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 Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Dear Colleague Letter: Computer Science for All
National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) James Kurose and NSF Assistant Director for Education and Human Resources (EHR) Joan Ferrini-Mundy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
McD's First Loyalty Program
A first .. McDonalds to join the App based loyalty programs. " ... Nation's Restaurant News noted that McDonald's has been building up its digital team to better tap customer-facing technology. Margo Georgiadis, president of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Learning Methods for Neural Networks
We used mostly error back propagation. How will this influence new methods being used for classification? Technical, worth a deeper look in the linked paper. Possible link to IOT sensory applications?In CACM: " ... The model…
From Schneier on Security
Punishment and Trust
Interesting research: "Third-party punishment as a costly signal of trustworthiness, by Jillian J. Jordan, Moshe Hoffman, Paul Bloom,and David G. Rand, Nature: Abstract: Third-party punishment (TPP), in which unaffected observers…
From insideHPC
Video: The National Strategic Computing Initiative
"U.S. President Obama signed an Executive Order creating the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) on July 31, 2015. In the order, he directed agencies to establish and execute a coordinated Federal strategy in high-performance…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Better Know a Committee – 2016 edition
The CSTA Board of Directors is a working board. Board members work closely with the Executive Director to articulate the vision for the organization, plan initiatives and activities, and help carry out the organization’s business…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Caution with the Statistical P Value
Statistical measures like P-Values and R Squares are dragged out to prove a number of things. But caution should be considered. This Nature article does a good job of explaining the needed cautions:" ... Scientific method:P…
From insideHPC
Cyber Dyne’s KIMEME Software Comes to Penguin On Demand
Today Penguin Computing announced the availability Cyber Dyne’s KIMEME software on the POD public HPC cloud service. "It’s now possible to submit and manage large DOEs and optimization simulations flawlessly in the cloud,” said…
From insideHPC
Brookhaven Lab is the latest Nvidia GPU Research Center
Today Nvidia announced that Brookhaven National Laboratory has been named a 2016 GPU Research Center. "The center will enable Brookhaven Lab to collaborate with Nvidia on the development of widely deployed codes that will benefit…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Artificial intelligence is mostly a matter of computational power?
Unless you live under a rock, you should know by now that AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence, has beaten a world champion at the game of Go. After Tic Tac Toe, Checker and Chess, Go was the last conventional board games where…
From insideHPC
Dell Powers New Pearcy Cluster at CSIRO in Australia
The CSIRO national science agency in Australia has teamed up with Dell to deliver a new HPC cluster called "Pearcey." The Pearcey cluster supports CSIRO research activities in a broad range of areas such as Bioinformatics, Fluid…
From Computational Complexity
On Phillip Rogaway's The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work.
Some people have emailed me asking me to blog about the paper The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work by Phillip Rogaway I urge you to read it, even if you disagree with it. Especially if you disagree with it. (Hmm- how will…
From BLOG@CACM
Alphago Is Not the Solution to AI
Some of the discussion around this seems like giddy overstatement.
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at How Blockchain Will Create the Internet of Value
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at blockchain technology with Chris Skinner, author of ValueWeb – How FinTech firms are using mobile and blockchain technologies to create the Internet of Value. "The Internet of…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 14 March 2016
The US went on to Daylight Savings Time over the weekend. Most of my devices updated their clocks automatically. How that happens is an interesting discussion. Did you know that companies regularly have to update their software…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cost and Process Model for IOT
n Gartner. An example of a cost model for IOT. Part 1. Have not looked at it in detail, Even without using something this detailed directly it is useful to think about elements that should be considered. Also how a more…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Classification Methods in R
We used classification methods to determine, for example, how marketing should be placed or how it should be adapted. Most of this work was done long before R, but with adapted codes, I am still in the process of understanding…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Free O'Reilly Book on Graph Databases
This approach to do analytics is too little used. We always called it Graph Analytics. This free ebook, sponsored by Neo4j, is a good introduction. Polinode is known for its ease of integration for HR survey data. There…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Analytics Tools
Bernard Marr outlines best analytics tools. Non-technical. I like this because it is business decision oriented. Presented at the business manager level, not for the coder or the statistician or 'data scientist'. The smart…
From insideHPC
Convergent Science Speeds Indycar Engine Development
Engineers at Ilmor are using novel CFD software from Convergent Science to dramatically reduce prototype build costs for Indycar engines. "Ilmor is the company behind the design of Chevrolet’s championship-winning Indycar engine…
From insideHPC
Video: What’s New with Fortran?
Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continuous use for over half a century in computationally intensive…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Charting a Path to Digital Value
In the Cisco Blog:Digital disruption is here. by Shaun Kirby According to a 2015 survey from the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation (DBT Center), a joint initiative of Cisco and the Institute of Management Development…
From Schneier on Security
Analysis of Yemeni Cell Phone Metadata
This research shows the power of cell phone metadata. From an article by the author: Yemen has experienced an array of violent incidents and political turmoil in recent years, ranging from al Qaeda militant attacks to drone strikes…
From The Noisy Channel
Collaboration isn’t a Technology Problem
Collaboration is hard. Technology can improve how we collaborate, but effective collaboration isn’t purely — or even primarily—a technical…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP and Roambi
Forrester view with further comment.Forrester Quick Take: SAP Acquires Roambi, Opens New Chapter In Mobile BI ... Posted by Martha Bennett
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wolfram Programming Lab v Open Source
An introduction to programming, start for free .... Wolfram Programming Lab. Have always been impressed by capabilities and direction. Below is true, but we are starting to see increasing use of open source, free entry packages…
From insideHPC
Video: System Software in Post K Supercomputer
"The next flagship supercomputer in Japan, replacement of K supercomputer, is being designed toward general operation in 2020. Compute nodes, based on a manycore architecture, connected by a 6-D mesh/torus network is considered…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Senior Cluster Architect at Intel in Albuquerque
Intel in Albuquerque is seeking a Senior Cluster Architect in our Job of the Week. "The Senior Cluster Architect will be responsible for design, support, and maintenance of HPC (High Performance Computing) cluster hardware and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google's Mobile Research Team
This was the kind of thing we did in our innovation centers. We watched how people were exposed to, bought and used our products. The idea of sending out mobile teams to do this was brought up, but never implemented in this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cognitive and Affective Biases in High Stakes Decision Making
Join us in this Group Discussion: " ... Dominique Liana Russo, Harvard University, gave a fascinating presentation today on “Cognitive and Affective Biases in High Stakes Decision Making” as part of our Cognitive Systems Institute…