS Symposium. "We will introduce Numba and RAPIDS for GPU programming in Python. Numba allows us to write just-in-time compiled CUDA code in Python, giving us easy access to the power…
From insideHPC
Cooling unit saves water at Sandia supercomputing center
A new high efficiency cooling unit installed on the roof of Sandia National Laboratories’ supercomputer center saved 554,000 gallons of water during its first six months of operation last year, says David J. Martinez, engineering…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Self Checkout is Harder than it Should be
More on the use of the automated checkout process and related issues, with links to a survey and review:
Shoppers have a love/hate relationship with self-checkouts by Tom Ryan in Retailwire
Consumers are increasingly favoring…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Faster Lab Results with Phone to Lab Chip Connect
Faster lab test results for infectious diseases.
UC Smartphone Lab Delivers Test Results in 'Spit' Second
University of Cincinnati
Michael Miller
Researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have developed a portable lab device…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Combinatorial Optimization Algorithm
Combinatorics are of particular interest to me, are part of any kind of complex process choice problem. Note the use of annealing, being used in some quantum methods. Here a new advance, examining.
Optimization Algorithm Sets…
From insideHPC
HPC User Forum to Explore AI-HPDA Use In Banking and Investment Firms
Today Hyperion Research announced high-profile speakers from major banking and investment firms will highlight the agenda at the next HPC User Forum. Thomas Thurston, CTO of WR Hambrecht Ventures, and Brad Spiers, executive director…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Great Innovative Idea: Towards Geocoding Spatial Expressions
The following Great Innovative Idea is from Hussein S. Al-Olimat from The Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-Enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis) at the Wright State University. Dr. Al-Olimat along with his coauthors Valerie L.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
EU Rules for AI
Will be interesting to see how such regulations evolve.
Fear of Big Brother Guides EU Rules on AI
Agence France-Presse
February 17, 2020
The artificial intelligence (AI) policy unveiled by the European Union (EU) this week urges
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Classification with Naive Bayes
Good piece, behind a paywall but worth a look. Technical.
Comparing a variety of Naive Bayes classification algorithms
Comprehensive list of formulas for text classification
Pavel Horbonos (Midvel Corp)
Naive Bayes algorithm is
…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Tracking the Coronavirus with HPC
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at how supercomputing can help predict and track the progress of the Covid-19 virus. "Shahin also wonders about the economic effect on the tech business as inventories dry up while…
From insideHPC
LBNL Breaks New Ground in Data Center Optimization
Berkeley Lab has been at the forefront of efforts to design, build, and optimize energy-efficient hyperscale data centers. “In the march to exascale computing, there are real questions about the hard limits you run up against…
From insideHPC
GE Research Leverages World’s Top Supercomputer to Boost Jet Engine Efficiency
GE Research has been awarded access to the world’s #1-ranked supercomputer to discover new ways to optimize the efficiency of jet engines and power generation equipment. Michal Osusky, the project’s leader from GE Research’s
…
From insideHPC
Video: From Brains to Agents and Back
Jane Wang from DeepMind gave this talk NeurIPS 2019. "Building on the connection between biological and artificial reinforcement learning, our workshop will bring together leading and emergent researchers from Neuroscience, Psychology…
From insideHPC
Intel Horse Ridge Chip Addresses Key Barriers to Quantum Scalability
At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference this week, Intel presented a research paper demonstrating the technical details and experimental results of its new Horse Ridge cryogenic quantum computing control chip. The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Reinforcement Learning Improvements
Very interesting item. Quite technical. I like the hint of using pools or teams of agents to solve reinforcement problems. Brings to mind the idea of process design and bringing multiple resources to bear. Can it be more…
From insideHPC
UberCloud Publishes Compendium Of Case Studies in Life Sciences
If you are considering moving some of your HPC workload to the Cloud, nothing leads the way like a good set of case studies in your scientific domain. To this end, our good friends at the UberCloud have published a compendium…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robot Comedy for Data?
Ultimately we will have to be able do a better job of getting data based on reactions to proposals. Is standup comedy using robots a model of how to get this kind of data?
What's the Deal With Robot Comedy?
How to teach a robot…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Look at Aibo Robot Dog Programming
Have mentioned this a number of times, we saw it demonstrated in Japan when it first came out, now more, specifically about how it can be programmed. Note again this has been around for 20 years. Liked the idea then , but…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ground Penetrating Radar for Driving?
This is unexpected. But it has been known that weather is a problem with classic methods, now will ground penetrating radar solve this problem?
MIT’s Ground-Penetrating Radar Looks Down for Perfect Self-Driving by Bill Howard…
From insideHPC
AMD EPYC Cloud Adoption Grows with Google Cloud
Today Google Cloud announced the beta availability of N2D VMs on Google Compute Engine powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors. The N2D family of VMs is a great option for customers running general purpose and high-performance…
From insideHPC
New Servers from Dell Technologies analyze data wherever it resides
Today Dell Technologies announced new solutions to help customers analyze data at the edge, outside of a traditional data center. With a host of new offerings—including new edge server designs, smaller modular data centers, enhanced…
From insideHPC
UK to establish Northern Intensive Computing Environment (NICE)
The N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research, N8 CIR, has been awarded £3.1m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Resources Council to establish a new Tier 2 computing facility in the north of England…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Working Through the Stages of Debugging
I found this Tweet by Katerina Borodina @ctrlshifti that claimed that the 5 stages of grief apply perfectly to debugging code
From Schneier on Security
Hacking McDonald's for Free Food
This hack was possible because the McDonald's app didn't authenticate the server, and just did whatever the server told it to do: McDonald's receipts in Germany end with a link to a survey page. Once you take the survey, you…
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
#Internet4All around the Globe in 2019: A Recap of UA Ambassador Work
By Dušan Stojičević, Vice Chair of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) 2019 was a busy and productive year for the UASG as we worked to spread awareness of an inclusive Internet in local communities around the world…
From The Eponymous Pickle
E-Mail Productivity
Nicely done short look at how to be more productive with too much e-mail. Tips, tricks and more ... brief too. In the enterprise, my most read posts were about email productivity.
The Suite Life: 4 tips for a more manageable…
From insideHPC
AMD Powers CARA Supercomputer from NEC in Dresden
The DLR German Aerospace Center dedicated its new CARA supercomputer in Dresden on February 5, 2020. With 1.746 Petaflops of performance on the Linpack benchmark, the AMD-powered system from NEC is currently rated #221 on the…