Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2018
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: Global Tech Jam on Smart Cities in Portland
The Global Tech Jam conference on Smart Cities has issued its Call for Papers. The event takes place June 20-22 in Portland, Oregon. "In collaboration with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Emerging Interest Group…
From insideHPC
Google Goes for Quantum Supremecy with 72-Qbit Bristlecone Chip
Over at the Google Research Blog, Julian Kelly writes that the company has developed a new 72-Qbit quantum processor called Bristlecone. "We are cautiously optimistic that quantum supremacy can be achieved with Bristlecone, and…
From insideHPC
TUK in Germany installs NEC LX Supercomputer with Intel Omni-Path
NEC Deutschland GmbH has delivered an LX series supercomputer to Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (TUK), one of Germany's leading Universities of Technology. "The new HPC cluster consists of 324 compute nodes totaling nearly…
From Computational Complexity
When the Wrong People raise the issue
On my discrete math final in Spring 2017 I had a question:
Prove that sqrt(2/3) is irrational.
A student emailed me the folloing (I paraphrase and am prob not as elegant or as long as he was)
Dr. Gasarch
I received only 2…
From insideHPC
Deploy Serverless TensorFlow Models using Kubernetes, OpenFaaS, GPUs and PipelineAI
Chris Fregly from PipelineAI gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Applying my Netflix experience to a real-world problem in the ML and AI world, I will demonstrate a full-featured, open-source, end-to-end TensorFlow…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Echo Buttons for Games
The somewhat mysterious Echo 'buttons' and now more clearly assigned to game playing. Have yet to see a very engaging game there. Now think about how these might be used for gamification, aka 'serious games'? Or crowd
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Multi Robotic Systems
They open the door to all sorts of collaborative displays and tasks.
Drone Light Shows Look Cool, but How Do They Work? By PC Magazine in CACM
Scientists are exploring multi-robot systems technology, with University of Southern…
From The Eponymous Pickle
McDonalds and Uber Eats Expanding
I read this announced in a sign in the local McDs a year ago. My immediate thought was: Who would use this? A snarky piece below in Buzzfeed. But it appears that this worked. Watching McD's use of tech, most recently in
McDonald…
From insideHPC
Bright Computing adds support for OpenHPC
Today Bright Computing announced it has joined the Linux Foundation and will participate in the OpenHPC Community project. "Many of our HPC customers incorporate both commercial and open source management regimens on clusters…
From Schneier on Security
New DDoS Reflection-Attack Variant
This is worrisome: DDoS vandals have long intensified their attacks by sending a small number of specially designed data packets to publicly available services. The services then unwittingly respond by sending a much larger number…
From My Biased Coin
Optimizing Learned Bloom Filters
For the small-ish subset of people out there who care about "learned Bloom filters" (the subject of my last post), I have a small-ish update. I guess the data structure has been unconsciously sitting around in the back of my…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Going Cashier-Free
Recall we reported here a test of BlueEyes technology to test vision based interaction with product in physical retail in our store laboratory. Our survey showed people liked the idea, once it was fully integrated. Now a more…
From XRDS
Audio features for web-based ML
One of the first problems presented to students of deep learning is to classify handwritten digits in the MNIST dataset. This was recently ported to the web thanks to deeplearn.js. The web version has distinct educational advantages…
From insideHPC
XSEDE offers free HPC Training from Cornell Virtual Workshop
Today Cornell University announced that four new Cornell Virtual Workshop training topics are available at the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) user portal. "The Cornell University Center for Advanced…
From insideHPC
Call for Proposals: iRODS User Group Meeting in Durham
The iRODS User Group Meeting has issued their Call for Proposals. Registration is now open for the event, which takes place June 5-7 in Durham, NC. "The meeting gives iRODS users and those interested in using iRODS the chance…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Can we Trust a Robot?
Thoughtful and interesting reviewed lengthy paper at the link. Also a video presentation below.
How Can We Trust a Robot? By Benjamin Kuipers
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 61 No. 3, Pages 86-95
10.1145/3173087
Advances in artificial…
From insideHPC
High Speed Connection to Hyades Supercomputer wins CENIC Innovation Award
The project connecting the UC Santa Cruz’s Hyades supercomputer to LBNL is being awarded the CENIC 2018 Innovations in Networking Award for Research Applications. "To accelerate the rate of scientific discovery, researchers must…
From insideHPC
RCR uses Simulation to Accelerate Racecar Development
Richard Childress Racing (RCR) is hoping to improve racing times through a multi-year partnership with ANSYS. RCR will use ANSYS Pervasive Engineering Simulation software to more accurately predict machine performance and enhance…
From insideHPC
Behind the Scenes – HPC at Sandia
In this video, Sandia engineers provide a behind-the-scenes look at the lab's efforts centered around High Performance Computing. "The Sandia team supports researchers who solve critical national and global problems - a challenging…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Voice Shopping Expands
Can voice get us the precision shopping we need? Considerable detail in article.
Study and Statistics: Voice shopping to hit $40 billion by 2020
In ChainstoreAge By Deena M. Amato-McCoy
Voice-based commerce is shaping up to be…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Responds: AI in Office Apps
I complained just the other day about Microsoft not doing enough in leveraging intelligence for the office. Colleague Walter Riker sends along a 17 minute Youtube briefing about what they are doing, and it is impressive. Especially…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Reads Contract Better than Lawyers
Quite a coup depending on how well the interpretation goes beyond just identifying issues. General interpreting and consistent 'captioning' of text and images has been a long time challenge. Its about simplifying complex
Stanford…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Learning By Coding
Throughout my career I have increased my knowledge by working on projects. As a teacher who teaches mostly beginners I don’t see a lot of complicated code. No I take that back beginners write lots of overly complicated code.Now…
From Schneier on Security
Security Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts
Interesting research: "Finding The Greedy, Prodigal, and Suicidal Contracts at Scale": Abstract: Smart contracts -- stateful executable objects hosted on blockchains like Ethereum -- carry billions of dollars worth of coins and…
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
Report to the ICANN & UASG Community on Recent Activities
Download PDF Core messages at ICANN61 The UASG has several core messages that we’re working on during ICANN61: The first is working through our workshop agendas on Communications and EAI The second is to reach out to Governments…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Human in the Loop Machine Learning
Planning to Attend ....
Practical Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning
Join us for this latest DSC Webinar on March 15th, 2018
Register Now!
Curious about what human-in-the-loop machine learning actually looks like? Join CrowdFlower…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Decision and Reasoning Analysis with Uncertainty
Am a big proponent of linking models directly to decisions, and thus make them relevant to real business process. Business is all about uncertain business decisions. One way to do this is to uses Bayesian networks. And the…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
New NSF Appointments
The following is a letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Location Analysis
Since the beginning of optimization analytics, store location has been a classic application. Every major chain uses it to consider the best location for new stores. Now will it be superceded by including more data, more patterns…
From Schneier on Security
Intimate Partner Threat
Princeton's Karen Levy has a good article computer security and the intimate partner threat: When you learn that your privacy has been compromised, the common advice is to prevent additional access -- delete your insecure account…