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
Game Plan for Quantum Computing
Good thoughts on the new technology and its specific applications.
A game plan for quantum computing
February 2020 | Article McKinsey
By Alexandre Ménard, Ivan Ostojic, Mark Patel, and Daniel Volz
A game plan for quantum computing…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
ACM-W North America News
ACM-W North America welcomes the newest ACM-W Student chapter, California State University at Chico! Shout out to Bryan Dixon (faculty sponsor), Tanya Bellen Bonilla (Chair), Paige Marie Jones (Vice Chair) and Maena Haroldson…
From Schneier on Security
Apple's Tracking-Prevention Feature in Safari has a Privacy Bug
Last month, engineers at Google published a very curious privacy bug in Apple's Safari web browser. Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention, a feature designed to reduce user tracking, has vulnerabilities that themselves allow…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why all Those Satellites?
Been watching all those Starlink satellite launches. 60 per launch. Being an observational astronomer ave been concerned about throwing all that stuff into orbit. Here is the motivation.
Elon Musk Says He's About to Deliver…
From insideHPC
KU Leuven in Belgium joins iRODS Consortium
The iRODS Consortium has welcomed KU Leuven as its newest Consortium member. As one of Europe’s oldest universities, Belgium’s KU Leuven boasts a long tradition of ground-breaking research and high quality education. With a new…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bayer's use of Digital Twins, Decision Science
Another example of AI and Digital Twins being used to construct virtual models at major enterprises.
Bayer uses digital twins to reshape business strategy
Bayer Crop Science has created 'virtual factories' to provide dynamic digital…
From insideHPC
Distributed HPC Applications with Unprivileged Containers
Felix Abecassis and Jonathan Calmels gave this talk at FOSDEM 2020. "We will present the challenges in doing distributed deep learning training at scale on shared heterogeneous infrastructure. At NVIDIA, we use containers extensively…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Samsung's Imaginary Keyboard
A long time student of ways to efficiently communicate with machines. This not being sold yet,
Samsung’s Latest AI Project Is an Imaginary Keyboard for Your Phone By Ryan Whitwam in ExtremeTech
The typing experience on smartphones…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neon Digital Avatars
Interesting in seeing Samsung involved in this, meaning unclear.
Neon CEO explains the tech behind his overhyped ‘artificial humans’ in TheVerge
Neon Genesis Evangelicalism
The most buzzed-about company at CES 2020 doesn’t make…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (February 8th 2020)
It is often believed that radiations are bad for you. To the contrary, David et al. report that life expectancy is approximately 2.5 years longer in people living in areas with an elevated background radiation in the USA. Birth…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Simulating Galaxy Clusters with XSEDE Supercomputers
In this TACC podcast, researchers describe how they are using XSEDE supercomputers to run some of the highest resolution simulations ever of galaxy clusters. One really cool thing about simulations is that we know what's going…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Systems Administrator at D.E. Shaw Research
D.E. Shaw Research is seeking Systems Administrators for Servers, Clusters and Supercomputers in our Job of the Week. "Our research effort is aimed at achieving major scientific advances in the field of biochemistry and fundamentally…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On AI Crisis of Confidence
More like a crisis of expectations. Understanding is good, useful, needed. But it is not the driving need. The failures that will occur will first be those of results rather than those of understanding. Its significant,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Possibilities Created by 5G together with IOT
Some useful starting thoughts on the possibilities driven by the emergence of these technologies. Sill qite a bit to do to make this really remarkable, like data security.
Mind-Blowinguossibilities Created by 5G-Enhanced IoT…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: An MRI Scan of a Squid's Brain
This paper is filled with brain science that I do not understand (news article), but fails to answer what I consider to be the important question: how do you keep a live squid still for long enough to do an MRI scan on them?…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talk on Service Design from ISSIP
I am a long time member of the below:
Upcoming Presentation from ISSIP: International Society of Service Innovation Professionals
Horrors and heroes of building design capabilities in organizations: an industry experience
Speakers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
7 Eleven Experiments with No Cashier Store
Would imagine this concept would work best where speed is of the essence. Another test to watch.
7-Eleven tries out an Amazon Go-like store in Retailwire by George Anderson plus expert comments.
Convenience store giant 7-Eleven…
From Schneier on Security
Security in 2020: Revisited
Ten years ago, I wrote an essay: "Security in 2020." Well, it's finally 2020. I think I did pretty well. Here's what I said back then: There's really no such thing as security in the abstract. Security can only be defined in…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
National Academy of Engineering Elects 87 Members and 18 International Members!
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has elected 87 new members and 18 foreign members. Six computing researchers are among those elected this year. They include Joel Emer (MIT / NVIDIA) for “quantitative analysis of computer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Autonomous Vehicles to Bypass Safety for Testing?
Note the specific mention of Nuro, which is testing with Kroger and others. I am imagining how it might work in a suburb like ours.
U.S. Lets Autonomous Vehicle Bypass Safety Rules
Associated Press via CACM
Tom Krisher
The U.S.
…
From insideHPC
Avaso to Deliver Worldwide Support for GRC Immersive Cooling
Immersive cooling vendor GRC has announced a new business collaboration with Avaso, an IT solutions provider with global service delivery and warranty capabilities. Through this collaboration, Avaso will provide installation
…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Research should not stop with the research paper
The practice of academic research is based on the production of formal documents that undergo formal reviewers by peers. We routinely evaluate academics for jobs and promotions based on their publication output. When asked about…
From insideHPC
CENIC 2020 Conference to showcase Growing Contributions of Women in Computer Networking
Studies have found that men tend to drastically outnumber women at technology conferences, limiting female viewpoints, minimizing women’s contributions to leadership, and exhibiting fewer female role models. At CENIC’s 2020 Conference…
From insideHPC
Sylabs releases SingularityPRO 3.5
Today Sylabs announced the release of SingularityPRO 3.5, a popular container platform for HPC, supercomputing, and AI. "SingularityPRO 3.5, released January 21st, 2020, brings exciting new features to the long-term professionally…
From Schneier on Security
New Ransomware Targets Industrial Control Systems
EKANS is a new ransomware that targets industrial control systems: But EKANS also uses another trick to ratchet up the pain: It's designed to terminate 64 different software processes on victim computers, including many that…
From insideHPC
Interview: Exascale Computing Project Update for 2020
In this video, Exascale Computing Project Director Doug Kothe describes how disciplined and tailored project management led to very impressive results in what was likely the most comprehensive independent review of the project…
From The Eponymous Pickle
CPG : Navigating Industry 4.0
Having been in that industry an interesting take, have heard relatively little about the definition of 4.0.
2020 Consumer Products Industry Outlook
Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) trends: Navigating Industry 4.0
With economic uncertainty…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tracking the Movement of Cryptocurrency
Quite an extensive look at the process and how it must be adapted to make sure monetary regulations are enforced. And how will this further be be enforced under rules like GDPR and other standards? Implications for the enforcement…
From insideHPC
Podcast: AMD to Power New ECMWF Supercomputer for Weather Forecasting
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC looks at the new ECMWF supercomputer. "This new system will give them roughly 5x more compute power than their current system. The new box is an Atos BullSequana XH2000 fueled by high-end AMD…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Counting Votes By Humans
A new way to agree on calculations Cropped from ABC News source Troy Price is the Iowa Democratic Party Chair. He was in charge of Iowa’s primary vote. The vote totals were due Monday night but have not been finished, now three…