Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2019
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Procurement
A current area I am looking at closely. An area to also make things precise, smart, and predicatively alert. Strategic considerations also make much sense,
Digital procurement: For lasting value, go broad and deep To get…
From The Eponymous Pickle
McKinsey: Global Energy Perspectives
A perspective of energy use, production.
From McKinsey
Global Energy Perspective 2019
Energy systems around the world are going through rapid transitions that affect many aspects of our lives, including the way we fuel our cars,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Templates for Alexa in Business
Finally a movement forward here. To date have not seen much useful in this space.
Amazon’s Alexa for Business Blueprints lets employees make custom voice apps By Kyle Wiggers @Kyle_L_Wiggers in Venturebeat
Use Alexa in yourAlexa…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Handle Robot for Warehouses
Looking for an autonomous and adaptable robot for warehouse environments. Some quite impressive examples have now come from Boston Dynamics.
Boston Dynamics' new Handle robot heads to the warehouse
Play time is over. By Richard…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Java is not a safe language
The prime directive in programming is to write correct code. Some programming languages make it easy to achieve this objective. We can qualify these languages as ‘safe’. If you write in C++ without good tools, you are definitively…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Experience in Retail
Clearly important, but how to effectively use it is the challenge.
Digital Experience Matters: Kroger VP In Progressive Grocer By Kat Martin
Kroger VP Digital Experience Jody Kalmbach presented at the Food Marketing Conference…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds
A topic that has long interested me. How biased is the Wikipedia?
Wikipedia and the Wisdom of Polarized Crowds
A lesson in how to break out of filter bubbles.
By Brian Gallagher
In 2013, James Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Medical Delivery Drones
Probably most useful for specific and perhaps temporary contexts. But shows how this can be useful.
Operator prepares drone to carry medical specimens Hospital Using Drones to Fly Blood Samples Between Buildings
Associated Press…
From insideHPC
GRC Partners to Provide Worldwide Support and Server Warranties for Immersion Cooling
We've been hearing more and more about immersive cooling for HPC, but what happens to system warranties in these kinds of installations? Today GRC took a step to ease these concerns through collaboration with TechData to provide…
From insideHPC
Nor-Tech Powers LIGO and IceCube Nobel-Physics Prize-Winning Projects
Today HPC integrator Nor-Tech announced participation in two recent Nobel Physics Prize-Winning projects. The company's HPC gear will help power the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project as well as…
From insideHPC
Video: IBM Powers Ai at the GPU Technology Conference
In this video from the GPU Technology Conference, Sumit Gupta from IBM describes how IBM is powering production-level Ai and Machine Learning. "IBM PowerAI provides the easiest on-ramp for enterprise deep learning. PowerAI helped…
From insideHPC
Data Management: The Elephant in the Room for HPC Hybrid Cloud
While there are many benefits to leveraging the cloud for HPC, there are challenges as well. Along with security and cost, data handling is consistently identified as a top barrier.
The post Data Management: The Elephant in…
From Schneier on Security
Malware Installed in Asus Computers Through Hacked Update Process
Kaspersky Labs is reporting on a new supply chain attack they call "Shadowhammer." In January 2019, we discovered a sophisticated supply chain attack involving the ASUS Live Update Utility. The attack took place between June…
From Computational Complexity
Scooped
At Dagstuhl I got a few ideas for future posts but then...
We had some discussions about STOC allowing program committee members to submit papers that I planned to post about. But then Suresh wrote a fine post on the same issue…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC@AAAS 2019- Cybersecurity: Transcending Physics, Technology, and Society
Am I safe sitting at home with my pacemaker? Am I safe shopping online? Am I safe when I am using my web-cam enabled computer? These are all real concerns brought up by audience members at the Computing Community Consortium (CCC)…
From insideHPC
SDSC and Sylabs Gather for Singularity User Group
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, and Sylabs.io recently hosted the first-ever Singularity User Group meeting, attracting users and developers from around the nation and beyond who wanted to learn more…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Walmart Battles Amazon with Jetblack
Mentioned previously here, back to product selection curation. Would be a good place to model the process of consumer interaction with needs. The journey involved could produce places for useful interaction.
Walmart Builds a…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Example of Blockchain Use with SAP
An example of secure tracking using Blockchains.
Blockchain Is Better Than a Database for Tracking Tuna In Computerworld By Lucas Mearian
Bumble Bee Foods has partnered with enterprise software producer SAP to launch a blockchain…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality Adoption in Retail
I think this still has some way to go, especially with regard to getting consumers comfortable with the idea of using AR publicly. That is why some wearable like smart glasses may be key to making that happen. Even Microsoft…
From insideHPC
Bo Ewald joins quantum computing firm ColdQuanta as CEO
Today quantum computing startup ColdQuanta announced the appointment of Robert “Bo” Ewald as president and chief executive officer. Ewald is well-known in high technology having previously been president of supercomputing leader…
From insideHPC
Video: Enabling Applications to Exploit SmartNICs and FPGAs
Sean Hefty and Venkata Krishnan from Intel gave this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop in Austin. "Advances in Smart NIC/FPGA with integrated network interface allow acceleration of application-specific computation to be performed…
From insideHPC
Pioneers in Deep Learning to Receive ACM Turing Award
Today ACM named Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun recipients of the 2018 ACM Turing Award for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing. "The ACM…
From insideHPC
Video: NVIDIA Showcases Programmable Acceleration of multiple Domains with one Architecture
In this video from GTC 2019 in Silicon Valley, Marc Hamilton from NVIDIA describes how accelerated computing is powering AI, computer graphics, data science, robotics, automotive, and more. "Well, we always make so many great…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Neural Pioneers get Highest Tech Award
Appreciate this because we worked with the same tech in the 90s. Laboriously training neural nets to classify brand reactions. Based on that, we thought that neural approaches would have little impact beyond classical statistical…
From Schneier on Security
Programmers Who Don't Understand Security Are Poor at Security
A university study confirmed the obvious: if you pay a random bunch of freelance programmers a small amount of money to write security software, they're not going to do a very good job at it. In an experiment that involved 43…
From The Eponymous Pickle
McDonald's Acquires Dynamic Yield for Decision Logic
Companies leveraging advanced analytic methods for their data by acquisition. Have recently stood in front of McDonald's store kiosk and after looking for the coffee I wanted, wondered what recommendation it should suggest,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Well Connected European Consumer
How does the European consumer differ from other regions in its use of information and communications technology. Infrastructure. Statistics.
Europe's Well-Connected Consumers By David Pringle
Communications of the ACM, April…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Hasty comparison: Skylark (ARM) versus Skylake (Intel)
In a previous post, I ran a benchmark on an ARM server and again on an Intel-based server. My purpose was to indicate that if one function is faster, even much faster, on one processor, you are not allowed to assume that itContinue…
From The Noisy Channel
Thanks Tony!
Thanks Tony! And you’re right thatI’m oversimplifying. My excuse is that it was already a 2,000-word post. :-)
From The Eponymous Pickle
Research on Edge Computing
Been following the idea and progress of preforming analytics and AI at the 'edge', or physically close to where it will be used. Here an abstract for an article on current research. Note this had been called by some 'fog' computing…