Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2020
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We released simdjson 0.3: the fastest JSON parser in the world is even better!
Last year (2019), we released the simjson library. It is a C++ library available under a liberal license (Apache) that can parse JSON documents very fast. How fast? We reach and exceed 3 gigabytes per second in many instances…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Webinar from iRobot, IFTTT on the Smart Home
Recently signed up for this and missed it, of interest:
Checking in to see if you watched the replay of our smart home webinar featuring iRobot.
It features iRobot's CTO, Chris Jones, talking in-depth about the future of the smart…
From Computational Complexity
Length of Descriptions for DFA, NFA, CFG
We will be looking at the size of descriptions
For DFAs and NFAs this is the number of states.
For CFG's we will assume they are in Chomsky Normal Form. So for this post CFG means CFG in Chomsky normal form.
1) It is known…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Procter Donates Face Masks, Hand Sanitizer
UPDATE: P&G to make and donate face masks, hand sanitizer in response to coronavirus By Barrett J. Brunsman – Staff reporter, Cincinnati Business Courier
Mar 26, 2020, 2:47pm EDT Updated Mar 26, 2020, 6:14pm EDT
Instead of selling…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC @ AAAS 2020 – New Approaches to Fairness in Automated Decision Making
The last decade has seen the increased use of machine learning and data science to make decisions—from figuring out which YouTube video to recommend to deciding whom to give a loan, automated decisions are now everywhere. However…
From insideHPC
SIAM Announces Class of 2020 Fellows
Today the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) announced the 2020 Class of SIAM Fellows. These distinguished members were nominated for their exemplary research as well as outstanding service to the community…
From BLOG@CACM
The ASPLOS 2020 Online Conference Experience
CS pioneered it. Should we use it?
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Open Access to ACM Digital Library During Coronavirus Pandemic
By Cherri Pancake, ACM President As the coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic continues, we at ACM would like to do what we can to help support the computing community. Many computing researchers and practitioners are now working remotely…
From insideHPC
Russian Supercomputer Joins the Fight Against COVID-19
An international research team of scientists – from Russia, Finland, Italy, China, Japan and Canada is using a recently upgraded HPC system at the Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences to develop diagnostics…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Changing How We Think About School
What my school is doing is trying to replicate the brick-and-mortar model in the online world. Other schools are doing something more like “correspondence school” We fall back on old models at times like this when the world is…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing the Spread of Contagions on Airplanes
Researchers are using supercomputers to model how contagions can spread onboard aircraft. Using Frontera's GPU subsystem, the researchers were able to get the computation time down to 1.5 minutes. "Using the GPUs turned out to…
From insideHPC
Video: NVIDIA to Accelerate the HPC-AI Convergence
Gunter Roeth from NVIDIA gave this talk at ML4HPC 2020. "The growing adoption of NVIDIA Volta GPU by the Top500 Supercomputers highlights the need of computing acceleration for this HPC & AI convergence. Many projects today demonstrate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Towards a Taxonomy for Automated Assistants
Like the idea of identifying and constructing tasks for assistants so they can be more readily be challenged and compared. This article suggests this be done and gives some examples.
A Taxonomy of Automated Assistants
By Jerrold…
From Schneier on Security
Clarifying the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act
A federal court has ruled that violating a website's tems of service is not "hacking" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The plaintiffs wanted to investigate possible racial discrimination in online job markets by creating…
From insideHPC
D-Wave Offers Free Quantum Cloud Access for Global Response to COVID-19
Today D-Wave Systems announced the immediate availability of free access to its quantum systems via the Leap quantum cloud service for anyone working on responses to the COVID-19 crisis. "It is promising to accelerate the solution…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Can Tech Disrupt the Virus?
Here is a challenge: Can AI and Tech confront and disrupt evolved biology in new ways? Can we think beyond methods that currently exist?
Tech's Next Disruption Target: The Coronavirus
The Wall Street Journal
Asa Fitch; Rolfe
March…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hybrid AI Examined
Big proponent of the idea. Neural methods solve specific problems well, yet we solve many other problems symbolically, logically. Math gives us solutions with algorithms, but the applied use of these methods is logically driven…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Anomaly Response: How we Respond to the Unexpected
Intriguing piece. Made me think of our current predicament as well. Can we model human adaptation to expected and unexpected events? I like the notion of exploring different responses. Would add then we could simulate…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teaching From Home–Day 11–Is this our new normal?
Well. we’re definitely going to stay online until May. Our last week in April is a vacation week. I am hoping it still is. What will May bring? I have no idea. What about June? My school usually runs into June for a week to ten…
From BLOG@CACM
The Rise of the Data Engineer
The combination of AI and cloud infrastructure is changing the roles of certain engineers and creating a new requirement that demands an entirely new engineering specialty.
From insideHPC
Registration Opens for Stanford HPC Conference Virtual Event
Registration is now open for the Stanford HPC Conference. The two day 'condensed' agenda combines thought leadership and practical insights on HPC, AI, Data Science and much more. The virtual event takes place April 21-22. "The…
From insideHPC
Lifebit Provides Free Cloud, Data Hosting & Analysis Tools to COVID-19 Researchers
Today Lifebit Biotech announced it is providing its premium Lifebit CloudOS license free to all researchers and teams working on COVID-19 efforts, including diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines. As increasing demand for widely…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Rules for Remote Work
Reasonably done look at things that make sense, we have done much remote work for some time now, years in many cases, but now its just lots more of it.
HBRWK: Business Research for Business Leaders
The New Rules for Remote Work…
From insideHPC
Xilinx Alveo U50 Accelerator Cards come to Nimbix Cloud with Broad Application Support
Today Nimbix announced the availability of Xilinx Alveo U50 Accelerator Cards on the Nimbix Cloud. "Nimbix has paved the way for FPGA-accelerated cloud computing and today leads with the broadest portfolio of cloud FPGA solutions…
From insideHPC
NCSA Joins Nationwide Collaboration to Combat COVID-19
NCSA is joining C3.ai, Microsoft Corporation, and research institutions across the country as part of the new C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (C3.ai DTI). This new institute, a multi-disciplinary effort focused on artificial…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtualitics for Insight Extraction
A company of interest for advanced data visualization. We worked with them in the Enterprise.
Virtualitics Selected fof the Air Force Strategic $7 Million Award
March 16, 2020 By Amy Gunzenhauser
Virtualitics is pleased to announce…
From Schneier on Security
Privacy vs. Surveillance in the Age of COVID-19
The trade-offs are changing: As countries around the world race to contain the pandemic, many are deploying digital surveillance tools as a means to exert social control, even turning security agency technologies on their own…
From insideHPC
UKRI Awards ARCHER2 Supercomputer Services Contract
UKRI has awarded contracts to run elements of the next national supercomputer, ARCHER2, which will represent a significant step forward in capability for the UK’s science community. ARCHER2 is provided by UKRI, EPCC, Cray (an…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Logic and Star-Free, Part Deux
A visual proof with no abstract-algebra overhead Composite crop of src1, src2 Dominique Perrin and Jean-Éric Pin are French mathematicians who have done significant work in automata theory. Their 1986 paper “First-Order Logic…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Resources: Our World in Data
As part of a larger project that is looking at Data Sources, Open Source Data, Data as an Asset, Data Quality, Data for Machine Learning, Semantic Data, Knowledge Mapping, Metadata and related topics. This looks to be a great…