Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2021
From Putting People First
[Book] Why the world needs anthropologists
![[Book] Why the world needs anthropologists](/system/assets/0000/1953/030209_Vanderbeeken_Mark_250.small_square.jpg?1476779420&1260281963)
Why does the world need anthropology and anthropologists? This collection of essays written by prominent academic, practising and applied anthropologists aims to answer this provocative question.
From The Eponymous Pickle
EU to Constrain Certain AI Uses?
To be expected reaction from EU regulators.
Facial Recognition, Other 'Risky' AI Set for Constraints in EU
Bloomberg, Natalia Drozdiak, April 21, 2021
The European Commission has proposed new rules constraining the use of facial…From insideHPC
Super-expensive Supercomputers: UK Met Office in £1B+ Deal for Microsoft Weather System; $3B System in China on Way
As widely reported in February, the UK Met Office and Microsoft have come to an agreement to provision a £1.2 billion (over 10 years) supercomputer the Met Office said will be the world’s most powerful weather and climate forecasting…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Some useful regular expressions for programmers
In my blog post, My programming setup, I stressed how important regular expressions are to my programming activities. Regular expressions can look intimidating and outright ugly. However, they should not be underestimated. Someone…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Centered Product Design
Had not heard of the concept as stated, worth a look:
How is AI-Centered Product Design Different?
By Amanda Linden in TowardsDataScience
People who are interested in AI often ask me what an AI designer is, and I’ve attempted to…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Pandemic Informatics: Variants of Concern (VOC)
Contributions to this post were provided by Elizabeth Bradley (University of Colorado Boulder), Madhav Marathe (University of Virginia), Melanie Moses (The University of New Mexico), William D. Gropp (University of Illinois Urbana…
From Computational Complexity
The Million Dollar Sermon
Illinois Tech has one of the greatest origin stories for a university. In 1890 Frank Gunsaulus, a pastor on the south side of Chicago, gave a sermon where he said "If I had a million dollars I would build a school to provideThe…
From insideHPC
ACM SIGHPC’s Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing Award: Call for Nominations
Nominations are open for the ACM SIGHPC Emerging Woman Leader in Technical Computing (EWL/TC), a biennial award open to any woman who has engaged in HPC and technical computing research, education or practice for five to 15 years…
From insideHPC
DOE Issues Funding Opportunity for HPC4EI
Washington, DC — The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) High Performance Computing for Energy Innovation Initiative will issue a Spring 2021 solicitation in May 2021 covering the High Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg)…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Ken Turns 40
Every chess master was once a beginner—Irving Chernev Ken Regan obtained his Ph.D. 40 years ago from Oxford, in complexity theory, advised by Dominic Welsh. Ken continues to be a researcher in complexity theory, a teacher of…
From insideHPC
5 Considerations when Building an AI / GPU Cluster
AI continues to change the way many organizations conduct their work and research. Deep learning applications are constantly evolving and organizations are adapting to new technologies, improving their performance and capabilities…
From BLOG@CACM
Computing Education Is Not the Same as Engineering Education
Learning Engineering is not always about Becoming an Engineer. Computing Education outside of Engineering Education is bigger than the part inside.
From insideHPC
Unify Your HPC Computing Infrastructure from Edge-to-Core-to-Cloud
In this contributed article, Bill Wagner, CEO of Bright Computing, discusses how the definition of “edge computing” has solidified as “compute at the network edge” and has become inextricably tied to IoT and 5G. Yet there’s a…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wharton: Planning for AI Risk Governance
Useful thoughts on the concept of governance of AI in the paper linked to below.
How Can Financial Institutions Prepare for AI Risks?
Apr 13, 2021 Analytics Wharton Research North America
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies…From The Eponymous Pickle
Book: End-to-end Encrypted Messaging
Continue to make my way through this excellent and detailed book. Rolf Oppliger's site describes this book and others he has written. Plus his company's ongoing research and work. Order it below.
End-to-End Encrypted Messaging…From insideHPC
Continuing Arecibo’s Legacy – A Partnership to Save Telescope Data at TACC
Millions of people have seen footage of the famed Arecibo radio telescope’s collapse – due to various hurricanes and other natural disasters – in December 2020. What they would not have seen from those videos was Arecibo’s data…
From insideHPC
HPC Part of Bay Area National Labs Business Partnership Event Series
April 21, 2021 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, as part of the Bay Area Lab Innovation Networking Center…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Procter Costs Rise
Seems like a need for analytical modeling of costs. My former employer needs to step up to the problem.
Price hikes on the horizon for P&G as material costs rise
in Reuters
Procter & Gamble Co (PG.N) said on Tuesday it would raise…From insideHPC
Nvidia Romps in Latest MLPerf AI Benchmark Results
What has become Nvidia’s regular romp through MLPerf AI benchmarks continued with today’s release of the latest performance measurements across a range of inference workloads, including computer vision, medical imaging, recommender…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CIFellows 2021 Application Now Open
The CIFellows 2021 application site is now open. Applicants may start their applications here. Please read the CIFellows 2021 website and FAQs in its entirety before submitting. Applicants must submit the following for registration…
From Schneier on Security
On North Korea’s Cyberattack Capabilities
Excellent New Yorker article on North Korea’s offensive cyber capabilities.
From Schneier on Security
Backdoor Found in Codecov Bash Uploader
Developers have discovered a backdoor in the Codecov bash uploader. It’s been there for four months. We don’t know who put it there.
Codecov said the breach allowed the attackers to export information stored in its users’ continuous…From The Eponymous Pickle
Palm Swipe Scanning at Whole Foods
We experimented with a number of ID/payment methods. From Iris to thumbprint to Face. But not palm swipe scanning, installed at Wholefoods now. Contact-less.
Amazon to let Whole Foods shoppers pay with a swipe of their palm…From The Eponymous Pickle
Need for Continuous and Dynamic Threat Modeling
Well done post from Cisco, with useful explanatory visuals. Strongly agree. Using and applying specific risk models.
From insideHPC
Atos’ BullSequana Powers First EuroHPC Supercomputer at IZUM in Slovenia
Maribor, Slovenia, Paris, April 21, 2021 – Atos and the Institute of Information Science (IZUM) in Maribor, Slovenia, today announce that the first EuroHPC supercomputer is now operational. This is the ‘Vega’ supercomputer, based…
From BLOG@CACM
What Happened to Watson Health?
A case study in portfolio management.
From The Eponymous Pickle
GE Working on Detecting COVID from a Smartphone
More detail, here from GE on their work on detecting COVID from a smartphone.
GE Scientists Developing Technology to Add COVID-19 Virus Detector to Your Mobile Device
Sensing Materials
Awarded National Institutes of Health (NIH)…From insideHPC
Human Brain Project and EBRAINS: Call to Build Services for Sensitive Data
April 21, 2021 – The Human Brain Project and its research infrastructure EBRAINS are looking for partners to help them offer compliant data solutions to the scientific community. In a new call, institutions and companies can …
From insideHPC
Cerebras Systems: 2.5 Trillion-plus Transistors in 7nm-based 2nd Gen Wafer Scale Engine
Maker of the world’s largest microprocessors, Cerebras Systems, today unveiled what it said is the largest AI chip, the Wafer Scale Engine 2 (WSE-2) — successor to the first WSE introduced in 2019. The 7nm-based WSE-2 exceeds…
From insideHPC
Qumulo Extends to Asia Pacific; Expands Partnership with HPE
SEATTLE — April 20, 2021 — Qumulo, focused on enterprise file data management across hybrid-cloud environments, today announced the expansion of its global operations to Asia-Pacific (APAC). Driven by increased regional demand…