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 insideHPC
Video: Protecting Your Data, Protecting Your Hardware
"Thanks to the arrival of SSDs, the performance of storage systems can be boosted by orders of magnitude. While a considerable amount of software engineering has been invested in the past to circumvent the limitations of rotating…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Declarative programming is a dead-end for the lowly programmer
Most programmers focus on software execution. We want to understand what the computer is actually doing. Java, C, JavaScript, PHP, Python… all these languages make it easy to build any software you like. In these languages, even…
From insideHPC
OpenACC Building Momentum going into GTC
Today the OpenACC standards group continues announced a set of additional hackathons and a broad range of learning opportunities taking place during the upcoming GPU Technology Conference being held in San Jose, CA April 4-7,…
From Schneier on Security
Interesting Lottery Terminal Hack
It was a manipulation of the terminals. The 5 Card Cash game was suspended in November after Connecticut Lottery and state Department of Consumer Protection officials noticed there were more winning tickets than the game's parameters…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Towards Intelligent Crowdsourcing
Always thought there would be value in intelligently directing a crowdsourcing effort. Our own experiments showed it was difficult to manage. The below appears to point to a better means to direct the results and feed machine…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Sonification
Using sound to detect patterns in data. Never got this idea to work in practice, but others have. Under certain circumstances our ears can discern patterns better than our eyes. How can this also be combined with analytics…
From The Noisy Channel
Hand-coded rules won’t scale.
But a bit of QA would go a long way. And we should all know better than to set an unsupervised bot free on Twitter.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Lessons From Two Artificial Intelligences
Artificial Intelligence has been in the news. Last week Google got a lot of great press with some AI software that learned how to play the ancient game of Go. (Google's AlphaGo scores 4-1 against South Korean Go player) This…
From Schneier on Security
FBI vs. Apple: Who Is Helping the FBI?
On Monday, the FBI asked the court for a two-week delay in a scheduled hearing on the San Bernardino iPhone case, because some "third party" approached it with a way into the phone. It wanted time to test this access method.…
From The Noisy Channel
Our AI Children Need Supervision
Reading about Microsoft’s misadventures with it’s “Tay” chatbot, I immediately remembered a similar incident several years ago.
From Computational Complexity
Complexity versus Complexity
For those interested, I've started writing posts for the Predictwise Blog. Predictwise makes predictions of future events such as who will win the Republican Nomination (currently Trump with an 80% probability) based on prediction…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Building Amazon Echo Rival?
Been involved in examination of the voice channel in the enterprise and smart home for some time now. The Amazon Echo has received much attention, but is Google now building something that might compete? They have worked hard…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Just How Smart are Smart Machines?
Very good piece from some of our communications with MT Sloan. Read the whole thing. May require some registration. Again, very non technical, management approach to the question. Just How Smart Are Smart Machines? Thomas…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Affordable Technology to Mitigate Hearing Loss
Contributions to this post were made by Elizabeth Mynatt, CCC Vice Chair and Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech. Dr. Mynatt was a member of the President’s Council of Advisors for Science…
From insideHPC
Video: The State of Linux Containers
"With Docker v1.9 a new networking system was introduced, which allows multi-host network- ing to work out-of-the-box in any Docker environment. This talk provides an introduction on what Docker networking provides, followed …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wharton Customer Analyticast
Previewing nowvia Marin Hitch Associate Director, Marketing & CommunicationsIntroducing the, "Wharton Customer Analyticast"WCAI has launched a podcast, "The Wharton Customer Analyticast," where we'll have WCAI constituents share…
From insideHPC
Lenovo Powers Phoenix Supercomputer at University of Adelaide
Researchers at the University of Adelaide will soon have access to a new Lenovo supercomputer named "Phoenix" with as much as 30 times more computing power than before.
The post Lenovo Powers Phoenix Supercomputer at University…From insideHPC
How Intel Worked with the DEEP Consortium to Challenge Amdahl’s Law
Funded by the European Commission in 2011, the DEEP project was the brainchild of scientists and researchers at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in Germany. The basic idea is to overcome the limitations of standard HPC …
From Schneier on Security
Cryptography Is Harder Than It Looks
Writing a magazine column is always an exercise in time travel. I'm writing these words in early December. You're reading them in February. This means anything that's news as I write this will be old hat in two months, and anything…
From insideHPC
Intrinsic Vectorization for Intel Xeon Phi
"It is important to be able to express algorithms and then the coding in an architecture independent manner to gain maximum portability. Vectorization, using the available CPUs and coprocessors such as the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Look at Some New Dimensions of Fintech
Just sent to me by a Fintech contact, made me think:Lots of places for innovation to play out in financial/insurance space. Consider insurance defined as a means of dealing with a portfolio of risk.Also looked at smart contract…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bill Gates on Quantum Computing in Cloud
In CACM: Quite an interesting view of this potential next step to computing. Have followed this for a long time, see the tag below. Including links to overviews of the idea.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Annedroids: A STEM Show with a Positive Impact on Girls
Some time ago, I shared info about a STEM show that premiered on TVO back in 2014: Annedroids. Recently, the show's PR specialist followed up with me to share some really interesting research about the positive impact the show…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google is Sharing Cloud AI
Nice to see this happen, As always like to see demonstrations as to how it can be practically applied in the enterprise. Will be examining this. In Wired: Google is once again sharing its state-of-art artificial intelligence…
From BLOG@CACM
Computational Thinking, 10 Years Later
It’s been 10 years since I published my three-page "Computational Thinking" viewpoint in the March 2006 issue of the Communications of the ACM.
From Schneier on Security
FBI's Cyber Most Wanted List
The FBI just added two members of the Syrian Electronic Army to its cyber most-wanted list. I had no idea that the FBI had a cyber most-wanted list....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Detecting Funny
The emergence of a New Yorker crowdsourcing system that tries to determine, with interaction and algorithm, what is funny. In CNet. Seems this could also be linked to Cyc and perhaps Lucid, to determine the subtlety of ourhere …
From The Eponymous Pickle
MicroInsurance
This and commentary on it made me think. Recently dealt with a related insurance problem: " Explore New Kinds Of Insurance ... Customers and businesses are desperately seeking workable solutions to their problems. With microinsurance…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft and Lowes with Augmented Reality
In the Forrester Blog: Augmented retailing, it might be called. Is it enough of an engagement factor to drive sales? DIY retail has often been mentioned as a place where this would work well. This appears to be a demonstration…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Great Innovative Idea- Indefinite Scalability for Living Computation
The following Great Innovative Idea is from David H. Ackley from the University of New Mexico. His Indefinite Scalability for Living Computation paper was one of the winners at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) sponsored…