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 Schneier on Security
Data Is a Toxic Asset
Thefts of personal information aren't unusual. Every week, thieves break into networks and steal data about people, often tens of millions at a time. Most of the time it's information that's needed to commit fraud, as happened…
From Putting People First
Collaborative consumption: from value for users to a society with values
Four European Union consumers associations – OCU (Spain), Altroconsumo (Italy), DECO-Proteste (Portugal) and Test-Achats/Test Aankoop (Belgium) – in collaboration with Cibersomosaguas Research Group (Universidad Complutense of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Benefits of Design Thinking for Innovation
In Linkedin: " ... Design thinking is all about creating something from ground zero. You start with a clean slate, not with a baggage of something that already exists. The benefits are enormous as it allows for a more exhaustive…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft's Data Science Startups
In Geekwire: Meet the 10 machine learning and data science startups in Microsoft’s Seattle Accelerator By Taylor Soper. An indication of directions to come.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Statistics is overrated: the rise of data science
With the industrial and scientific revolutions, we saw the rise of enormous bureaucracies collecting reliable numbers. For the first time in history, we could ask about the total production of silver in England and get a meaningful…
From insideHPC
Video: Reproducibility in High Performance Computing
Ensuring reliability and reproducibility in computational research raises unique challenges in the supercomputing context. Specialized architectures, extensive and customized software, and complex workflows all raise barriers…
From Schneier on Security
DROWN Attack
Earlier this week, we learned of yet another attack against SSL/TLS where an attacker can force people to use insecure algorithms. It's called DROWN. Here's a good news article on the attack, the technical paper describing the…
From BLOG@CACM
What's Your Research?
Research is about solving problems.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Cryptography Pioneers Receive 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) congratulates Whitfield Diffie, former Chief Security Officer of Sun Microsystems and Martin E. Hellman, Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University on receiving…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Getting Started with Google Analytics
A nice piece from CIO that forms an introduction to Google Web Analytics. Its actually a good way to start thinking about how to use analytical data if you have a web site that is tracked.
From insideHPC
OCF Deploys 181 Teraflop “Grace” HPC Cluster at University College London
Researchers from across University College London are now benefitting from "Grace," a new 181 Teraflop HPC system named in honor of pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper. Designed and integrated by OCF in the UK, the Grace…
From insideHPC
HPC Finally Climbing to the Cloud
"Although commerce and consumers have been computing in the cloud for years, the high-performance computing sector has been more hesitant. But all that may now be changing. The cost of cloud computing for HPC is falling, while…
From insideHPC
EXTOLL Deploys Immersion Cooled Compute Booster at Jülich
Today Extoll, the German HPC innovation company, announced that is has it has successfully implemented its new GreenICE immersion cooling system at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. As part of the DEEP Dynamical Exascale Entry…
From insideHPC
PreFetch for Intel Xeon Phi – Part 2
"An interesting aspect to prefetching is the distance ahead of the data that is being used to prefetch more data. This is a critical parameter for success and can be defined as how many iterations ahead to issue a prefetch instruction…
From insideHPC
Video: Multi-Host Containerized Clusters – Using Docker Networking To Spin-Up SLURM
"With Docker v1.9 a new networking system was introduced, which allows multi-host networking to work out-of-the-box in any Docker environment. This talk provides an introduction on what Docker networking provides, followed by…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Echo as Assistant in Business
Have been testing the Echo in home for a year. It is my most used smart home device, by a long margin. Even ranks high in usage as a home entertainment device. Intrigued by the potential power of an attentive voice channel…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Billboards Tracking Cellphones
In CACM: Linking to an article in NPR. This was a method we looked at some time ago, in particular how it could be used to adapt advertising in retail. This seems to a more passive collection of data. False cell towersSee…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Aesthetics and Deep Learning
Understanding aesthetics with Deep Learning. A test of using deep learning neural nets to determine the aesthetics of photographic images.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Insight Mapping
By Barbara Fillip of NASA" ... Insight mapping is a variation of concept mapping that focuses on eliciting and documenting insights from any given event, activity or experience. It can be used by individuals, in support of team…
From Schneier on Security
Security Vulnerabilities in Wireless Keyboards
Many wireless keyboards have a security vulnerability that allow someone to hack the computer using the keyboard-computer link. (Technical details here.) An attacker can launch the attack from up to 100 meters away. The attacker…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sony Xperia Agent
A product that will challenge the Amazon Echo? In Business Insider: " ... Sony showed off a prototype of its Experia Agent, a smart home that would compete with the Echo, at Mobile World Congress 2016. And when the time comes…
From insideHPC
OrionX Appoints Big Data & HPC Expert Dan Olds as Partner
Pioneering a new consulting services model for strategy, marketing, and PR, OrionX today announced the appointment of Dan Olds as partner. Our clients value OrionX’s ability to understand their technology, their competition, …
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Blue Sky Ideas Track Held at AAAI-16
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 30th Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-16), February…
From Schneier on Security
The Mathematics of Conspiracy
This interesting study tries to build a mathematical model for the continued secrecy of conspiracies, and tries to predict how long before they will be revealed to the general public, either wittingly or unwittingly. The equation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Considering an Internet of Trees
Worked in the pulp and paper industry for a few years, so this is of interest. At the time we used satellite images, and I can see how this could be linked to image analysis. And applied broadly to agri industry IOT applications…
From insideHPC
Video: Introduction to RISC-V
Mellanox announced today that it has joined the RISC-V foundation as a Founding Platinum Sponsor. The RISC-V foundation promotes the open RISC-V instruction set architecture and associated hardware and software ecosystem for …
From Putting People First
User research to improve public-government interactions in the U.S.
The U.S. federal government needs to improve how it interacts with the public. Enter the Federal Front Door, an initiative to improve public-government interactions across the board. The team is currently exploring projects to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On AI and the Future of Civilization
Stephen Wolfram on AI and the future of civilization in the Edge. Conversation and lengthy transcript. More philosophical that I expected, but worth a hear. See also the wolfram tag link to see my past coverage of Wolfram…
From insideHPC
Bright Computing Partners with France-based Alineos
"Alineos clients are keen to simplify the installation of HPC, big data and OpenStack, and then blend these environments into a single view," said Clemens Engler, Director, Business Development in EMEA at Bright. "Bright is uniquely…
From insideHPC
Interview: ISC Cloud Absorbs into ISC High Performance
Registration opened today for the ISC 2016 conference, which takes place June 19-23 in Frankfurt. This year, the ISC 2016 conference program features an increased focus on Cloud, Machine Learning, and Robotics. In fact, insideHPC…