Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2019
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Adoption in Retail
General general overview, not enough direct examples.
Forecasting AI Adoption in Retail: A Mixed Bag By Alex Woodie in Datanami
You don’t have to look far to see the impact that artificial intelligence is having on the world
A…
From insideHPC
Cornell Investigates Multi-cloud Cost Management with RightScale
The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) is collaborating with RightScale, recently acquired by Flexera, to understand how to best manage and optimize costs in a multi-cloud world. "Universities and research…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Vudu Competes with Shoppable Ads
Had actually forgotten about the Wal-Mart streaming service Vudu. Interesting experiment to understand what evokes interaction and get related data. Buying directly from integrated product in video has long been a holy grail…
From insideHPC
HPC Breaks Through to the Cloud: Why It Matters
In this special guest feature, Scot Schultz from Mellanox writes researchers are benefitting in a big way from HPC in the Cloud. "HPC has many different advantages depending on the specific use case, but one aspect that these…
From insideHPC
New Funding and DARPA Grant to Propel Optical Interconnects at Ayar Labs
Today Ayar Labs announced that the company has secured additional funding to fuel its growth as it drives to productize its TeraPHY optical I/O chiplets and SuperNova multi-wavelength lasers in 2019. The company aims to disrupt…
From insideHPC
Bill Dally from NVIDIA presents: Accelerating AI
Bill Daly from NVIDIA gave this talk at the Matroid Scaled Machine Learning Conference. "The world of computing is experiencing an incredible change with the introduction of deep learning and AI. Deep learning relies on GPU acceleration…
From insideHPC
Call for Presentations: MVAPICH User Group in August
The 7th annual MVAPICH User Group (MUG) meeting has issued its Call for Presentations. MUG will take place from August 19-21, 2019 in Columbus, Ohio. "MUG aims to bring together MVAPICH2 users, researchers, developers, and system…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Network Coding Yields Lower Bounds
Practice leads theory Peyman Afshani, Casper Freksen, Lior Kamma, and Kasper Larsen have a beautiful new paper titled “Lower Bounds for Multiplication via Network Coding”. Today we will talk about how practical computing played…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Improving Wifi Security
Wifi is so commonly used, it needs to be secure in its basic defaul tuse.
Enterprise Wi-Fi: We Need Devices That Are Secure by Default
By Alberto Bartoli, Eric Medvet, Andrea De Lorenzo, Fabiano Tarlao , Communications of the ACM…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Heat Transfer in Boiling Water
Had a minor involvement, as a lab assistant, in studies about the transfer of heat, at first in boiling water, and later applied to stellar atmospheres. It's more complex than you think.
Getting to the bottom of the “boiling…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Behavior
We behave, machines exhibit behavior. Both can be trained with examples and practice and direction. Both have been collaborating for some time. But only recently have machines been given the opportunity to take small amounts…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
A Picture of A Black Hole Shows How Cool Computer Science Is
Contributions to this post were graciously provided by CCC Director Ann Schwartz and CCC Chair Mark Hill. Computer science is cool, but you already knew that. You are in this field because you find it cool, exciting, and limitless…
From Schneier on Security
Defending Democracies Against Information Attacks
To better understand influence attacks, we proposed an approach that models democracy itself as an information system and explains how democracies are vulnerable to certain forms of information attacks that autocracies naturally…
From The Eponymous Pickle
US to Use AI to Scan Passengers Faces
This is inevitable, and will sooner be in most non US airports. Every CCTV camera will soon be online with face recognition.
U.S. Airports Will Use AI To Scan 97% Of Passengers' Faces Within 4 Years in Forbes By Nicole Martin…
From BLOG@CACM
Breaking the Chains of Freelance Slavery
The idea of working from home is no longer novel, and there are a number of drawbacks to consider.
From insideHPC
Liqid Enables Multi-Fabric Support for Composable Infrastructure
Today Liqid announced unified multi-fabric support for composability across all major fabric types including PCIe Gen 3, PCIe Gen 4, Ethernet, Infiniband, and laying the foundation for the up-coming Gen-Z specifications. "Providing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Python is used at Netflix
An instructive piece in the Netflix tech blog. Netflix has to reliably delivery large amounts of data, personalized to millions of consumers, reliably and securely. While gathering information to tailor their sales and marketing…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF/CISE Launches Search Committee for Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Division Director
The following is a letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering…
From insideHPC
Beluga Supercomputer comes to Calcul Québec
Calcul Québec has deployed a new supercomputer to power research in Canada. With over 28,000 compute cores and 688 NVIDIA V100 GPUs, the new Béluga system was first made available at the beginning of April and is now the main…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Feedback loops for Neural Nets
I remember something similar posed in the 90s, tat feedback could converge to better results. Or at least produce some better next step position. Don't recall any work suggest progress back then. Now its here? Lots more detail…
From insideHPC
GPU Technology Conference Returns to DC in November
NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference will returns to Washington, D.C. Nov 5-6, 2019. "GTC is the premier AI and deep learning conference series, providing you with training, insights, and direct access to experts from NVIDIA and…
From insideHPC
Register for the Altair Student Competition for Innovation in Electromagnetics
Altair invites engineering students from across the globe to participate in their Student Competition for Innovation in Electromagnetics. “At a time when energy efficiency is a global priority, students can use Altair software…
From insideHPC
Long Live Posix – HPC Storage and the HPC Datacenter
Robert Triendl from DDN gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. "The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Strategy for Voice Technology
HBR on the topic. Very good overview, some good stats referred to. I think most consumer facing companies are thinking about voice, but a specific strategy is harder. Recall the emergence of the smartphone and tablets,
Your…
From The Eponymous Pickle
An Initial Look at Wal-Mart's Future Store
FastCompany takes an initial look. Different it seems, from what we did in our future store. Less direct research and more, promotion of themselves as a forward looking company. Good piece, expect to see more on the topic…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Game of Thrones and Computer Science
I confess that I have not watched a single episode of Game of Thrones. That doesn’t mean I am oblivious to the social impact of the show. My online social media is full of it. So when Rita Tillson Vasak linked to this SlateIt…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Emotions in Group Photos
More than just spotting but also getting the emotion of multiple people. Could lead to the further understanding of crowds in contect.
Spotting Faces in the Crowd
from University of Delaware By Julie Stewart
University of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cheaper Robot Arms for Human Tasks
New ideas in lower cost robotics.
Blue Is a New Low-Cost Force-Controlled Robot Arm from UC Berkeley
Designed to safely perform human-scale tasks, Blue will cost $5k and help accelerate research towards useful home robots By…
From Schneier on Security
Stealing Ethereum by Guessing Weak Private Keys
Someone is stealing millions of dollars worth of Ethereum by guessing users' private keys. Normally this should be impossible, but lots of keys seem to be very weak. Researchers are unsure how those weak keys are being generated…
From Computational Complexity
x3 + y3 + z3 = 33 has a solution in Z. And its big!
Consider the following problem:
Given k, a natural number, determine if there exists x,y,z INTEGERS such that x3+y3+z3=k.
It is not obvious that this problem is decidable (I think it is but have not been able to find an exact…