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
A History of Advertising Holding Company WPP
Only did a little work with them on the edges of tech, not very impressed, they seemed to be wrestling with what they should do next. Worth a historical read.
In Adage:
How WPP went from shopping cart maker to the world's
By…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Getting the Most from your Data
Once more, Jason Brownlee makes some excellent points. It starts and ends with the data. Its the biggest asset, and also the largest obstacle. Frame it and test it. Is there enough, does it support the methods you can
H…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Panel: Retail and Machine learning
An interesting panel I am attending. Like to see the idea of machine learning applied to retail, via Retailwire.
Machine Learning is Teaching Retailers How to Compete Again
Wednesday, April 18th, 1 pm Eastern / 10 am Pacific
Register…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
ACM-W Connections – April 2018
Letter from ACM-W Chair News from ACM-W Celebrations News from ACM-W Professional Chapters News from ACM-W Student Chapters News from ACM-W Europe Welcome from the ACM-W Chair I am writing this welcome message while attending…
From My Biased Coin
New Papers/Code for MIC and MINE
Several years ago, I worked on a project where the goal was to try to come up with an "equitable" version of a measure of dependence; the idea was you could take a large multi-dimensional data set, score the dependence for each…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robots not the Answer
But to some challenges they are inevitable.
Robots are not the answer to store challenges by Nikki Baird in Retailwire with expert input.
... Through a special arrangement, what follows is a summary of an article from Retail…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What Does an Agency Add?
Fairly good thoughts, but not quite enough detail. But the 'can ' and 'could' must be rated by their return. ... but the potential return for digital could be large .... and what digital might do, might replace what
How…
From insideHPC
Shifter – Docker Containers for HPC
Alberto Madonaa gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. "In this work we present an extension to the container runtime of Shifter that provides containerized applications with a mechanism to access GPU accelerators and specialized…
From insideHPC
Altair Steps up to Azure Cloud with Inspire Unlimited
Altair software is now part of the Inspire Unlimited software-as-a-service offering available on the Azure cloud. "Unlike the HyperWorks Unlimited Appliance, where performance is based on the number of nodes, Inspire’s scale
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning and Signal Processing
Quite interesting, linking classical signal processing and machine learning. Signal processing was part of classical engineering training. I assume this is still common. Ultimately its all about signals that we are trying…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Modeling the Visual Intelligence of Dogs
Quite a remarkable claim. Can many visuals replace the ability to query a system about about what it knows. Could this work with humans, entities like firms and their data? Examining.
Via the University of Washington and Allen…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Russia Has a Chat Assistant: Alice
A global trend. More conversational? Yandex mentioned here previously.
Alice In Putin’s Wonderland: How Russia’s AI Assistant Compares To Siri And Alexa
The assistant, launched by a company, with ties to the Kremlin, is exploding…
From insideHPC
Accelerating Ceph with RDMA and NVMe-oF
Haodong Tang from Intel gave this talk at the 2018 Open Fabrics Workshop. "Efficient network messenger is critical for today’s scale-out storage systems. Ceph is one of the most popular distributed storage system providing a
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talk: Business Process and AI
Upcoming next week, a favorite topic of mine ... About linking analytics directly to operational and strategic models of process. Analytics now also means the use of cognitive and embedded logical capabilities. Known broadly…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Monetizing Data to Produce Data as an Asset
A topic we followed and experimented with for years. What has been added now is also the risk of holding data. Consider risk analysis. Good piece:
Monetizing Data: Follow the Yellow Brick Road written by Mark Katz in FinancialTechnologyToday…
From insideHPC
Using Ai to detect Gravitational Waves with the Blue Waters Supercomputer
NASA researchers are using AI technologies to detect gravitational waves. The work is described in a new article in Physics Review D this month. "This article shows that we can automatically detect and group together noise anomalies…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Getting the Most from AI
Attended this webinar last week from MITSloan, very well done. Here is a description and link to the recording.
On Demand: “Five Strategies for Getting the Most From AI”
Many business leaders are contemplating whether and/or how…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Chips Advance Smarter Devices
Very good overview of the nature of chips that enable AI on the edge capabilities. New capabilities for the IOT. And who is doing what in delivering new hardware. I recall mention back in the 90s it was said that faster hardware…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple Homepod lagging?
Homepod will get many purchases simply from the wave of Apple zealots, and the audiophile speaker, but is that enough? Do the assistant aspects do well enough? Is that what people want? How much is it connected to their Siri…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Eating Firefly Squid
In Tokama, Japan, you can watch the firefly squid catch and eat them in various ways: "It's great to eat hotaruika around when the seasons change, which is when people tend to get sick," said Ryoji Tanaka, an executive at the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Amazon Skill Builders Guide
Amazon puts together a nice doc about building voice first experiences. Linked to below. Mostly rules of thumb to make things work. And they have lots of data now on what works well, based on the architecture they have.
10…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teachers For Now or Teachers Forever?
One really can get a lot out of following Twitter hashtags from conferences and other events. Today I saw the following Tweet:
From The Eponymous Pickle
Your Brands Voice at Risk
Good cautions, but how different from other ad channels?
Don't Let Alexa or Siri Speak for Your Company: Protecting Your Brand's Voice on AI Platform
With the rising popularity of voice-driven AI assistants, it's important for
When…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 13th, 2018)
Somewhat depressingly, there is very little evidence that you can improve people’s overall cognitive abilities: Although cognitive ability correlates with domain-specific skills—for example, smarter people are more likely toContinue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blockchain and the Supply Chain
Another example of the technology. Similar it seems to what Wal-Mart has been experimenting with. Still don't don't see why this is necessarily better than a well designed database, notably the speed aspect.
IBM Watson with…
From insideHPC
Amazon and Libfabric: A case study in flexible HPC Infrastructure
Brian Barrett from Amazon gave this talk at the 2018 OpenFabrics Workshop. "As network performance becomes a larger bottleneck in application performance, AWS is investing in improving HPC network performance. Our initial investment…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Director of Computing at ECMWF
"Supercomputing capability plays a key role in ECMWF’s success and in its ability to implement its strategic vision to 2025. In order to meet the required flexibility for future growth, ECMWF’s data centre is being relocated
…
From insideHPC
Architects for Research Infrastructure
The mission of the eScience Centre is to support research through the development and provision of advanced ICT infrastructure, services and expertise. We provide services and expertise in the areas of High Performance Computing…
From Computational Complexity
Lance and Bill Gather for Gardner
Every two years in Atlanta, recreational mathematicians gather to honor Martin Gardner, whose Scientific American column Mathematical Games through the 60's and the 70's. Those columns inspired budding mathematicians of a certain…
From Schneier on Security
COPPA Compliance
Interesting research: "'Won't Somebody Think of the Children?' Examining COPPA Compliance at Scale": Abstract: We present a scalable dynamic analysis framework that allows for the automatic evaluation of the privacy behaviors…