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 insideHPC
Micron steps up with NVMe SSDs
Micron recently unveiled its new series of flagship solid-state drives (SSDs) featuring the NVMe protocol, bringing industry-leading storage performance at higher capacities to cloud and enterprise computing markets. The Micron…
From insideHPC
BeeGFS – Dealing with Extreme Requirements in HPC
Frank Herold from ThinkParQ gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "Together with our partners around the globe, we work hard to create the fastest, most stable and most flexible turn-key solutions for every performance-oriented…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Training Data for Autonomous Driving
Getting, saving, and usefully tagging data and metadata for key purposes is a powerful idea.
Training Data for Autonomous Driving By Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Using processed images, algorithms learn to recognize the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Autonomous Vegetable Weeding
Another approach that will increase agricultural food production.
FarmWise turns to Roush to build autonomous vegetable weeders By Matt Burns @mjburnsy
FarmWise wants robots to do the dirty part of farming: weeding. With that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nanoparticles for Drug Delivery
Yet another direction for pharmaceutical delivery is proposed
Nanoparticles take a fantastic, magnetic voyage
Tiny robots powered by magnetic fields could help drug-delivery nanoparticles reach their targets.
Anne Trafton | MIT …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantum Hype and Skepticism
Short piece looks at both sides.
Quantum Hype and Quantum Skepticism By Moshe Y. Vardi
Communications of the ACM, May 2019, Vol. 62 No. 5, Page 7
10.1145/3322092
" .... The popular media regularly reports breathlessly on quantum…
From The Eponymous Pickle
RSR Research on Clouds
Brought to my attention:
The Candid Voice in Retail Technology: Objective Insights, Pragmatic Advice
RSR is the candid voice in retail technology
Since our founding in 2007, we have combined our extensive retail industry backgrounds…
From insideHPC
Is Ubiquitous Cloud Bursting on the Horizon for Universities?
In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Mahesh Pancholi from OCF writes a growing number of universities are taking advantage of public cloud infrastructures that are widely available from large companies…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Risks of Artificial Intelligence
Having now been involved in many applications using AI oriented methods, it was rare that there were not risks in their application. We saw them all. From legal exposure to regulatory penalties to the loss of public trust
As…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Intel to Deliver Exascale for the Advancement of Science
In this Chip Chat podcast, Trish Damkroger from Intel outlines a few of the key technologies coming to the Aurora supercomputer in 2021. To enable Exascale levels of performance, Aurora will be built with a future generation
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Scientific American on Deep Learning
Scientific American does a good job of providing a good, intuitive and largely non-technical view of the math and applications of deep learning. Good for use with management with a reasonable amount of patience. I would
A…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 27th 2019)
Women who use oral contraceptives have a harder time recognizing emotions of others. Worldwide, livestock has ten times the mass of wild animals and nearly twice the mass of human beings. Fishes have more than ten times the mass…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automating Science Writing
How different is this from script writing mentioned previously? Accurate summarization of text is another example of a challenge for AI type methods, similar in goal to finding a pattern in complex data.
Can Science Writing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
McKinsey on Automating Logistics
Good description of the space and the large opportunities.
Automation in Logistics: Big Opportunity, Bigger uncertainty Via McKinsey by Ashutosh Dekhne, Greg Hastings, John Murnane, and Florian Neuhaus
As e-commerce volumes…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Speeding up a random-access function?
A common problem in software performance is that you are essentially limited by memory access. Let us consider such a function where you write at random locations in a big array. for ( i = 0; i < N; i++) { // hash is a randomized…
From The Eponymous Pickle
BPA, RPA or DPA? Automating Process
Interesting piece, with criticism of robotic process automation. It has somewhat focused application I agree. Contrast of options is interesting. I like the term DPA only because it does not include the confusing 'robotic'…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Toraiz SQUID Digital Sequencer
Pioneer DJ has a new sequencer: the Toraiz SQUID: Sequencer Inspirational Device. The 16-track sequencer is designed around jamming and performance with a host of features to create "happy accidents" and trigger random sequences…
From Schneier on Security
Interview of Me in Taiwan
Business Weekly in Taiwan interviewed me. (Here's a translation courtesy of Google.) It was a surprisingly intimate interview. I hope the Chinese reads better than the translation....
From insideHPC
Call for Proposals: ALCF Data Science Program
Argonne is now accepting proposals for the ALCF Data Science Program (ADSP) through July 1, 2019. "The ADSP open call provides an opportunity for researchers to submit proposals for projects that will employ advanced statistical…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Linux Administrator at CGG in Houston
CGG in Houston is seeking a Linux Administrator in our Job of the Week. CGG is a fully integrated Geoscience company providing leading geological, geophysical, and reservoir capabilities. "We bring our clients a unique range
…
From insideHPC
Big Compute Podcast Looks at Quantum Computing Today
In this Big Compute Podcast, Steve Reinhardt from D-Wave Systems describes how quantum computing can be used to find optimal solutions in complex optimizations. “For decades quantum computers will be used in a hybrid mode with…
From insideHPC
Finalists Chosen for Han Meuer Award
ISC 2019 has announced the finalists for this year’s Hans Meuer Award, which honors the most outstanding research paper submitted to the ISC High Performance Conference. The award was introduced in 2015 in memory of the late
…
From insideHPC
Simplifying AI, Data Science, and HPC Workloads with NVIDIA GPU Cloud
Adel El Hallak and Philip Rogers from NVIDIA gave this talk at the GPU Technology Conference. "Whether it's for AI, data science and analytics, or HPC, GPU-Accelerated software can make possible the previously impossible. But…
From The Eponymous Pickle
MuseNet Writes Music
OpenAI does some things with generating music. Back to the meaning of creativity, will we ultimately be able to tell?
MuseNet
We’ve created Musenet, a deep neural network that can generate 4-minute musical compositions with…
From BLOG@CACM
Women Now Outnumber Men in Medical Schools. Computer Science Should Be Next.
This story about encouragement tells us how we can change girls' and women's lives.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machines Firing Humans
First I had heard of such a thing, certainly the PR would be bad enough to add a human in the loop. Somewhat skeptical, but perhaps a warning of the future.
Amazon's system for tracking its warehouse workers can automatically…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Workplace Surveillance
Agree that doing this more universally will much chage the workplace. Indications are that Amazon has closed the loop for warehouse workers, but the the idea is likely implemented most everywhere. Will this then be posted…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Supply Chain Integrity Month
Had not heard this was a month, note here from Recorded Future, but the topic is very important. Some good free resources at the link on related threat intelligence.
April Is National Supply Chain Integrity Month — ReduceZane…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automating Ethics
Very good piece. A difficult problem.Yes as get closer to embedding ethics in systems and machines,how do we address this? By just warning the humans in the loop, or can we actually close the loop to include ethical reasoning…
From Schneier on Security
Towards an Information Operations Kill Chain
Cyberattacks don't magically happen; they involve a series of steps. And far from being helpless, defenders can disrupt the attack at any of those steps. This framing has led to something called the "cybersecurity kill chain"…