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
P&G Direct to Consumer Very Quickly Growing
GMA Smartbrief quotes CNBC:
P&G CFO: Direct-to-consumer category is "very quickly growing"
(Procter & Gamble)
Procter & Gamble is working to ensure its products are in all shopping channels, and it is considering the direct-to-consumer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Waymo to Build L4 Autonomous Cars in Detroit
A move ahead it seems. Coming soon to a road near you? We note that Waymo is part of Google via Alphabet.
Waymo will build its self-driving vehicle fleet in Detroit
The company will repurpose an existing facility in Motor City…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Market Basket Analysis
Some of the very earliest analysis (1970s) we supported in the enterprise were variants on market basket analysis. So I was pleased to find this relatively simple example posted in DSC, by Ayumi Owada, here using Apriori
Maximizing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cloaking Resource Operations Data in the Cloud
Fascinating play. How this differ from methods like blockchains? Maybe better than BC methods?
Creating a Cloak for Grid Data in the Cloud By Argonne National Laboratory
Delivering modern electricity is a numbers game. From…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Prescribing Fruits and Veggies
A clever idea, well worth a trial. Though there is usually no direct joy in prescriptions, unless they directly kill pain, so I wonder that they feed into the immediate gratification that comes from less than healthy food.…
From insideHPC
TACC Podcast Looks at the Challenges of Computational Reproducibility
In this TACC Podcast, Dan Stanzione and Doug James from the Texas Advanced Computing Center discuss the thorny issue of reproducibility in HPC. "Computational reproducibility is a subset of the broader and even harder topic of…
From insideHPC
Sylabs boosts HPC Containers with SingularityPRO 3.1
Today Sylabs announced the release of SingularityPRO 3.1 in what the company is calling a watershed moment for enterprise customers everywhere. "SingularityPRO 3.1 is the most highly anticipated release of our enterprise software…
From insideHPC
Agenda Posted: Forum Teratec in France
The Forum Teratec in France has posted their speaker agenda. With over 1300 attendees, the event takes place June 11-12 in Palaiseau. "The Forum Teratec is the premier international meeting for all players in HPC, Simulation,…
From insideHPC
Video: LANL Creates first Billion-atom Biomolecular Simulation
Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have created the largest simulation to date of an entire gene of DNA, a feat that required one billion atoms to model and will help researchers to better understand and develop cures…
From Schneier on Security
G7 Comes Out in Favor of Encryption Backdoors
From a G7 meeting of interior ministers in Paris this month, an "outcome document": Encourage Internet companies to establish lawful access solutions for their products and services, including data that is encrypted, for law…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Process Mining
A mostly historical look at process mining. Not a convincing enough view of why you should use it, and in particular link it to AI. Also its need to actual know the process, in other words model it, both current and proposed…
From Computational Complexity
Quiz Show Scandals/Admissions Scandal/Stormy Daniels/Beer names:being a lawyer would drive me nuts!!!!!!
0) Charles van Doren (see here) passed away recently. For those who don't know he he was (prob most of you) he was one of the contestants involved in RIGGED quiz shows in the 1950's. While there was a Grand Jury Hearing about…
From insideHPC
Ohio Supercomputer Center hosts Statewide User Group
On April 19, researchers gathered at the Ohio Supercomputer Center for the Statewide Users Group (SUG) spring conference to collaborate and share ideas with peers and OSC staff. "SUG encompasses all OSC clients and receives direction…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Can a Computer Write a Script? Or an Ad? Or Manage a Marketing plan?
A writer of ads, or a manager of marketing plans learns what works based on results in context. So why not? The idea of 'a script' was used in the earliest days of AI to create directions and goals to forge results. We…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Accoustical Watermarking and the Second Screen
And yet more on context switching for the voice assistant. Here work by Amazon, to be presented at an upcoming conference. Originating from work to ignore 'wake words' in 'second screens' from other media. Which seems to…
From insideHPC
Video: Simulations of Antarctic Meltdown should send chills on Earth Day
In this video, researchers investigate the millennial-scale vulnerability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) due solely to the loss of its ice shelves. Starting at the present-day, the AIS evolves for 1000 years, exposing the floating…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Catalyzing Computing Podcast – Content Generation for Workforce Training
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently held a visioning workshop in Atlanta, GA to discuss and articulate research visions for authoring rich graphical content for new workforce training. The workshop’s goal was to…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Bioelectric Fields in the Fight Against Cancer
Researchers from of the University of California at Santa Barbara are using TACC supercomputers to study bioelectric effects of cells to develop new anti-cancer strategies. "For us, this research would not have been possible
…
From insideHPC
40 Powers of 10 – Simulating the Universe with the DiRAC HPC Facility
Mark Wilkinson from DiRAC gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. "DiRAC is the integrated supercomputing facility for theoretical modeling and HPC-based research in particle physics, and astrophysics, cosmology, and nuclear…
From The Eponymous Pickle
From Web to Blockchain
Fascinating historical view of the Web, is the blockchain a natural architectural extension?
Moving Towards web3.0 Using Blockchain as Core Tech By Shahid Shaikh
The invention of Bitcoin and blockchain technology sets the foundations…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Another Amazon Go Store
Why is Amazon building brick-and-mortar locations? In Supermarketnews:
Amazon adds to physical retail footprint with latest Go store
Jeff Bezos highlights importance of brick-and-mortar locations to shareholders By Russell Redman…
From Schneier on Security
Excellent Analysis of the Boeing 737 MAX Software Problems
This is the best analysis of the software causes of the Boeing 737 MAX disasters that I have read. Technically this is safety and not security; there was no attacker. But the fields are closely related and there are a lot of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wake Words for Assistance Context
Been experiencing the strange concept of a 'wake word' for a few years now. Its means of switching context ... saying that after I say this special word or phrase, you can interpret everything I said afterwards as special,
…
From insideHPC
GPUs for Oil and Gas Firms: Deriving Insights from Petabytes of Data
Adoption of GPU-accelerated computing can offer oil and gas firms significant ROI today and pave the way to gain additional advantage from future technical developments. To stay competitive, these companies need to be able to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Decreasing Drilling Costs
Subsurface data is voluminous and complex. So why not look at it to determine patterns of value? AI today can be defined as looking for patterns of data that can be used to improve value in process. Here is an excellent example…
From The Noisy Channel
Is Relevance Part of the Problem?
Much of the innovation in information retrieval and recommender systems focuses on better targeting in order to improve relevance. Those of us who develop such systems often take for granted that the axiomatic goal of relevance…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Science Mistakes with the IOT
Good, short and non-technical article. Obvious and useful. And I as I often add, carefully map the business process, get decision makers involved early and often.
Don’t Make These Data Science Mistakes in IoT in DatanamiAlex…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Self Driving Expectations
Was recently interviewed on exactly this question. When? And what will the phrase include? Good piece.
Are we There Yet? A Reality Check on Self-Driving Cars in Wired by Alex Davies
READ THE BREATHLESS articles and bold…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Powered Home Tours
Something similar was suggested and tested to get data for plant maintenance by providing remote tours of key parts of facilities, then extracting data for simulations. Or to document assets and inventory of facilities.
Virtually…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
P=NP Proofs
Advice to claimers The Claimers The Claimers are a gang on the hit AMC television series The Walking Dead. They are the main antagonists in the second half of the zombie-apocalypse show’s Season 4. According to Wikipedia’s description…