Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2015
From insideHPC
SC15 Seeking More Teams for the Student Cluster Competition
Sign up your team today! "The Student Cluster Competition is a high energy event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers. Created as an opportunity…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Manager of HPC at KAUST
KAUST in Saudi Arabia is seeking a Manager of HPC in our Job of the Week.
From insideHPC
HPC User Forum Returns to Norfolk April 13-15
IDC has published the agenda for their next HPC User Forum. The event will take place April 13-15 in Norfolk, VA. "Don't miss the chance to hear top experts on these high-innovation, high-growth areas of the HPC market. You'll…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Growing Influence of the CIO
CIO Mag: But how will that influence be used? " ... On the one hand, this change is driven by new problems, such as high visibility data breaches and regulatory demands for tightening data security. However, there is also growing…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Still More Hardware for Learning Software–But Why?
I get email. And I get twitter followers. Often these new followers or email senders are promoting some new gadget for teaching. This week it was RobotIX and Hackball. Hackball is looking to get funded via Kickstarter so it’s…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A New VR for Consumers
I just asked a question about the arrival of a new VR. We explored Virtual Reality in a number of retail related spaces. A piece in Radar OReilly explores its next wave, which seems to finally include the real consumer:" .…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Tableau Tutorial Blog
Always liked Tableau, brought it into the enterprise. This colorful blog gets you started. By Jenny (Xiao) Zhang, Technology Professional and Enthusiast. Good idea, nicely done, I am following. Thank you.
From Schneier on Security
The TSA's FAST Personality Screening Program Violates the Fourth Amendment
New law journal article: "A Slow March Towards Thought Crime: How the Department of Homeland Security's FAST Program Violates the Fourth Amendment," by Christopher A. Rogers. From the abstract: FAST is currently designed for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Update on HoloLens
More on the Hololens. I can think of many applications, but yet to see one in the wild that really makes sense in context. Its all about the details. Waiting for the possibilities.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Capitol Hill Presentation on “Deconstructing Precision Agriculture”
Contributions to this post were made by Shashi Shekhar, Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member and Distinguished University Professor at the University of Minnesota. Task Force on American Innovation along with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Challenge of Cognitive Assistants
Via the Cognitive Systems Institute. Some excellent points are made in this slideshare. Advisory systems are probably the most important approach to AI for typical business use. We addressed this in much detail during the expert…
From The Eponymous Pickle
An Innovation Canvas
Talk today given at the Cognitive Systems Institute: Michael Wollowski “The Innovation Canvas: A tool to design products and business models” Rose-Hulman School .... Talk Slides.
From insideHPC
Podcast: A Tour of the Universe & Selected Cosmic Mysteries
In this podcast from the Swinburne University of Technology Astrophysics and Supercomputing series, Katherine Mack from the University of Melbourne presents: A Tour of the Universe and Selected Cosmic Mysteries.
From Computational Complexity
(1/2)! = sqrt(pi) and other conventions
(This post is inspired by the book The cult of Pythagoras: Math and Myths which I recently read and reviewed. See here for my review.) STUDENT: The factorial function is only defined on the natural numbers. Is there some way…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Wave of Restructuring
In Adage: Seen much of this in recent weeks, received lots of offers to chat. " ... Leaving P&G? Giant Advertiser's Restructuring Spawns an Ad Campaign Retirement Corp. of America Targets P&G 'Retirees' With Planning for …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Managing Mission Critical Knowledge
There are all kinds of levels of knowledge. Also, knowledge has direct value, and risk. In the HBR:" ... When executives talk about “knowledge management” today, the conversation usually turns very quickly to the challengeTantalizing…
From insideHPC
ClusterStor Solution for HPC and Big Data
The ClusterStor SDA is built on Seagate’s successful ClusterStor family of high performance storage solutions for HPC and Big Data, providing unmatched file system performance, optimized productivity and the HPC industry’s highest…
From Schneier on Security
Now Corporate Drones are Spying on Cell Phones
The marketing firm Adnear is using drones to track cell phone users: The capture does not involve conversations or personally identifiable information, according to director of marketing and research Smriti Kataria. It uses signal…
From Putting People First
Smartphones are addictive and should carry health warning, say academics
University of Derby finds smartphone users in study spent average 3.6 hours a day on devices, often causing severe distraction from relationships and ‘real life’. Haroon Siddique reports in The Guardian: Smartphones are psychologically…
From insideHPC
Video: Bill Kramer on How Blue Waters Advances Science
In this video, Bill Kramer from NCSA describes the ground-breaking science enabled by the Blue Waters supercomputer.
From Putting People First
Is it time to re-examine human-centered design?
Is it time to re-examine our anthropocentrism in design, asks ASU design professor Prasad Boradkar and to extend design’s locus of action towards biocentrism. “Clearly, the things we design with such diligent research and utmost…
From insideHPC
NSF Grant to Expand Indiana University GlobalNOC in Asia-Pacific
Today the Indiana University Global Research Network Operations Center (GlobalNOC) today announced the award of a major new five-year, $4.8 million grant from the NSF.
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Acquires AlchemyAPI Text and Image Mining
Makes sense that IBM would add select capabilities to Watson that it does not have in house. Unstructured text and image mining are an excellent example. In our own earlier examination of text analytics, did not look atAlchemyAPI…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Homo Ludens: People are at Play
Why think about game dynamics? It can be useful in the right context. Any sufficiently advanced work is indistinguishable from play - @sebpaquet See Wikipedia on Homo Ludens. We are all at play, to some degree. Via…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Need for Human Touch in Retail
In K@W: We examined a number of touch based methods in retail engagement:When Does the ‘Human Touch’ Matter in Retail? While retailers will see failures and successes as they move from one channel to another, the bottom line…
From insideHPC
Code Modernization – Why it is so Important
For about 40 years, developers and users could count on an increase in CPU performance that would make applications run faster. However, with the slowdown in constant clock rate increases being replaced by additional core counts…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GMA Out of Stock Report
Well done report, with lots of useful statistics and guidance." ... FMI/GMA Trading Partner Alliance report: Solving the out-of-stock problem ... Out-of-stocks remain at an 8% average rate among food retailers and manufacturers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital to Overtake TV Ad Spending in 2 Years
In Adage: Comparing digital to TV ads, a prediction. But how about streaming TV via digital?
From The Eponymous Pickle
DebateGraph: Collective, Collaborative Wisdom in Action
This week’s presenter for the ISSIP SIG Education & Research Service Evangelist Series was David Price, Ph.D. Organizational Learning (Cambridge University), Judge Business School, Consultant & Public Policy Advisor. He willCollaborative…
From insideHPC
Video: Teachers Shoot a Visual Tour of SC14 in New Orleans
In this video from SC14, Arni Mittal and Ethan Oayne from the John Monash Science School in Melbourne embark on a journey to New Orleans to uncover the world of supercomputing.