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 Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
CSPdWeek: Free Professional Development for many K-12 Teachers
The people I talk to who went to last year;s event rave about it. If you are looking for some good professional development this is well worth looking into.
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Look at Google's AI Explosion
Somewhat simplified, but based on measures like papers generated, and providing capabilities publicly, very impressive. Note that this not only about publishing papers, but also writing fundamental code that can be reused.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predicting Marketing Campaign Response
The holy grail is accurately predicting response. Here a step by step approach using Amazon methods. But do we know all the context involved? Amazon has the data to tailor this kind of model to alternative contexts.
Predicting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM on the Business of IOT Technology
From the recent conference. IBM on the business of the internet of things. Its cognitive and complex. I would add to the below, that its about analytics designed to better understand this new wealth of data, and the algorithms…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blockchain and Utilities
Blockchain in Power industry.
How Utilities Are Using Blockchain to Modernize the Grid
James Basden, Michael Cottrell
" .... Blockchain has grabbed the attention of the heavily regulated power industry as it braces for an energy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Is Intelligence Built Up from Basic Skills?
Which virtual assistant will ultimately win the race? Will it be a matter of having third party vendors building the best 'intelligent skills' to make them most useful? Amazon Alexa claims some 10K +skills, though most are…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid from Utensils
Available on eBay. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Review / Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom
While visiting a branch of our city's library system we don't often find ourselves at, I browsed the tiny section on education. I found Invent to Learn by chance, and though the title's font left me a bit skeptical, I decided…
From Schneier on Security
Commenting Policy for This Blog
Over the past few months, I have been watching my blog comments decline in civility. I blame it in part on the contentious US election and its aftermath. It's also a consequence of not requiring visitors to register in order…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF CISE Distinguished Lecture- Improving the Reproducibility of Computational Research
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) is pleased to announce a distinguished lecture on Wednesday, March 29, 2017 at 2:00 PM EDT by Russell Poldrack, from…
From Putting People First
The intimacy of autonomous vehicles
Matt Yurdana of Intel’s IoT Experiences Group discusses Intel’s insight on passenger experience in the age of autonomous transportation. The intimate nature of autonomous vehicles will most likely lead to a significant rethinking…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 24, 2017)
There are many claims that innovation is slowing down. In the XXth century, we went from horses to planes. What have we done lately? We have not cured cancer or old age. We did get the iPhone. There is that. But so what? There…
From insideHPC
SC17 Student Cluster Competition Continues Push for Reproducibility
"The SCC reproducibility program is part of a wider effort to encourage authors submitting papers to the conference to voluntarily complete an appendix to their paper that described the details of their software environment and…
From insideHPC
Huawei and Altair to Build Industrial Simulation Cloud Solutions
"The Huawei-Altair cooperation will be dedicated to building highly efficient, high-performance industrial simulation cloud solutions leveraging Altair’s PBS Works software suite," said Yu Dong, President of Industry Marketing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Issues and Analytics
Seen it now many times, sometimes to where the results would be irrelevant if we waited for perfect data. But to me this still does not mean we should ignore thinking about how the results will fit into, or would alter business…
From insideHPC
IEEE Looks Beyond Moore’s Law with IRDS Technology Roadmap
“As a team, we are laying the foundation to identify challenges and recommendations on possible solutions to the industry’s current limitations defined by Moore’s Law. With the launch of the nine white papers on our new website…
From insideHPC
Berkeley Lab Algorithm Boosts Resolution on Cryo–EM
Berkeley Lab researchers have developed the first 3-D atomic-scale model of P22 virus that identifies the protein interactions crucial for its stability. "This is a great example of how to exploit electron microscopy technology…
From insideHPC
Asperitas Unveils Liquid-cooled Modular Datacenter Solution
According to Asperitas, Immersed Computing is a concept driven by sustainability, efficiency and flexibility and goes far beyond just technology. In many situations, Immersed Computing can save more than 50% of the total energy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Scale in City Advertising
In the BBC:
How giant digital adverts could soon be in our cities By Mark Smith
Technology of Business reporter
Passers-by on a London street were recently amazed to see a fleeting image of a pink tongue protruding from fruitily…
From Schneier on Security
Second WikiLeaks Dump of CIA Documents
There are more CIA documents up on WikiLeaks. It seems to be mostly MacOS and iOS. News article....
From The Eponymous Pickle
More WalMart and Amazon by the Numbers
Insightful numbers and visuals:
Supply Chain News: Walmart and Amazon by the Numbers 2017 Part 2
More Analysis from Our Annual Review of the World's Two Most Important Retailers By Dan Gilmore ... "
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC System Administrator at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach is seeking a High Performance Computing System Administrator in our Job of the Week. "The HPC Specialist is responsible for technical systems management, administration, and…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Artificial Intelligence (AI) For Social Good
The organizing committee for the AI for Social Good Workshop has released their workshop report called Artificial Intelligence for Social Good. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), along with the White House Office of Science…
From insideHPC
Intel Aligns its AI Efforts into a Single Organization
"Intel sees the huge potential in AI and are moving mountains to take full advantage of it," said Patrick Moorhead from Moor Insights & Strategy. "They have acquired Altera, Nervana Systems and other IP, need to connect to their…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Council Member Cynthia Dwork is One of the Recipients of the 2017 Gödel Prize
The Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science is sponsored jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery, Special…
From insideHPC
Panel Discussion on How Europe Can Attain World Leadership in HPC
"HPC is moving towards its next frontier - more than 100 times faster than the fastest machines currently available in Europe," said Andrus Ansip, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Single Market. "But not all…
From insideHPC
Megware to Install CooLMUC 3 Supercomputer at LRZ in Germany
"The new CooLMUC 3 system outperforms its predecessors in a number of respects, including its key feature of cooling in thermally insulated racks all compute and login nodes, power supply units, and Omni-Path switches directly…
From Schneier on Security
Hackers Threaten to Erase Apple Customer Data
Turkish hackers are threatening to erase millions of iCloud user accounts unless Apple pays a ransom. This is a weird story, and I'm skeptical of some of the details. Presumably Apple has decided that it's smarter to spend the…
From insideHPC
Intel MKL and Intel TBB Working Together for Performance
When used in a TBB environment, Intel has demonstrated a many-fold performance improvement over the same parallelized code using Intel MKL in an OpenMP environment. Intel TBB-enabled Intel MKL is ideal when there is heavy threading…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Embedded Blog Links
I was reminded by a recent query that links that are embedded in posts in this blog may not always work. The history of this blog goes back to 2005, and so especially older post links may have gone stale. Sometimes I fix these…