Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2016
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Virtual Assistant in Your Ear
In the BBC: Sony Xperia puts AI assistant in owner's ear ... By Leo Kelion. And much more about hands free additions to smartphone interaction. See also their other Xperia labeled voice applications.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Global Infrastructure
Bold Ideas to Transform Infrastructure ... There’s much more to be done to ensure we can deliver against 21st-century demands, according to participants in McKinsey’s Global Infrastructure Initiative. Additional articles and…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Scientists on Tumblr
Really great Tumblr feed. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Stonefight at the Goke Corral
Will there be any man left standing? Sensei’s Library player bio source Lee Sedol of South Korea, who is currently ranked #4 on the unofficial GoRatings list, may be on his way to being #5. AlphaGo, a computer project sponsored…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Forrester on Knowledge Discovery
A long time topic of interest. You can get the full report from Forrester with Registration. They cover a number of well known vendors in the space: " ... In Forrester’s 31-criteria evaluation, they've identified nine big…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Do You Have a Professional Learning Network (PLN)?
Before anyone can answer that question, a definition is needed. According to Brianna Crowley in her article, 3 Steps for Building a Professional Learning Network, at http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2014/12/31/3-steps-for-building…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Speeding Through Big Data with the Wrangler Supercomputer
In this TACC Podcast, Jorge Salazar reports that scientists and engineers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center have created Wrangler, a new kind of supercomputer to handle Big Data.
The post Podcast: Speeding Through Big Data…From insideHPC
SimScale Offers Online F1 Aerodynamics Workshop
Today SimScale in Munich announced an online F1 workshop series focused on aerodynamics. "Today SimScale in Munich announced an online F1 workshop series focused on aerodynamics. The live online sessions will take place on Thursdays…
From Wild WebMink
Joining A Community Means Accepting Its Norms
The progress of Microsoft towards acceptance into the open source community continues. The Azure team is definitely a force for good in the company, constantly pushing Microsoft’s developer teams to understand how important the…
From insideHPC
Video: Fast and Robust Communications Avoiding Algorithms
"This talk will address one of the main challenges in high performance computing which is the increased cost of communication with respect to computation, where communication refers to data transferred either between processors…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Through the Looking Glass at Quantum Computing
“As a research area, quantum computing is highly competitive, but if you want to buy a quantum computer then D-Wave Systems, founded in 1999, is the only game in town. Quantum computing is as promising as it is unproven. Quantum…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Grammar of Common Data Science Tools
In KDNuggets: Nice look at the practical differences between R and Python. Now working with groups that often to use both. As it has always been, people use what they are most familiar with, trained in, but then when things…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Defining Research
Proud of the fact that even in the goal driven enterprise I have done research. So what is research all about? As the CACM article by Bertrand Meyer asks: What is your research? On some topic rather than in some area. Made…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bayesian in R for Estimating Waiting Times
Nice example of using Bayesian estimation in R. Relatively simple example by James Dreiss. Developing and using Priors. Recall just this sort of question for a very different problem. Includes instructive code and visualization…
From Schneier on Security
Leaked ISIS Documents
Looks like tens of thousands of ISIS documents have been leaked. Where did they come from? We don't know: Documents listing the names of Islamic State fighters have been touted around the Middle East for months, dangled in front…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Some More VR Examples
The Verge provides some useful virtual reality examples they have experienced. Both playful, and apparently, useful in the office. When I talk to people about virtual and augmented reality I find myself giving the same examples…
From insideHPC
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Announces Haven OnDemand Machine Learning-as-a-Service
Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced HPE Haven OnDemand, an innovative cloud platform that provides advanced machine learning APIs and services that enable developers, startups and enterprises to build data-rich mobile …
From Schneier on Security
Espionage Tactics Against Tibetans
A Citizen Lab research study of Chinese attack and espionage tactics against Tibetan networks and users. This report describes the latest iteration in a long-running espionage campaign against the Tibetan community. We detail…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Federal Highway Administration Research Opportunity on Virtual and Augmented Reality
The National Research Council (NRC) Research Associateship Programs (RAP) promote excellence in scientific and technological research conducted by the U.S. government through the administration of programs offering graduate,…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in Education
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality - what is their future in education? Last year at ISTE I saw a number of exhibits of educational uses of virtual Reality. And of course there has been a lot of talk about Google Cardboard…
From Blog@Ubiquity
Tim Cook at the Pearly Gates
By now almost everything that can be said about the Apple-FBI riff has been said. The FBI wants to open the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone and Apple’s CEO Tim Cook wants to secure iPhones everywhere. It is a defining ……
From The Eponymous Pickle
On GE Aviation Digital
By David Joyce in the GE Bikeshop:" ... Industry NeedIn aviation, operating the finest engines, components and systems made anywhere in the world can be improved—by the use of data and analytics. A generation ago, a GE Aviation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Challenge and Value of Simplicity
Simplicity is challenging, but essential. A look from the retail perspective. In Retailwire: " .... For the third straight year, Aldi ranked first in Siegel+Gale's Global Brand Simplicity Index. The grocer was commended for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
PurePredictive Automating Data Science
Another data science automation play that is worth a look." ... Visualization tools are good. But they can only tell you where you've been.Let PurePredictive Help you Discover Where you are Going. ... PurePredictive automates…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Thoughts on Gartner BI Conference Next Week
Brought to my attention. The Gartner BI conference next week. Noted in particular the list of exhibitors. Wide view of corporate needs there. Who do you bet on now? And how does BI relate to data science? As an introduction…
From insideHPC
Debugging Slow Buffered Reads on the Lustre File System
"Buffered read performance under Lustre has been inexplicably slow when compared to writes or even direct IO reads. A balanced FDR-based Object Storage Server can easily saturate the network or backend disk storage using o_direct…
From insideHPC
Bull Supercomputer Aids Discovery of Gravitational Waves
The discovery of gravitational waves, announced by an international team of scientists, including Cardiff University’s Gravitational Physics Group, was verified using simulations of black-hole collisions produced on a Bull supercomputer…
From insideHPC
IBM Watson CTO Rob High to Keynote GPU Technology Conference
Today Nvidia announced that Rob High, IBM Fellow, VP and chief technology officer for Watson, will deliver a keynote at our GPU Technology Conference on April 6. High will describe the key role GPUs will play in creating systems…
From insideHPC
OpenMP and SIMD Instructions on Intel Xeon Phi
"Vector instruction sets have progressed over time, and it important to use the most appropriate vector instruction set when running on specific hardware. The OpenMP SIMD directive allows the developer to explicitly tell the …
From Schneier on Security
Hidden Credit Card Skimmers
New credit card skimmers are hidden inside the card readers, making them impossible to spot....