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 The Eponymous Pickle
Retail Systems Research
Brought to my attention
Retail Systems Research (RSR)
The Candid Voice in Retail Technology: Objective Insights, Pragmatic Advice ....
The BOOT Methodology©
To support our goal of creating a business context for technology, RSR…
From Computational Complexity
Challenge: Is there a small NFA for { a^i : i\ne 1000} ?
Consider the language
{L = ai : i ≠ 1000 }
There is a DFA for L of size 1002 and one can prove that there is no smaller DFA.
What about an NFA? Either:
a) Show that any NFA for L requires roughly 1000 states
or
b)
…
From insideHPC
New MapD Cloud offers GPU-accelerated Analytics
Over at the MapD blog, Todd Mostak writes the company has justed launched the MapD Cloud, a major milestone GPU-accelerated analytics. "With MapD Cloud, anyone can spin up a 2-week trial of our platform in less than 60 seconds…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Walmart Expanding Digital Focus
Its inevitable to allow them to continue compete. My impression is that they have always been good at utilizing emergent tech.
Walmart is focused on expanding its digital brand portfolio by James Tenser in Retailwire with
Walmart…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Conversation with David Brin on AI
Have had some conversations with Sci Fi author David Brin on AI and privacy. Look forward to seeing the contextual and speculative views of a science fiction writer.
Voices in AI – Episode 39: A Conversation with David Brin Interviewed…
From insideHPC
Asperitas and Boston Collaborate on Immersed Cooling for Datacenters
Today Dutch cleantech company Asperitas announced it is partnering with Boston Ltd on Immersed Computing technologies. "Our partnership with Asperitas ushers in an exciting new chapter for our business and for our customers delivering…
From insideHPC
Video: Piz Daint Supercomputer speeds PRACE simulations in Europe
In this video, the European PRACE HPC initiative describes how the Piz Daint supercomputer at CSCS in Switzerland provides world-class supercomputing power for research. "We are very pleased that Switzerland – one of our long…
From insideHPC
Cray to build FPGA-Accelerated Supercomputer for Paderborn University
Today Paderborn University in Germany announced that it has selected a Cray CS500 cluster system as its next-generation supercomputer. This procurement is the first phase of the Noctua project in which a multi-petaflop-system…
From insideHPC
Video: Liqid Teams with Inspur at GTC for Composable Infrastructure
In this video from GTC 2018, Dolly Wu from Inspur and Marius Tudor from Liquid describe how the two companies are collaborating on Composable Infrastructure for AI and Deep Learning workloads. "AI and deep learning applications…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Computing and Emotional Intelligence
We worked with MIT on related systems. Followed Rosalind Picard. Most recently looking at what Watson has done with related skills emotion and personality detection. Consider deriving personality as a means of understanding…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Likley Jobs Soon to be Automated
Not very surprising, these were mentioned in the last go-around of AI Tech. Perhaps only less mentioned before, jobs that had a high robotic component that required vision+manipulation. Vision was less solved back then.
Replaced…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Digital Thinkers?
This message from Brian Aspinall was floating around in my social media the other day and it really resonates with me.
From Schneier on Security
Public Hearing on IoT Risks
The US Consumer Product Safety Commission is holding hearings on IoT risks: The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC, Commission, or we) will conduct a public hearing to receive information from all interested parties…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Always Out of Balance: Looking for Equilibria
Nicepiece, which includes a short, easy to understand video that explains the basics of the Nash Equilibrium. We sought to use these methods to understand competitive behavior. Not very successfully I admit, but the approach…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Is Computer Science Hard to Learn?
It’s been close to 45 years since I took my first computer science course. I really struggled with the first program. OK someone mostly wrote it for me. The third program we worked on together and the third I mostly wrote for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger and Embedded Machine Learning Analytics
Good to see how much work Kroger is doing in advanced analytics, congrats to my friends there, we worked with them in the innovation area, always following them for leading tech. This is a leading direction, good to see Kroger…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talk: Adversarial Risk Analysis
Of interest in particular, due to the adversarial element. Risk analysis does not often enough consider the intelligent nature of agents that create risk. Competitors for example, and now even intelligent agents in the form…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA Makes GPU Computing Easier in the Cloud
Setting up an environment for High Performance Computing (HPC) especially using GPUs can be daunting. There can be multiple dependencies, a number of supporting libraries required, and complex installation instructions. NVIDIA…
From insideHPC
Rack Scale Composable Infrastructure for Mixed Workload Data Centers
A more flexible, application-centric, datacenter architecture is required to meet the needs of rapidly changing HPC applications and hardware. In this guest post, Katie Rivera of One Stop Systems explores how rack-scale composable…
From insideHPC
Satoshi Matsuoka Moves to RIKEN Center for Computational Science
Satoshi Matsuoka from the Tokyo Tech writes that he is taking on a new role at RIKEN to foster the deployment of the Post-K computer. "From April 1st I have become the Director of Riken Center for Computational Science, to lead…
From insideHPC
Inside the new NVIDIA DGX-2 Supercomputer with NVSwitch
In this video from the GPU Technology Conference, Marc Hamilton from NVIDIA describes the new DGX-2 supercomputer with the NVSwitch interconnect. "NVIDIA NVSwitch is the first on-node switch architecture to support 16 fully-connected…
From insideHPC
RAID No More: GPUs Power NSULATE for Extreme HPC Data Protection
In this video from GTC 2018, Alexander St . John from Nyriad demonstrates how the company's NSULATE software running on Advanced HPC gear provides extreme data protection for HPC data. As we watch, he removes a dozen SSDs from…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brainstorming Killing Creativity
Always thought there was a flaw in brainstorming, and was in many of them.
Brainstorming Is Killing Your Creativity
Our go-to method for problem solving is majorly flawed. Here’s how to flip it on its head.
By Stephanie VozzaFastcompany…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Capabilities in Japan
Continued advanced of global assistants. Because of Japan's work in eldercare, would not be surprised to see advances there.
Alexa Voice Service now generally available for device makers in Japan
By Kari Johnson @KhariJohnson…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Its all About having the Right Data and Metadata
Spent quite a lot of time figuring this out for analytics in the enterprise.
Data governance and the death of schema on read in O'Reily
Comcast’s system of storing schemas and metadata enables data scientists to find, understand…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Animating Visualized Data
Interesting piece in Observable on Animation of visualized data. Which categorizes various kinds of visualization. There has been an increase in these kinds of things, apparently to enhance the attention that such visualizations…
From Schneier on Security
Musical Ciphers
Interesting history....
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
The Entropy of Baseball
The most shocking existential fact about the universe? Sports April Fools source George Ruth Jr., the “Babe,” may have thought he had cosmic significance but no one knew it until now. He would have said it was all a joke anyway…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Attentive Assistant Makers Patent their Leverage
This article in yesterday's NYT discusses how companies who have attentive sytems, like Amazon and Google, have pending patents that describe how they can take advantage of what they hear. Yet the companies involved usually…
From insideHPC
New HP Z8 is “World’s Most Powerful Workstation for Machine Learning Development”
HP Z Workstations, with new NVIDIA technology, are ideal for local processing at the edge of the network – giving developers more control, better performance and added security over cloud-based solutions. "Products like the HP…