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
Turning us into Artists with AI
Have long wanted to have a system that would improve our sketching and doodling into art. Or even just cleanws it up into a clear graphic sketch. Something I supposedly learned in an early drafting class. Even remember some…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Motor Babbling Generates Data for Walking
Seeing some of these kinds of examples always makes me think of early AI work. If we could design very good learners (and re-learners) we could start them like a human baby, without knowledge, put them in a context and just…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Humans Thinking Like Computers
Its well known that humans can be tricked by images. Computers too, and apparently sometimes in the same way. What are the implications? Can we have them check each other? About images? About ethics? In what contexts…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI and Patents in the WIPO
In a meeting a few weeks ago I asked the question about how findings using AI methods were being protected, and got a somewhat unclear answer. This perhaps shows why. Here much more about what is happening in this space. …
From insideHPC
InfiniBand: To HDR and Beyond
Ariel Almog from Mellanox gave this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop in Austin. "Recently, deployment of 50 Gbps per lane (HDR) speed started and 100 Gbps per lane (EDR) which is a future technology is around the corner. The
…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Specialist in Software Development at DKRZ
The German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ) is seeking and HPC and Specialist in Software Development in our Job of the Week. "DKRZ is involved in numerous national and international projects in the field of high-performance computing…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 23rd 2019)
Half of American households subscribe to “Amazon Prime”, a “club membership” for Amazon customers with monthly fees. And about half of these subscribes buy something from Amazon every week. If you are counting, this seems toContinue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Explainable AI
Here some basic thoughts. Not necessarily an easy thing, we can't even fully explain what intelligent people do.
An introduction to explainable AI, and why we need it By Patrick Ferris
Neural networks (and all of their subtypes)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Securing IOT in the Quantum Age
Its been long suggested that quantum computing may add new ways to break encryption. MIT says they have a way to prevent that.
Securing the “internet of things” in the quantum age
Efficient chip enables low-power devices to run…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gmail Functions will Soon Stop in IFTTT
This is very unfortunate, most of the functionality I used in IFTTT sensed Gmail. Apparently for security reasons? It shows you how you cannot rely on other architectures in such systems. Will follow to see if anything…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Debugging Student Code for Fun and Learning
Students are really good at creating strange hard to solve bugs in their code. I am convinced that the code of a raw beginner can easily be harder to debug than that of a professional coder.
I had a couple of good ones today.The…From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: New Research on Squid Camouflage
From the New York Times: Now, a paper published last week in Nature Communications suggests that their chromatophores, previously thought to be mainly pockets of pigment embedded in their skin, are also equipped with tiny reflectors…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ford to Build Autonomous Vehicles
Perhaps an indication that such vehicles are not far away. Note the specifics of manufacture goals quoted in the article.
Ford to Build Factory in Michigan for Autonomous Vehicles
CNBC By Phil LeBeau
Ford Motor has announced plans…
From insideHPC
Video: Cray Announces First Exascale System
In this video, Cray CEO Pete Ungaro announces Aurora – Argonne National Laboratory’s forthcoming supercomputer and the United States’ first exascale system. Ungaro offers some insight on the technology, what makes exascale performance…
From insideHPC
NERSC taps NVIDIA compiler team for Perlmutter Supercomputer
NERSC has signed a contract with NVIDIA to enhance GPU compiler capabilities for Berkeley Lab’s next-generation Perlmutter supercomputer. "We are excited to work with NVIDIA to enable OpenMP GPU computing using their PGI compilers…
From BLOG@CACM
Using Independent Technical Reviews to Ensure Project Success
By using independent technical reviews, management can have a third party audit software and ensure the dev team stays on track.
From insideHPC
PASC19 Preview: Brueckner and Dr. Curfman-McInnes to Moderate Exascale Panel Discussion
Today the PASC19 Conference announced that Dr. Lois Curfman McInnes from Argonne and Rich Brueckner from insideHPC will moderate a panel discussion with thought leaders focused on software challenges for Exascale and beyond.
…
From insideHPC
How Mellanox SHARP technology speeds Ai workloads
Mellanox Scalable Hierarchical Aggregation and Reduction Protocol (SHARP) technology improves upon the performance of MPI operations by offloading collective operations from the CPU to the switch network, and by eliminating the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Electrolux Allies with Google in the Smart Home
Smart homes move forward, the two major platforms continue to expand. Now Swedish maker Electrolux is embedding assistants. Many makers in the space are including both of the biggest home platforms, and even a hint they
Electrolux…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Computer Vision in Retail
From the Platt Retail Institute, thoughts on further use of computer vision:
Computer Vision Is Here. Now What?
By George Shaw, CEO/CTO, Brain of the Store
By now, you have probably heard about computer vision and recent advances…
From Schneier on Security
Enigma, Typex, and Bombe Simulators
GCHQ has put simulators for the Enigma, Typex, and Bombe on the Internet. News article....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Defense Agencies Move to AWS Cloud
Amazon wins another participant.
The Defense Health Agency joins a growing list of defense agencies moving their data to the commercial cloud. in NextGov
The Defense Health Agency, which supports the delivery of health and medical…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Look at Future HoloLens Mixed Reality
Good half hour Podcast interview about HoloLens-2 current and future on Twit-TV
Gives a good update of HoloLens at Microsoft and how they are now focusing its uses
Today's special guest engineering GM for mixed reality apps, Lorraine…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Detecting Potential Electrical Failures
One plant maintenance context we examined was the potential of electrical failures.
Energy monitor can find electrical failures before they happen
Sensor can monitor wiring in a building or ship, and signal when repairs are needed…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
The Shortest Path To The Abel Prize
While melding topology, geometry, and analysis IAS page Karen Uhlenbeck is a mathematician who has won a number of awards in the past and has just now been announced as winner of the 2019 Abel Prize. Today Ken and I want to explain…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Great Innovative Idea: Viewport-Adaptive Navigable 360-Degree Video Delivery
The following Great Innovative Idea is from Jacob Chakareski from the University of Alabama. Jacob published the “Viewport-adaptive Navigable 360-Degree Video Delivery” paper with Xavier Corbillon (IMT Atlantique), Alisa Devlic…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intelligent Display Scans Your Face
Is this invasive? Saw something like this years ago, but with no implication of seeing who it was. Advertising based on iris movement and facial analysis to extract demographic information. Iris scanning is known to be imprecise…
From insideHPC
UberCloud Publishes Compendium Of CFD Case Studies
If you are considering moving some of your HPC workload to the Cloud, nothing leads the way like a good set of case studies in your scientific domain. To this end, our good friends at the UberCloud have published their Compendium…
From insideHPC
ISC 2019 Keynote to focus on Algorithms of Life
Today the ISC 2019 conference announced that their keynote will be delivered by Professor Ivo Sbalzarini, who will speak to an audience of 3500 attendees about the pivotal role high performance computing plays in the field of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nulogy Case Study
Brought to my attention, aspects of the case study are of interest. At this time no pieces in this blog are sponsored. I do from time time get items that are of particular interest and I pass them along.
In SupplychainBrain…