Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2018
From insideHPC
Jon Bashor Retires After 27 Years of Service to National Labs
LBNL Communications Manager Jon Bashor has announced his retirement after 27 years with the national lab system. "As communications manager, Jon has been key to the visibility of Berkeley Lab’s computing program, both through…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Datasets for Teaching Data Science
Useful to have for testing and teaching concepts. With sample code.
Some datasets for teaching data science
By Rafael Irizarry 2018/01/22
In this post I describe the dslabs package, which contains some datasets that I use in
A…
From Schneier on Security
Obscure E-Mail Vulnerability
This vulnerability is a result of an interaction between two different ways of handling e-mail addresses. Gmail ignores dots in addresses, so [email protected] is the same as [email protected] is the same as b.r.u…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Kinds of Brain Maps
Unique tagging and looking for patterns to determine interaction among the brain cells. Other ways to use this method?
New Brain Maps With Unmatched Detail May Change Neuroscience
in Quanta Magazine by Monique Brouillette
A technique…
From Computational Complexity
Whan a deep theorem of your Uncles becomes standard should you be sad?
(An exposition of Nash-Williams's proof of the Kruskal Tree Theorem is here)
Andrew Vazsonyi (the mathematician, see here, not the folklorist, see here for that folklorist's wife) conjectured that the set of trees, under the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft's Next Act
From McKinsey, a Podcast:
CEO Satya Nadella talks about innovation, disruption, and organizational change.
In 2014, Satya Nadella was appointed CEO of Microsoft, making him only the third leader in the software company’s 40-year…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How to Think about Machine Learning
Nicely and non-technically put:
How to Think About Machine Learning Intro: by Jason Brownlee
Machine learning is a large and interdisciplinary field of study.
You can achieve impressive results with machine learning and find…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Radiologist Case Study of AI and Professional Jobs
Useful thoughts about how professional expertise might or might not be replaced. Augmented, but not replaced? With good detail. We examined similar professional applications in healthcare in previous AI efforts.
AI Will Change…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Level K thinking in Auctions and Assistants
How we also model interaction in any kind of interaction. Adversarial or Collaborative
Level-K Thinking in Auctions (Page 11) By David Banks, Duke University ...
From Talk notes.
" ... A fourth solution concept is level-k thinking…
From insideHPC
How ZIFF Powers AI with Dell EMC Technologies
In this video from the GPU Technology Conference, David Gonzolez from Ziff describes how Dell EMC powers AI solutions at his company. "ZIFF is unique in its approach to Ai. By focusing on empowering product visionaries and software…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Designing and Testing AI Microservices
Thought ultimately this would be a key aspect of delivering intelligence applications. The architectural design and selection of what each service looked like, and how they can be implemented to interact. A reminder of our…
From insideHPC
Researchers Tune HPC Codes for Intel Xeon Phi at Brookhaven Hackathon
"The goal of this hands-on workshop was to help participants optimize their application codes to exploit the different levels of parallelism and memory hierarchies in the Xeon Phi architecture,” said CSI computational scientist…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 7th, 2018)
Mammals have a neocortex, some kind of upper layer on top of our ancestral brain. It is believed to be the key evolutionary trick that makes mammals smarts. Yet birds have no cortex, but some of them (parrots and crows) are just…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Update: Adversarial Risk Analysis Talk
Talk given this week by Dr David Banks of Duke University and sponsored by Yichen Qin, Assistant Professor, Department of Operations, Business Analytics, and Information Systems, Lindner College of Business, University of
From The Eponymous Pickle
Marketing Strategy
Better together: Why integrating data strategy, teams, and technology leads to marketing success in ThinkWithGoogle
Customer interactions with brands generate an abundance of digital information, but the right elements must be…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brain Computer Interfaces
Could these methods be used beyond the hands-free enhanement? Could they be used to replace or enhance human interaction when mentally disabled? Presented on the site as technical augmentation, for computing platforms, but…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Evolving Process of Automobile Use and Security
A link to a Consumer Reports article on the recent evolution of automobile access, control and security technologies. Non-technical. Informative for a recent process examination. While this starts talking about the Tesla it…
From insideHPC
Video: Thomas Sterling on the Current State of HPC
In this video from the Supercomputing Frontiers Europe conference, Prof. Thomas Sterling describes how the National Strategic Computing Initiative will help keep the USA on the forefront of technology. Along the way he answers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mind Reading, Hands-free Augmentation
A long term goal, hands-free interaction with the Internet. I got a demo if this kind of thing a decade ago, and it didn't really work. Is it here now? Ideal use to drive an assistant. The ultimate augmentation?
Mind-reading…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Security Engineer at Ohio State University
The Ohio State University is seeking an HPC Security Engineer in our Job of the Week. "OSC provides high-performance computing services for university researchers and industrial clients. The HPC Systems Team delivers OSC’s production…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Sake Decanters Made of Dried Squid
This is interesting. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Deloitte on Humans and Automation.
Trends and forecasts.
AI, robotics, and automation
As AI and other advanced technologies permeate the workplace, skills such as critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving gain in importance. Leading companies are recognizing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smithsonian Looks at an AI Future
A non technical view ...
What Will Our Society Look Like When Artificial Intelligence Is Everywhere?
Will robots become self-aware? Will they have rights? Will they be in charge? Here are five scenarios from our future dominated…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Better Roomba Needs a Breakthrough
We spent quite sometime looking at home robotics, It has now been around for some time, and continues to mature. It will require some breakthrough in value to become common.
An iRoomba Review in Wired.
This bot features iRobot's…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Whats a Smart Contract?
When I asked the question at a recent talk I got the answer that smart contracts are the embedded agreements that exist in all Blockchains. But they can refer to other unrelated external agreements as well. But how often is…
From The Eponymous Pickle
VR and Eye Tracking
We saw the need for this early on. Where you are looking implies intent, so why not track it?
Peter Rubin in Wired.
Eye Tracking Coming to VR Sooner that you think. What Now? ....
".... Eye-tracking has been a part of the
…
From insideHPC
Ohio Supercomputing Center Hosts User Group Meeting
At the Ohio Supercomputer Center Statewide Users Group spring conference this week, OSC clients in fields spanning everything from astrophysics to linguistics gathered to share research highlights and hear updates about the center…
From insideHPC
New Pointwise Release Adds Mesh Automation and Adaptability for CFD
Pointwise has released Version 18.1, a major update to its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) mesh generation software. With its origins in a multiyear development effort funded by the U.S. Air Force for overset grid assembly…
From insideHPC
Barbara Chapman Joins Board of OpenMP ARB
Today the OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) announced the appointment of Barbara Chapman to its Board of Directors. "We are delighted to have Prof. Chapman join the OpenMP Board”, says Partha Tirumalai, chairman of the OpenMP…
From insideHPC
Let’s Talk Exascale: Developing Low Overhead Communication Libraries
In this episode of Let's Talk Exascale, Scott Baden of LBNL describes the Pagoda Project, which seeks to develop a lightweight communication and global address space support for exascale applications. "What our project is addressing…