Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2021
From insideHPC
Opus Interactive Expands Multicloud Services across AWS, GCP and Azure with Scality RING and Zenko Open Source
San Francisco – Feb. 11, 2021 – Scality announced today that Opus Interactive, a cloud, colocation and IT services company, is using Scality RING and Zenko to deliver enhanced services, including data management across multicloud…
From insideHPC
CHIPS Alliance Appoints Rob Mains as Executive Director
February 11, 2021 — CHIPS Alliance, a consortium advancing common and open hardware for interfaces, processors and systems, today announced the appointment of Rob Mains as the organization’s executive director. Mains has more…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Infants as a Model for Perceiving Language
Classic kind of approach, , can we have systems learn knowledge like language? Have followed the idea for many years.
Scientists Develop Computational Approach to Understand How Infants Perceive Language By News-Medical Life…From The Eponymous Pickle
Human Buildings Outweigh Life on Earth
An interesting Malthusian kind of statistic, but not sure what it really means we should do about it.
Human ‘stuff’ now outweighs all life on Earth By Erik Stokstad , in Science Mag.
It’s not just your storage unit that’s…From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
An Interview with Bushra Anjum, ACM-W Standing Committees Co-Chair
Web series "Celebrating Technology Leaders" brings stories and advice from engaging speakers, with diverse careers in computing, directly to our global audience.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for Applicants- Networking Tour in Artificial Intelligence
Are you a Ph.D. candidate or postdoctoral researcher in the field of artificial intelligence looking for a new opportunity? Do you want to connect with leading research groups and research institutions from Germany? The DAAD’s…
From insideHPC
AI and Weather Expert Amy McGovern To Keynote RMACC’s HPC Symposium
Boulder, CO – Feb. 10, 2021 — Dr. Amy McGovern, the Lloyd G. and Joyce Austin Presidential Professor in the School of Computer Science and School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, will be the second day keynote speaker…
From insideHPC
Unikie Joins the Edge AI and Vision Alliance to Advance Its Offering to the US Market
February 10, 2021 – Deep technology Finland-based company Unikie Inc. has joined the worldwide Edge AI and Vision Alliance industry partnership. Unikie is specialized in demanding device-edge-cloud-based software and aims to …
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
News from the ACM-W Scholarships Committee
The pandemic has caused many small and not so small changes in everyone's life. We know that women are being disproportionately affected by it.
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Far Side Cartoon
The Far Side on squid.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
From insideHPC
NeuReality Out of Stealth with $8M Seed for AI Compute Infrastructure
Tel Aviv – Feb. 10, 2021 – NeuReality, an Israeli startup developing high performance AI compute for cloud data centers and edge nodes, emerges from stealth today with $8M seed from Cardumen Capital, OurCrowd and Varana Capital…
From insideHPC
RapidAPI Acquires Paw, Extends API Development Platform
San Francisco —February 10, 2021—RapidAPI, a platform to find, connect to, and manage thousands of APIs, announced today the acquisition of Paw, a leading API design and collaboration tool. The acquisition enables RapidAPI to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Considering Robot Consciousness
OK, we are far from this, still sci fi. but worth a thought. So we will be ready then.
If a Robot Is Conscious, Is It OK to Turn It Off? The Moral Implications of Building True AI By Anand Vaidya
In the Star Trek: The NextThe…From The Eponymous Pickle
SolarWinds Hacking Overviewed
Considerable look at the problem and many links to current work in progress.
By David Geer Commissioned by CACM Staff
U.S. government agencies were among those affected by the Solarwinds hack.
A nine-month…From insideHPC
HPE Supercomputer Installed at Oak Ridge for U.S. Air Force
HPE has delivered a two-systems-in-one supercomputer to support weather modeling and forecasting for the U.S. Air force and Army. The HPC system, powered by two HPE Cray EX supercomputers, is now operational at Oak Ridge National…
From insideHPC
Khronos Releases SYCL 2020 Specification — Closer Alignment with ISO C++
Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the ratification and public release of the SYCL 2020 final specification—the open standard for single source C+…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Weakness Imperils Encryption
Click through to access Bloomberg. Regarding use of quantum computing. Following up on details.
