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 Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Learning To Teach To Learn
A blog post by Eugene Wallingford (TEACHING YOURSELF THE MATERIAL) reminded me of some things. As he says, “A common complaint from students is that the professor makes them teach themselves the material.” During a graduateAs…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
New NSF Convergence Accelerator Themes
The NSF Convergence Accelerator issued a new funding opportunity (NSF-21-572) focused on two research track topics; the Networked Blue Economy and Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems. Launched in 2019, the NSF Convergence…
From insideHPC
PSC’s HPE-Cerebras ‘Neocortex’ AI Supercomputer Starts Early User Access Program
March 29, 2021 — The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) has deployed Neocortex, an HPC system PSC said is designed to revolutionize scientific AI research. Funded by a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machines Writing for Us
Will such robotic systems do all our writing for us? A lot of words being spewed.
OpenAI’s text-generating system GPT-3 is now spewing out 4.5 billion words a day
Robot-generated writing looks set to be the next big thing
By James…From The Eponymous Pickle
Stretch Robot Works the Warehouse
Say hello to Boston Dynamics’ newest robot: Stretch By Trevor Mogg in Digitaltrends
Boston Dynamics has just unveiled its latest robot, but don’t expect the kind of entertaining shenanigans that we enjoy with its other creations…From Computational Complexity
Slicing the Hypercube
Here's a neat result I heard about at virtual Dagstuhl last week, a new lower bound on the number of hyperplanes that cuts all the edges of a hypercube.
A n-dimensional hypercube has 2n vertices corresponding to the binary strings…From insideHPC
Atos HPC Software Suites
This whitepaper, "Atos HPC Software Suites," from our friends over at Atos explains the main features and functionalities of the Atos HPC Software Suites and shares the company's vision for the significant evolutions coming
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Answers for the Bullwhip Effect
A classic problem with supply chain predictability. Often covered here. Oracle and Retailwire provide a survey and means to approach to address it.
Reverse the Supply Chain Bullwhip Effect
The entire supply chain has been upended…From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtual Reality at a Touch
A new kind of interaction with your reality. Perhaps easier and more productive.
Virtual Reality at Your Fingertips
ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Leo Herrmann, March 16, 2021
Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have developed…From The Eponymous Pickle
A Look inside Boston Dynamics Workshop
Impressed by some of the videos from inside Boston Dynamics, and some of their agile and assistive designs that have obviously broad applications. Here is some more:
Robot specialist Boston Dynamics offers rare look inside its…From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Embraces Immersive VR Learning
Good piece with useful details of the effort. Consider the volume of training required. Was involved with some sales training efforts, but this takes it quite further. Our innovation centers also allowed us to stage sales…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New CCPA Addresses Dark Patterns
First I had heard of this, the definition of 'dark patterns' seems quite loose.
California Passes Regulation Banning 'Dark Patterns' Under Landmark Privacy Law
in Gizmodo, Brianna Provenzano, March 15, 2021
New rules enacted under…From The Eponymous Pickle
Towards Deception Detection? In Humans, in Machines? In Crowds?
Following this in the Language Log Blog for some time. We even looked at large databases of human comments on products. But could such comments really be marked as 'deception'? And when our brands started to converse with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
TensorFlow3D and Audio
More on Google 3D Scene understanding inTensorFlow3D with links to audio. Quite interesting, why not build a broader notion of context? Like the direction.
3D Scene Understanding And building audio filters
By Bugra Akyildizin…From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Today's Retail
All will have an impact, demise no, efficiency yes.
The future of retail: Do robots, A.I., and AR spell demise for stores? By Jeremy Kaplan, in DigitalTrends
A robot started prowling the aisles at my local Stop & Shop grocery…From The Eponymous Pickle
Measuring Microfailures (Again)
Not really a new thing, but thinking about effectively measuring them is. Which we attempted to deal with directly. ...
Elsevier: Business Horizons Volume 63, Issue 4, July–August 2020, Pages 573-584
How small…From The Eponymous Pickle
Good Overview of Blockchain
Very nice non-technical video overview. Passing this on for a talk I am giving.
What is BLOCKCHAIN? The best explanation of blockchain technology
6 minute Youtube video: https://youtu.be/3xGLc-zz9cA
By Lucas Mostazo …From CERIAS Blog
So You Have to Learn a 3rd Programming Language?
I recently found myself in a conversation where someone made a comment about "Being so old I've programmed in Pascal!" I'm considerably older than that person, and actually did some of my first programming on plugboards and punchcards…
From BLOG@CACM
Misnomer and Malgorithm
The algorithm should be respected; the malgorithm should be rejected.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 27th 2021)
Scientists, including climate-science researchers, often travel to faraway places for conferences. Attending a live conference is time consuming and expensive. The cost is relative: attending a $3000 conference in Hawaii is cheap…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Fewer UK Troops, More Tech
Another inevitable thing. How do we make sure the decisions are applied in the right way?
Fewer Troops, but More Tech: U.K. Military Downsizes as it Shifts to AI, Drones, Cyber
By ZDNet, March 26, 2021
The U.K. government has…From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Launches Identity Platform on Bitcoin’s Blockchain
Via Walter Riker. Microsoft is working a number of strategies in identity I am exploring.
Microsoft Launches Identity Platform on Bitcoin’s Blockchain
By Emmanuel Young, in BeinCrypto
Microsoft has revealed the launch of aCalled…From The Eponymous Pickle
Unilever on Our Brave New Post Pandemic Work Future
Lots of future predictions, here from the CPG world we studied.
Fit for the postpandemic future: Unilever’s Leena Nair on reinventing how we work
As Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO), responsible for 150,000 Unilever employees…From The Eponymous Pickle
Anomaly Detection
Humans in conversation also look for anomalies to build a model of the interaction and its direction and value.
Explainable AI (XAI) design for unsupervised deep anomaly detector
Interpretable prototype for detecting Out-of-Distribution…From The Eponymous Pickle
DARPA Subterranean Challenge
Always intriguing, how can robotic systems autonomously navigate complex and messy environments, like virtual tunnels, caves, underground urban environments, or even the interiors of buildings or warehouses, to achieve somehttps…
From insideHPC
DOE Announces $29 Million for Data Analysis Tools
March 26, 2021 – The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced $29 million to develop new tools to analyze massive amounts of scientific information, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced algorithms…
From insideHPC
HPC User Forum: Virtual Event Coming Up in May
The HPC User Forum has been reconfigured as virtual events for 2021 and registration is now open for the May meeting at: www.hpcuserforum.com or directly at: https://attendesource.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x121544abcd…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Chipotle Wants to use Autonomous Nuro Delivery
Surprising to me, given the number of delivery services out there. Note the use of Nuro, which many retailers have tested. Still want to see one of these operating autonomously, have not heard…
From insideHPC
Preparing for Exascale: ALCF’s Aurora Early Science Program and Visualizing Cancer’s Spread
Scientists are preparing a cancer modeling study to run on Argonne’s upcoming Aurora supercomputer before it goes online in 2022. The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will be home to one of the nation…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Congrats Avi and Laci on the Abel Prize
The joy of knowing, understanding, and creating is common to all the sciences.—Vera Sós. Dorit Aharonov is a researcher in quantum computation. She was a Ph.D. student of Michael Ben-Or and Avi Wigderson. Her 1999 thesis, entitled…