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 The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC@AAAS 2018- Transforming Cities, Transportation, and Agriculture with Intelligent Infrastructure
CCC Chair Elizabeth Mynatt from Georgia Tech and former CCC Council member Shashi Shekhar from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, provided contributions to this post. How can we really be sure that autonomous vehicles…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Teams
An Overview. Have now used Slack for a number of collaboration examples with projects, and like it. Will MS Teams do as well? I do note its not available for standard versions of Office, a mistake, its where people will…
From The Eponymous Pickle
High Quality Images from Limited data
Always looking for more information from less data. You may just not have enough data, or it may take more effort, time, cost or exposure to get it.
New artificial intelligence technique dramatically improves the quality of
Source…
From insideHPC
Los Alamos Releases File Index Product to Open Source
Today Los Alamos National Laboratory released new open source software called the Grand Unified File Index. GUFI is designed using a new, heirarchical approach to storing file metada, allowing rapid parallel searches across many…
From insideHPC
Argonne Helps to Develop all-new Lithium-air Batteries
Scientists at Argonne are helping to develop better batteries for our electronic devices. The goal is to develop beyond-lithium-ion batteries that are even more powerful, cheaper, safer and longer lived. “The energy storage capacity…
From Schneier on Security
Reverse Engineering the Cuban Sonic Weapon
Interesting analysis and speculation....
From insideHPC
Intel AVX Gives Numerical Computations in Java a Big Boost
Recent Intel® enhancements to Java enable faster and better numerical computing. In particular, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) now uses the Fused Multiply Add (FMA) instructions on Intel Intel Xeon® PhiTM processors with Advanced…
From insideHPC
The U.S. Exascale Computing Project: Status and Plans
In this video from the 2018 Rice Oil & Gas Conference, Doug Kothe from ORNL provides an update on the Exascale Computing Project. "The quest to develop a capable exascale ecosystem is a monumental effort that requires the collaboration…
From My Biased Coin
Swedish Summer School
I was asked to post the following notice for the upcoming Swedish Summer School for (theoretical) computer scientists. I gave some lectures for it a couple of summers back, and really enjoyed it. Maybe the students did also…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Watson Assistant: Business Skills as Intelligence Architecture
Have now had a few month look at the Watson Assistant in Beta. Also have had three years learning with the Amazon Echo and a year plus with the Google Home. So the comparison is quite interesting. Watson Assistant is very…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On GDPR
Useful Informatica white paper on GDPR, brought to my attention. Which happens come May 25. Implications for Assistants?
In the WP: " ... The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679 is a regulation in EU law…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning with Limited Data
Despite all the claims for all the data we have, this is often the case. And the term 'mixed scale' is important, you often have many different quantities of data by context.
Machine Learning With Limited Data
Government Computer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Defining Normal
Useful idea. The example shows a very specific context at what space or times scales?
Researchers at Bethel University are studying how to teach computers to define "normal" data and then detect anomalies.
The team used mathematical…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Council Member Kevin Fu Does Some Detective Work
Between December 2016 and August 2017, at least 24 employees of the U.S Embassy in Cuba heard high-pitched sounds and suffered injuries thought to be related to the noise. Many speculated that the high-pitched sounds were some…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
The Problems With Small Programming Projects
Most programming projects for beginners are small ones. They are focused on a specific concept that is under discussion. They are often forced in the sense that a professional programmer would seldom write them they way students…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Is the BlockChain Needed?
A critically contentious look at Blockchain. Do we need it? How is it different from a number of existing technical capabilities? Worth thinking about it.
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI and Process Productivity
Nicely done, considerable case study. Agree. And suggest that a good way to ensure this is to make sure you know exactly where and how the AI is inserted in current or proposed process. Then the needed training and skills…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Will Amazon Own Your Customer?
Amazon Will Own Your Customer And What To Do About It
By James L. McQuivey Vice President, Principal Analyst
From twenty years of trying, I know this about covering Amazon: It’s tricky. Our report process can take months during…
From insideHPC
Lenovo Updates LiCO Tools to Accelerate AI Deployment
Over at the Lenovo Blog, Dr. Bhushan Desam writes that the company just updated its LiCO tools to accelerate AI deployment and development for Enterprise and HPC implementations. "LiCO simplifies resource management and makes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
2018 Amazon Shopper Behavior Study
Looks to be most interesting, download it at the link:
CPC Strategy
The 2018 Amazon Shopper Behavior Study
How Shoppers Will Browse and Buy on Amazon in 2018
Get the Guide PDF
The Story: 2018 will be a pivotal year for retailers…
From insideHPC
New Arm-based Workstation Opens the Doors for HPC Developers
Today GIGABYTE Technology announced the availability of ThunderXStation: the industry’s first 64-bit Armv8 workstation platform based on Cavium’s flagship ThunderX2 processor. “ThunderXStation is an ideal platform for Arm software…
From insideHPC
Penguin Computing to share AI Best Practices at GPU Technology Conference
Today Penguin Computing announced that Director of Advanced Solutions, Kevin Tubbs, Ph.D., will be speaking at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on best practices in artificial intelligence. "On the second day of the conference…
From insideHPC
HPE Launches Vertical AI Solutions
Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced new offerings to help customers ramp up, optimize and scale artificial intelligence usage across business functions to drive outcomes such as better demand forecasting, improved operational…
From insideHPC
Video: IBM Quantum Computing will be Mainstream in Five Years
Talia Gershon from the Thomas J. Watson Research Center gave this talk at the 2018 IBM Think conference. "There is a whole class of problems that are too difficult for even the largest and most powerful computers that exist today…
From Schneier on Security
Hijacking Computers for Cryptocurrency Mining
Interesting paper "A first look at browser-based cryptojacking": Abstract: In this paper, we examine the recent trend towards in-browser mining of cryptocurrencies; in particular, the mining of Monero through Coinhive and similar…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC@AAAS 2018- Rethinking Approaches to Disaster Management and Public Safety with Intelligent Infrastructure
Contributions to this post were provided by Executive Council Member Dan Lopresti, Michael Dunaway, Robin Murphy, and Nalini Venkatasubramanian. Cell towers on wheels? Monitoring Twitter? These are just some ideas of how to monitor…
From insideHPC
IBM Launches Deep Learning as a Service
"IBM's goal is to make it easier for you to build your deep learning models. Deep Learning as a Service has unique features, such as Neural Network Modeler, to lower the barrier to entry for all users, not just a few experts.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tiny, Disposable CPUs for the IOT
I like the idea that these CPUs will be embedded, even disposable. In packaging for example. Something we suggested in retail. Bringing computing power closer to the edge. Still not powerful by modern standards.
IBM’s …
From insideHPC
Overcoming Roadblocks in Computational Networks
Mariam Kiran is using an early-career research award from DOE’s Office of Science to develop methods combining machine-learning algorithms with parallel computing to optimize such networks. "This type of science and the problems…
From insideHPC
Video: IBM Sets Record TensorFlow Performance with new Snap ML Software
In this video, researchers from IBM Research in Zurich describe how the new IBM Snap Machine Learning (Snap ML) software was able to achieve record performance running TesorFlow. "This training time is 46x faster than the best…