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
Cheating in Bicycle Races with Tiny Hidden Motors
If doping weren't enough, cyclists are cheating in races by hiding tiny motors in their bicycles. There are many detection techniques: For its report, Stade 2 positioned a thermal imaging camera along the route of the Strade…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Sees AI and Cloud as its Future
Have heard this mantra from a number of directions this week. " .... Google believes its superior AI will be the key to its future .... Sundar Pichai sets its sights on AI and the cloud .. " In the Verge. Cognitive AI can…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Gathering, Displaying, Connected Contact Lens
Wearable, even bionic solutions to augmented reality:Samsung is developing a contact lens camera, triggered by blinking, that can also project images into the eye ... Samsung is exploring the development of a contact lens that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Conversational Voice Bots From Baidu
Considerable work done by Chinese company Baidu in voice interfaces, with indications of Bot like interaction to AI. A good group to follow. They have a huge test bed of possibilities. Have yet to see a demo of their approaches…
From insideHPC
Ohio Supercomputer Center Names New Cluster after Jesse Owens
The Ohio Supercomputer Center has named its newest HPC cluster after Olympic champion Jesse Owens. The new Owens Cluster will be powered by Dell PowerEdge servers featuring the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Analytics Edge
Was pointed to this book:The Analytics Edge: by Dimitris Bertsimas, Allison O'Hair, William PulleyblankThey write:This book covers the science of using data to build models, improve decisions, and ultimately add value to institutions…
From insideHPC
e-IRG Roadmap to Help Shape European Open Science Cloud
This week, the European Commission presented a vision for the European Science Cloud that will bring together current and future data infrastructures. The European Open Science Cloud will be created for European researchers and…
From The Noisy Channel
Human or Vulcan: Should Data Scientists Rely on Intuition?
Intuition in data science is a funny thing.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIH National Cancer Institute Opens Online Platform to Submit Ideas About Research for Cancer Moonshot
The National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health has launched an online platform to enable the research community and the public to submit ideas on the National Cancer Moonshot efforts. The goal…
From insideHPC
How HPE Makes GPUs Easier to Program for Data Scientists
In this video from the 2016 GPU Technology Conference, Rich Friedrich from Hewlett Packard Enterprise describes how the company makes it easier for Data Scientists to program GPUs. "In April, HPE announced a public, open-source…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The powerful hacker culture
In my post the hacker culture is winning, I observed that the subculture developed in the software industry is infecting the wider world. One such visible culture shift is the concept of “version update”. In the industrial era…
From Phys.org Technology News
Looking back: 30 years of photographing Chernobyl
Efrem Lukatsky, a Kiev-based photographer for The Associated Press, recalls the confusion and anxiety of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, the world's worst nuclear accident.
From insideHPC
Brian V. Turner Joins Cray’s Board
Today Cray announced that its Board of Directors has appointed Brian V. Turner as a member of the Board and as a member of its Audit and Compensation Committees, effective April 18, 2016.
The post Brian V. Turner Joins Cray’s…From insideHPC
Why the HPC Industry will Converge on Europe at ISC 2016
In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, ISC’s Nages Sieslack highlights a convergence of technologies around HPC, a focus of the ISC High Performance conference, which takes place June 19-23 in Frankfurt…
From insideHPC
Video: Lustre Community Release Update
Peter Jones from Intel presented this talk at LUG 2016 in Portland. "The OpenSFS Lustre Working Group (LWG) is the place the where the participants of OpenSFS come together to coordinate their software development efforts for…
From insideHPC
Why Parallelism?
"As clock speeds for CPU’s have not been increasing as compared to a decade ago, chip designers have been enhancing the performance of both CPUs, such as the Intel Xeon and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor by adding more cores.…
From Computational Complexity
The Master Algorithm
We see so few popular science books on computer science, particularly outside of crypto and theory. Pedro Domingos' The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake the World, despite the hyped…
From Schneier on Security
How Hacking Team Got Hacked
The hacker who hacked Hacking Team posted a lengthy description of how he broke into the company and stole everything. Two articles. ETA: This post originally had a pastebin.com link to the original post, but it seems to have…
From Putting People First
The product design of IoT
As more and more ‘Internet of Things’ products come into the market, most, if not all will come with significant challenges. The key to overcoming any obstacles, writes Joe Johnston, VP Experience Innovation for Universal Mind…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Spaces and Cognitive Mediators
Smart Spaces - People with Cognitive MediatorsOrganizational Change and the Digital Economy:A Computational Organization Science PerspectiveYes, spaces are one way to think about this. But also Jobs/roles. Or even Responsibilities…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Comparison of Public Clouds
In CWorld: Interesting most because is covers current different features of public clouds. " ... Public cloud review: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Joyent ... "
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why Forecasters Are often Wrong
In Knowledge@Wharton; Why forecasting is often not on the mark. A favorite author J Scott Armstrong, and a number of others talk about the limitations of accuracy of forecasting, its current capabilities, and thus why data often…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Industrializing Data Science
Nicely done, non technical piece in Data Science Central. Covering many of the topics and issues now being considered and debated.
From The Eponymous Pickle
3D Printing Ceramic Parts
Parts of aircraft engines. An unexpected advance. Was just introduced to advanced ceramics uses in engines." .... HRL’s trick is to formulate special resins that can be used as the ink in a printer. They are made out of polymers…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
USPTO Patent Quality Community Symposium on April 27
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will host a one-day Patent Quality Community Symposium on Wednesday, April 27, 2016 at the USPTO’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. The Symposium will update the public on the elevenContinue…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of April 18
Monday, April 18, 2016 State of the Net Wireless Internet Policy Conference 2 pm | Newseum Markup: Multiple Communications Bills House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology 5 pm | 2123 Rayburn House…
From XRDS
Khandu Cards: Design for Kids… and grown-ups!
I recently received a set of Khandu cards after backing a Kickstarter. These cards are designed by a company called Seven Thinkers, their aim is to get kids thinking like designers early in life. I was interested immediatelyContinue…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Surface Pro 4 Unboxing
My Surface Pro 3 has been my constant companion and major computer workhouse ever since I got it over a year ago. It’s pretty much ideal for a school computer. I’m seeing more and more students carry them around the building …
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIST Video Analytics in Public Safety (VAPS) Workshop
On June 6, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will host the 2016 Video Analytics in Public Safety (VAPS) Workshop, a satellite workshop of the Public Safety Communications Research (PSCR) Broadband Stakeholder…
From insideHPC
Video: UPC++ Parallel Programming Extension
In this video from the 2016 OpenFabrics Workshop, Zili Zheng from LBNL presents: UPC++. "UPC++ is a parallel programming extension for developing C++ applications with the partitioned global address space (PGAS) model. UPC++ …