Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2017
From Schneier on Security
Shadow Brokers Releases the Rest of their NSA Hacking Tools
Last August, an unknown group called the Shadow Brokers released a bunch of NSA tools to the public. The common guesses were that the tools were discovered on an external staging server, and that the hack and release was the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Assistants Acting as Phones
I note that in the IFTTT applets there are now ways to have the Amazon Echo dial phone numbers. See for example this applet, that causes the Echo to dial specific phone number and recite a message. Previously a skill was announced…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI In Medicine
Medicine has long been seen as a fruitful area of application for AI, because of its complexity, reliance on extensive and frequently changing data sources, deep expertise and high costs. Good to understand the applications…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hololens in the Classroom
With my first closeup view of the Hololens this week I was struck by the educational opportunity, and further how educational progress, and gaming could be integrated as well. Seeing how it could be inspirational.
Lifeliqe Partner…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Disney Aiming at Soft Body Robotics
Starting with audio animatronics, which we saw in the 60s, Disney has always been into interactive realism. What is the value of the very realistic android? Now reports indicate they want robotic characters that act like animation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Knowledge Graph of the Business World
We tried this with just an enterprise, and discovered it was quite hard. What is the appropriate level of detail? And how is it changing? The gaps can make your AI worthless.
Aman Naimat on building a knowlege graph of the
The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intelligence and Analytics Case Studies
A nice set of broad examples that are insightful.
5 Business Intelligence & Analytics Case Studies Across Industry
Last updated on April 4, 2017 by Daniel Faggella
When businesses make investments in new technologies, they usually…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Helpdesk Concierge Experience
I remember using the word 'Concierge' when developing our own experiences. It helps you think about multiple, focused experiences the way a concierge does. Helpful the user, and the developer as well. Plus for future maintenance…
From insideHPC
Cowboy Supercomputer Powers Research at Oklahoma State
In this video, Dana Brunson from Oklahoma State describes the mission of the Oklahoma High Performance Computing Center. Formed in 2007, the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) facilitates computational and data-intensive…
From insideHPC
GPU Hackathon Coming to Spain End of May
Appentra and CESGA are organizing a GPU Hackathon in Spain. The event takes place May 29 - June 1 at the Galicia Supercomputing Center in Santiago de Compostela. The event is free, limited in capacity and in Spanish, with priority…
From Michael Nielsen
Is there a tension between creativity and accuracy?
On Twitter, I’ve been chatting with my friend Julia Galef about tensions between thinking creatively and thinking in a way that reduces error in our thinking. Of course, all other things being equal, I’m in favour of reducing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Adaptive Machine Learning
Good points in DSC article below on adaptive machine learning. I often make the case that you should often consider if your modeling should be modeled adaptively. Data and context can be changing even if we don't expect…
From Putting People First
Jeremy Myerson on how social challenges can catalyse design-led innovation in industry
In this recent talk at the RCA in London, writer and academic Jeremy Myerson explores how social challenges can catalyse design-led innovation in industry. Rather than seeing such issues as ageing populations, growing healthcare…
From insideHPC
Managing Node Configuration with 1000s of Nodes
Ira Weiny from Intel presented this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. "Individual node configuration when managing 1000s or 10s of thousands of nodes in a cluster can be a daunting challenge. Two key daemons are now part of the…
From insideHPC
Driving Change with Multiphysics
The latest industrial vehicles – as with other areas of automotive design – often involve high-tech components composite components to assisted driving or vehicle automation systems which require significantly more complex simulation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Interaction Experiments in Hololens
Professor David E Rapien of the University of Cincinnati demonstrated his prototype for interacting with data using Microsoft's Hololens. Great start. Recall we experimented with this broad idea over the years. StartingVirtualitics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Document Review Inquiry
In the Gartner Blog, they mention a process called a Document Review Inquiry . Which like the author , I had never hear of. Worth a look. A means towards curation for Gartner, apparently. The same approach could lead you…
From Putting People First
Service design at the Singapore Government
Jacqueline Poh, CEO of Singapore’s GovTech agency, spoke about the importance of a service design approach at the Innovation by Design Conference 2017, held from 7-8 March as part of Singapore Design Week. Whether or not the
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
An Acessible Look at Logistic Regression
Logisitic regression is probably the most common analytic method used in industries I have spend the most time in. Like retail and marketing. Here a very good, largely non-technical description of how it works, and what you…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Robots have not yet stolen our jobs
Though it is not yet widespread, I encounter more and more people who seem to believe that there is growing unemployment, or falling labor participation rate, due to technology. It is true that technology has impacted the job…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Turing Award 2016
It takes a … Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the latest winner of the ACM Turing Award. He was cited for “inventing the World Wide Web (WWW), the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the web to scale…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Can Edit Their Own RNA
This is just plain weird: Rosenthal, a neurobiologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory, was a grad student studying a specific protein in squid when he got an an inkling that some cephalopods might be different. Every time…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open AI Gym
Open AI resources for experimenting with reinforcement learning. Python environment. Overview document.
From insideHPC
Dr. Robert Voight on Educating Computational Scientists
In this video from KAUST Live, Dr. Robert Voigt discusses his recent keynote at the HPC Saudi Conference on the topic of Educating Computational Scientists. "This talk will provide a historical perspective on the challenges of…
From insideHPC
Agena Posted for HPC User Forum in Santa Fe
Hyperion Research has posted the final agenda for the HPC User Forum April 17-19 in Santa Fe. Note that Hyperion Research is the new name for the former IDC HPC group.
The post Agena Posted for HPC User Forum in Santa Fe appeared…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 7th, 2017)
Many people suffer from obesity. I am not sure we know how to combat this epidemic effectively. There is a never ending stream of wonder diets, but nothing seems to actually work. Or we just tell people to have more will power…
From insideHPC
Video: InfiniBand Virtualization
"Infiniband Virtualization allows a single Channel Adapter to present multiple transport endpoints that share the same physical port. To software, these endpoints are exposed as independent Virtual HCAs (VHCAs), and thus may
…
From insideHPC
OCF in the UK Adopts Iceotope Liquid Cooling Technology
"Iceotope's novel approach to liquid cooling allows us to deliver compute capability for customers with environments outside the traditional air cooled datacentre – for example a factory shop floor or an office environment where…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson Visual Recognition
Introducing command line tools for Watson Visual Recognition by Andrew_Trice
The Watson Visual Recognition service is a powerful tool that enables you to leverage cognitive computer vision to extract information from any image…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tableau Changes Pricing Structure
Looks good, but seems expensive for the small business. Though I was a long time user in the enterprise, have not looked at how they structure their pricing for some time. A popular direction, but I think it gives smaller business…