Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2016
From Schneier on Security
BlackBerry's Global Encryption Key
Last week there was a big news story about the Blackberry encryption. The news was that all BlackBerry devices share a global encryption key, and that the Canadian RCMP has a copy of it. Stupid design, certainly, but it's not…
From Putting People First
How city design is adapting to older populations
As cities experience a demographic shift, the need for age-friendly design is becoming ever more critical. From almshouses to driverless cars, the future of urban housing and mobility may just be shaped for and by the elderly…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 25 April 2016
April vacation! Yes we do things different in New England. After this week we still have 7 to 8 weeks of school left. So this is a good time for a break. I hope to use some of it to work on some projects like writing up some …
From Phys.org Technology News
Obama says 'spirit of innovation' turns ideas into jobs
President Barack Obama it putting in a few good words for the "spirit of innovation" that he says turns ideas into jobs and growth.
From Writing
Introducing Gruntwork: get up and running on AWS with DevOps best practices and world-class infrastructure in about 2 weeks
Building infrastructure for a software company is much harder than it should be. There are so many moving parts and so many concepts to learn. How do I build my code? How do I deploy it? Should I use Docker? How do I deploy a…
From Computational Complexity
Some short bits from the Gathering for Gardner Conference
I attended G4G12 (Gathering for Gardner) a conference that meets every 2 years (though the gap between the first and second was three years) to celebrate the work of Martin Gardner. Most of the talks were on Recreational mathematics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Beginners Guide to Chatbots
Well done article in Medium, with reasonable definitions and pointers to examples and resources. The distinction is made between those driven by machine learning and AI. Of course do also take a look at the bot examples featured…
From insideHPC
HiPEAC Seeks Your Input for the Next Ten Years of Computing
The good folks at the European Network on High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation (HiPEAC) have launched a call for contributions to the 2017 edition of the HiPEAC Vision, which will set out the way forward…
From insideHPC
Video: HPC Trends from the Trenches at Bio-IT World
In this video, Chris Dagdigian from Bioteam delivers his annual assessment of the best, the worthwhile, and the most overhyped information technologies for life sciences at the 2016 Bio-IT World Conference & Expo in Boston. "The…
From Putting People First
[Book] The Politics of Design
The Politics of Design: A (Not so) Global Manual for Visual Communication By Ruben Pater BIS Publishers May 2015 Many designs that appear in today’s society will circulate and encounter audiences of many different cultures and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Supply Chain Numbers at Amazon and Wal-Mart
A look at retail heavyweights, their numbers and some key innovations:Supply Chain News: Walmart and Amazon by the Numbers 2016Our Annual Review of the World's Two Most Important RetailersI think it is rather safe to say that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Failing and Succeeding in the Digital World
Podcast in Knowledge@Wharton: It is counterintuitive to celebrate failures as well as successes. But that is precisely what needs to happen if companies wish to spark a culture of innovation, says Ganesh Ayyar, CEO of Mphasis…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Look at the Virtual Assistant Landscape
Nicely done view of what is going on, with considerable variance in the definition of assistant. Useful to see the extensive examples here.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Browsing the Web in Virtual Reality
Has been proposed a number of times. Is this useful? Likely to be created and used? In the relatively early days of the Web you could browse 2D representations of the organization of the web as a tree. To my knowledge this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Procurement Undergoing Digital Revolution
Thoughts on a Deloitte study in Supply Chain Digest. " .... After a Period of People Expansion, Procurement Now Being Asked to Do More with Less; the Two Tracks for Digitization ... " . An area I have followed for years, further…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Voice Service with Java on Raspberry Pi
I am very late to this, I see lots of people have it working. All the steps are there, but its an advanced project that requires buying a number of additional parts, some programming understanding, and attention to detail, should…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Soft Robotic Fingers
We addressed this issue for a robotics application. Haptics is touch.In the CACM:Soft Robotic Fingers Recognize Objects by FeelDaniela Rus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial…
From insideHPC
Video: Intel’s Machine Learning Strategy
In this video from the HPC User Forum in Tucson, Gary Paek from Intel presents: Intel's Machine Learning Strategy. "Earlier this week, Intel announced the inception of the Intel Data Analytics Acceleration Library (Intel DAAL)…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Application Performance Engineer at Mellanox
Mellanox is seeking an HPC Application Performance Engineer in our Job of the Week. "Mellanox Technologies is looking for a talented engineer to lead datacenter application performance optimization and benchmarking over Mellanox…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Quantum Supremacy and Complexity
An AMS article by Gil Kalai updates his skeptical position on quantum computers Cropped from Rothschild Prize source Gil Kalai is a popularizer of mathematics as well as a great researcher. His blog has some entries on Polymath…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: My Little Cephalopod
I assume this is more amusing to people who know about My Little Pony. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
From insideHPC
University of Iceland Unveils Lenovo Supercomputer
Today the University of Iceland unveiled a new supercomputer that will boost research in a range of scientific areas. Manufactured by Lenovo, the cluster was funded by the Research Infrastructure Fund Iceland with matching funds…
From Schneier on Security
Encryption Backdoor Cartoons
Dilbert has a series: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. SMBC. And three more that make it clear this is a security vs. surveillance debate. Also this....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Marketing AI
Examples of coming Marketing AI. by Jeremy Wilson" ... With all the buzz about artificial intelligence and the launch of the Facebook bot marketplace, I thought it might be helpful to look at the potential implications for marketers…
From insideHPC
HPC Benchmarking Results for Intel Broadwell Processors
Over at the Dell HPC Community Blog, Ashish Kumar Singh, Mayura Deshmukh and Neha Kashyap discuss the performance characterization of Intel Broadwell processors with High Performance LINPACK (HPL) and STREAM benchmarks.
The post…From The Eponymous Pickle
Magic Leap Virtual Reality
In Wired: A new kind of virtual reality augmentation, with much less needed equipment in the way? Making it a kind of augmented reality without some of the clumsiness? Still under development, with lots of funding appearing…
From insideHPC
Video: Cloud for the “Missing Middle”
Leo Reiter from Nimbix presented this deck at the HPC User Forum. “Nimbix is a pure high performance computing cloud built for volume, speed and simplicity. We give people the tools and the processing power to solve their biggest…
From insideHPC
Michael Klemm Appointed CEO of OpenMP ARB
The Board of Directors of the OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Michael Klemm as the new CEO of the OpenMP organization, a group of vendors and research organizations creating…
From insideHPC
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Packs 8 GPUs into Apollo 6500 Server
In this video from the 2016 GPU Technology Conference, Greg Schmidt from Hewlett Packard Enterprise describes the new Apollo 6500 server. "With up to eight high performance NVIDIA GPU cards designed for maximum transfer bandwidth…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Congressional Briefing on Encryption on April 22
The Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee will hold a lunch briefing today on “Encryption: Balancing Privacy, Security and Law Enforcement Needs.” The panelists will explore a range of legislative issues, judicialContinue…