A Swiss Company Says It Found Weakness That Imperils Encryption
By Ryan Gallagher in Bloomberg
February 7, 2021, 2:00 AM EST
Discovery…From insideHPC
oneAPI DPC++ in SYCL 2020 Final Spec
oneAPI Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) features are included in the SYCL 2020 final specification, released today by The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards. …
From insideHPC
Lenovo to Power SURF Dutch National Supercomputer
Amsterdam — February 8, 2021 – Lenovo Data Center Group (DCG) announced it will deliver high-performance computer (HPC) infrastructure for SURF, the ICT cooperative for education and research in the Netherlands. The €20 million…
From insideHPC
ORNL Now Accepting Abstracts for SMC 2021
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is now accepting abstracts for the 2021 Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences and Engineering Conference (SMC 2021), a premier event for discussing the latest developments…
From BLOG@CACM
Lessons From and For Online Teaching
The troika model for successful online teaching.
From insideHPC
Inspur: 4-Socket Server Achieves SPECpower Benchmark Record, Performance-to-Power Ratio up by 52.4%
San Jose — Jan. 9, 2021 — Inspur Information, an IT infrastructure solutions provider, announced the Inspur NF8480M6, a high-end 4-socket rackmount server, achieved record power and performance evaluation, carried out by Standard…
From insideHPC
Q-CTRL AI-Based Tools Enable Quantam Computers to ‘Self-Tune’
Los Angeles, Feb. 10, 2021 – An AI-based toolset developed by scientists at Q-CTRL enables quantum computers to optimize their own performance autonomously without user intervention, the company said. The building blocks of quantum…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On the cost of converting ASCII to UTF-16
Many programming languages like Java, JavaScript and C# represent strings using UTF-16 by default. In UTF-16, each ‘character’ uses 16 bits. To represent all 1 million unicode characters, some special ‘characters’ can be combined…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
National Robotics Initiative 3.0
Contributions to this post were provided by CCC Council member Holly Yanco (University of Massachusetts, Lowell). In 2009, the CCC published a report, A Roadmap for US Robotics, From Internet to Robotics (a.k.a. the Robotics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Zero Trust
Elements of Zero Trust
Closing the Cloud Permissions Gap to Achieve Zero Trust: An AWS Risk Assessment by Sarah on January 26, 2021 Author: Raj Mallempati, COO of CloudKnox
Whether it is to adapt to remote work, improve innovation…From insideHPC
4 Cloud Vendors Held 67% of $129B Market in Q4
Data researched by Trading Platforms indicates that the top four cloud infrastructure vendors accounted for 67 percent of the market share during Q4 2020. Amazon Web Services had the largest share at 32 percent, followed by Microsoft…
From insideHPC
EvidentIQ: Data Science Group Created from XClinical, Carenity and Fortress Medical
Today it was announced that Andreas Weber has been appointed CEO of EvidentIQ, the newly formed life science group from the merger of clinical software vendors XClinical and Fortress Medical with social platform Carenity. The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
CEO Warns of Use of Algorithms
A warning, but they and we use algorithms in so many things, and Apple of course for all the right purposes.
Apple CEO Sounds Warning of Algorithms Pushing Society Towards Catastrophe By ZDNet
January 29, 2021
Apple CEO Tim…From insideHPC
DDN Appoints Amy Medeiros SVP Corporate Marketing and Inside Sales for DDN and Tintri
Chatsworth, Calif. – Feb. 9, 2021 – DDN, an artificial intelligence (AI) and multi-cloud data management solutions company, today announced Amy Medeiros has been named SVP, corporate Marketing and inside sales. She will be responsible…