Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2017
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Why I Prefer Processing as a First Language to Teach
Once upon a time, almost 5 years ago, I wrote a post about Python vs Processing as a first language to learn. It became my only post to appear on Hacker News and still gets plenty of hits. The reflections in that post were quite…
From insideHPC
Call for Technical Papers: SC17 in Denver
SC17 has issues its Call for Technical Papers. The event takes place Nov 12-17 in Denver. "The Technical Papers Program at SC is the leading venue for presenting the highest-quality original research, from the foundations of
…
From insideHPC
Let The Compiler Do Its Thing
"In the past, developers would get best results if a loop was unrolled, that is, duplicating the body as many times as needed to that the operations could be operated on using full vectors. The number of iterations would reflect…
From Computational Complexity
International Science
I did some counting and the 35 academic faculty members in the Georgia Tech School of Computer Science come from 14 different countries. My co-authors come from at least 20 different nations. My 10 successful PhD students hail…
From Schneier on Security
Buzzword Watch: Prosilience
Summer Fowler at CMU has invented a new word: prosilience: I propose that we build operationally PROSILIENT organizations. If operational resilience, as we like to say, is risk management "all grown up," then prosilience is resilience…
From Putting People First
Exploring how and why we make financial choices
The Think Forward Initiative is an open source initiative by ING, CEPR (Centre for Economic Policy Research), Dell EMC, Microsoft, Dimension Data and Deloitte. Its goal is to gain a deeper understanding of financial decision
…
From Putting People First
Business as Unusual: Latest issue of Touchpoint, the service design journal
“Business as Unusual” was the theme of the ninth annual Service Design Global Conference held in Amsterdam and in its play on words, it recognises that service design is more and more becoming an established way of ‘doing business…
From Putting People First
Understanding life’s speed from an anthropological perspective
The latest issue of the Cultural Anthropology journal features a new contribution to the journal’s Openings and Retrospectives section: an Openings collection, “Speed,” edited by Vincent Duclos, Tomás Sánchez Criado, and Vinh…
From Putting People First
[Report] How US youth navigate the news landscape
Yesterday, the New York research institute Data & Society released the report How Youth Navigate the News Landscape (download) that explores how young people use mobile devices, messaging apps, and social media to consume breaking…
From insideHPC
Apply Now: OSC Summer Institute Programs Introduce Young Women to Exciting STEM Careers
Each summer the Ohio Supercomputer Center offers summer programs for high school students and middle school girls interested in experiencing the dynamic fields of high performance computing and networking. Applications for Summer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Reinforcement Learning for Machine and Human Performance
Playtime's Over
Technology Review
Emma Brunskill
" ... Reinforcement-learning techniques that enabled a computer to beat world-class human Go champions last year should be applied to much higher ambitions, according to Stanford…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How IOT is Changing the World
Business emphasis and non-technical. Pointer to DSC article:
How IoT is Changing the World: Cases from Visa, Airbus, Bosch & SNCF
Posted by Ronald van Loon on February 23, 2017 ...
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Blue Sky Ideas Track Held at AAAI-17
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 31st Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-17), February…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Commercial Alexa to Field Calls
In Engadget. A good direction with very high labor costs. Such conversations are tough to do well.
Amazon wants Alexa to answer customer service calls
A new suite of AWS products is designed to put call centers in the cloud.…
From insideHPC
Fathom Neural Compute Stick Enables Mobile Devices to React Cognitively
Intel-owned Movidius has introduced a fascinating new device called the Fathom Neural Compute Stick, a modular deep learning accelerator in the form of a standard USB stick. "The Fathom Neural Compute Stick is the first of its…
From insideHPC
Supermicro Rolls Out New SuperBlade with EDR InfiniBand and OmniPath
"Our new SuperBlade optimizes not just TCO, but initial acquisition cost with industry-leading server density and maximum performance per watt, per square foot and per dollar,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro…
From insideHPC
The Long Rise of HPC in the Cloud
"As the cloud market has matured, we have begun to see the introduction of HPC cloud providers and even the large public cloud providers such as Microsoft are introducing genuine HPC technology to the cloud. This change opens…
From insideHPC
Bringing HPC Algorithms to Big Data Platforms
Nikolay Malitsky from Brookhaven National Laboratory presented this talk at the Spark Summit East conference. "This talk will present a MPI-based extension of the Spark platform developed in the context of light source facilities…
From Schneier on Security
Botnets
Botnets have existed for at least a decade. As early as 2000, hackers were breaking into computers over the Internet and controlling them en masse from centralized systems. Among other things, the hackers used the combined computing…
From Schneier on Security
"Proof Mode" for your Smartphone Camera
ProofMode is an app for your smartphone that adds data to the photos you take to prove that they are real and unaltered: On the technical front, what the app is doing is automatically generating an OpenPGP key for this installed…
From Putting People First
[OECD Publication] Behavioural Insights and Public Policy
Behavioural Insights and Public Policy: Lessons from Around the World OECD, March 2017 408 pages “Behavioural insights”, or insights derived from the behavioural and social sciences, including decision making, psychology, cognitive…