Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2021
From Schneier on Security
Metadata Left in Security Agency PDFs
Really interesting research:
“Exploitation and Sanitization of Hidden Data in PDF Files”
Abstract: Organizations publish and share more and more electronic documents like PDF files. Unfortunately, most organizations are unaware…From Schneier on Security
Fast Random Bit Generation
Science has a paper (and commentary) on generating 250 random terabits per second with a laser. I don’t know how cryptographically secure they are, but that can be cleaned up with something like Fortuna.
From insideHPC
Registration Opens March 15 for RMACC HPC Symposium, May 19-20
BOULDER, CO – Registration for the Rocky Mountain Advanced Computing Consortium’s (RMACC) 11th annual High Performance Computing Symposium – offered online and free of charge – opens Monday, March 15. Registration for the conference…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Using Synthetic Data
Worked with elements of the idea for some time the enterprise. In fact after a while we learned that its often very useful to have synthetic data alongside 'real' data, it can be used to tease out some less than common patterns…
From The Eponymous Pickle
FHE Encryption Getting Support from DARPA
The approach is getting more support. Will post quantum decryption threaten it?
Intel will develop a fully homomorphic encryption chip for DARPA BY MARIA DEUTSCHER
Intel Corp. today announced that it has been entrusted by the…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Announcing New ICMI 2021 Blue Sky Papers Track
The 23rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2021) will be held in Montreal, Canada October 18-22, 2021. ICMI is the premier international forum for multidisciplinary research on multimodal human-human…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Last Cortana Speaker is Recalled
What seemed like a very credible assistant offering, the Harmon Kardan Intent Speaker, which included the Microsoft assistant Cortana, has left the field. Further indication that Microsoft is not serious in voice assistants…
From insideHPC
BIG COMPUTE 2021 State of Cloud HPC Report
Rescale’s role as an intelligent cloud automation platform means the company has a unique vantage point of how R&D-driven organizations are adopting cloud. This inaugural report, “BIG COMPUTE 2021 State of Cloud HPC Report,”
…
From insideHPC
Nvidia Unveils AI Enterprise Software Suite with VMware vSphere 7
SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 09, 2021 – Nvidia today announced AI Enterprise, a software suite of enterprise-grade AI development tools and frameworks supported by Nvidia with VMware vSphere 7 Update 2. Nvidia said the software…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Brain for Autonomous Mobile Robots
Brought to my attention with its specific applications in retail like inventory checking.
BrainOS® is a pioneering AI software platform that powers the world’s largest fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) operating…From The Eponymous Pickle
Microserver Exchange Server Attack
The Web Continues to move into a More Dangerous State
Microsoft Exchange Server Attack Escalation Prompts Patching Panic
US government officials weigh in on the attacks and malicious activity, which researchers believe may be the…From The Eponymous Pickle
Starlink to Connect Vehicles as Well
Further general connectivity.
SpaceX plans to beam its Starlink internet to vehicles, not just homes By Trevor Mogg
SpaceX wants to beam internet from its Starlink satellites to vehicles on Earth.
The revelation came via a recent…From The Eponymous Pickle
Robots Could Save you From Drowning
Seems little end to what robots could do.
Autonomous Underwater Robot Saves People From Drowning By Fraunhofer Institute (Germany)
March 8, 2021
A research team from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies…From insideHPC
CoolIT Systems and AMAX to Deliver Custom Thermal Management for Data Center Products
CALGARY, AB, March 8, 2021 – CoolIT Systems announced today a collaboration with AMAX to deliver a thermal management solution for scalable, high-density computing products. The companies’ collaboration delivers a custom thermal…
From BLOG@CACM
The World's Most Magnificent Historical Automatons
Automatons are ubiquitous. Some of the most magnificent works in the genre have survived in museums.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Custom Assistant Announced
Was expecting something like this, now here it is, will this be widely used? Implications? Check out what Chrysler is doing. Introduction below:
Announcing Alexa Custom Assistant
Learn how you can create intelligent assistants…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Catalyzing Computing Podcast Episode 32 – Autonomous Flight and Landing on Mars with Behçet Açikmeşe (Part 2)
A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) official podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. In this episode, Khari Douglas (CCC Senior Program Associate) interviews Dr. Behçet Açikmeşe. Behçet was a…
From insideHPC
CEA-Leti Envisions LiDAR Systems Based on Integrated Optical Phased Arrays
GRENOBLE, France – March 8, 2021 – Taking a step toward developing LiDAR systems for widespread commercial applications, CEA-Leti has developed genetic algorithms to calibrate high-channel-count optical phased arrays (OPAs), …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Small Business Exporters
From friend Steve King, who has run this blog on small business needs for years:
Barlow Research on Small Business Exporters
Barlow Research is one of our go-to sources on all things related to small business use of financial…From The Eponymous Pickle
Podcast: How Spies Think
At the link, podcast provided by Recorded Future, who we worked with long ago. The link below leads you to the podcast. Makes me think: How do spies think differently, say since before computing? Is that useful from a security…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Retracts Quantum Computing Paper
This seems to indicate the scientific method system is working. But don't retraction alerts get far less attention than the original paper? I do note that Wired has following this closely, from the original claims, the objects…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Explaining Reinforcement Learning
Been recently involved with reinforcement learning, and found this interesting. I see some advances in this space worth following. Especially in RL, you need explanation regarding decisions, in order to support reasonable…
From insideHPC
Qumulo Extends Qumulo Protect Data Services with Commvault Integration
SEATTLE – March 9, 2021 – Qumulo, focused on enterprise file data management across hybrid-cloud environments, today announced a full integration with Commvault, a enterprise data protection solutions compay. The capabilities…
From insideHPC
Intel Developing ASIC Accelerator for DARPA ‘Holy Grail’ Cybersecurity Project
Intel has joined the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) in a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) program that takes aim at the “holy grail” of cybersecurity – protecting data during processing, when it is most vulnerable…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Entities Build with Knowledge Graphs
Announcements in the Alexa Development blog about new means to connect knowledge graph data to voice interactions with Entities. With code and Dev examples. Technical.
Announcing Alexa Entities (Beta): Create More Intelligent…From The Eponymous Pickle
Computational Complexity and Quantum
Computational complexity provides measures of how hard things are to compute. Taught in many as part of analytics curriculum.. Which define classes of complexity. Though we would like to define these for things like 'AI'…
From Computational Complexity
When do I need to warn about Spoilers?
In a recent post here I mentioned in passing a plot point from the last season of The Big Bang Theory. Note that the last season was in 2019. WARNING- do not read that post if you are watching The Big Bang Theory and do notSomeone…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Virtual ACM Celebrations of Women in Computing
It has been a whole year since the pandemic suddenly changed our lives. Uncertainty has been the major obstacle hindering us from making plans. We never lost our hopes for a brighter future and the additional responsibilities…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On What Matters: Cornerstones
Below the intro, which links to the 'cornerstones', good thoughts. Certainly we discovered these in the enterprise, for new and older tech.
Intelligent automation depends on these 4 cornerstones
By Andrew Spanyi, Spanyi International…From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Advancing and Counting
Announcing tomorrow’s Women in Data Science workshop, plus a US State Department event for International Women’s Day (also March 8) Santa Fe Inst. external faculty src Dana Randall is an ADVANCE Professor of Computing and also…