Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2024
From insideHPC
Riverlane Wins DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Program Grant
April 17, 2024 — Quantum computing company Riverlane has been selected for Phase 2 of the Quantum Benchmarking program funded by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The aim of the program is to design key quantum…
From Schneier on Security
Using AI-Generated Legislative Amendments as a Delaying Technique
Canadian legislators proposed 19,600 amendments—almost certainly AI-generated—to a bill in an attempt to delay its adoption.
I wrote about many different legislative delaying tactics in A Hacker’s Mind, but this is a new one.
From insideHPC
LBNL Leads Quantum Data Storage, Visualization Project
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has announced that national lab and university researchers recently released two papers introducing new methods of data storage and analysis to make quantum computing more practical and exploring…
From insideHPC
Stanford AI Index: Lax LLM Reponsibility, AI for Science Accelerates, Impact on Workers, US Leads China in Models
The AI Index Report from Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI is out, it's an annual, thoroughgoing snapshot of the state of AI begun by the HAI in 2019. This year's edition presents new estimates on AI training....
The…
From insideHPC
NeuReality Launches Developer Portal for NR1 AI Inference Platform
SAN JOSE — April 16, 2024 — NeuReality, an AI infrastructure technology company, announced today the release of a software developer portal and demo for installation of its software stack and APIs. The company said the announcement…
From insideHPC
Former Intel Executive Thomas Lantzsch Joins Canatu Board
VANTAA, FINLAND, April 16, 2024 — Canatu, a developer of carbon nanotubes (Canatu CNTs) and manufacturing equipment for the semiconductor and automotive industries, today announced the appointment of former Intel executive Thomas…
From insideHPC
Microsoft and NVIDIA Together Advance AI
[SPONSORED GUEST ARTICLE] Think of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform as analogous to a general contractor who brings together the most skilled and knowledgeable artisans, technologically speaking, offering the latest and most…
From Schneier on Security
X.com Automatically Changing Link Text but Not URLs
Brian Krebs reported that X (formerly known as Twitter) started automatically changing twitter.com links to x.com links. The problem is: (1) it changed any domain name that ended with “twitter.com,” and (2) it only changed the…
From insideHPC
Accelsius Announces NeuCool Direct Liquid Cooling
AUSTIN, Texas – Accelsius, whose patented two-phase direct-to-chip liquid cooling systems enable high-performance computing and compute density for data center and edge computer operators, today announced NeuCool, its in-rack…
From Computational Complexity
Avi Wigderson is a counterexample to TWO stupid thoughts of G.H. Hardy
Recently
1) Avi Wigderson won the Turing Award (See blog posts by Fortnow-here, Scott-here, Lipton-Regan here, and the ACM announcement here). The last time I could find when Fortnow-Gasarch, Scott, Lipton-Regan all bloggedhere…From The Noisy Channel
Sparse and Dense Representations
The heart of the AI-powered search revolution is the move from sparse bag-of-words representations to dense embedding-based representations. But reducing everything to a sparse vs. dense is a false dichotomy. This post explores…
From Schneier on Security
New Lattice Cryptanalytic Technique
A new paper presents a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for solving certain hard lattice problems. This could be a big deal for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, since many of them base their security on hard lattice problems…
From Schneier on Security
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
I’m speaking twice at RSA Conference 2024 in San Francisco. I’ll be on a panel on software liability on May 6, 2024 at 8:30 AM, and I’m giving a keynote on AI…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 13 2024)
Our computer hardware exchange data using a standard called PCI Express. Your disk, your network and your GPU are limited by what PCI Express can do. Currently, it means that you are limited to a few gigabytes per second of bandwidth…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Greatest common divisor, the extended Euclidean algorithm, and speed!
We sometimes need to find the greatest common divisor between two integers in software. The fastest way to compute the greatest common divisor might be the binary Euclidean algorithm. In C++20, it can be implemented generically…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: The Awfulness of Squid Fishing Boats
It’s a pretty awful story.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
From insideHPC
Exaion and PINQ² to Launch the HPC-Quantum Platform in Quebec
Montreal and Paris, April 12, 2024: Exaion, a Canadian subsidiary of the EDF Group (Électricité de France), a developer of digital service platforms aimed at eco-responsibility1, and PINQ² (Québec Digital and Quantum Innovation…
From Schneier on Security
Smuggling Gold by Disguising it as Machine Parts
Someone got caught trying to smuggle 322 pounds of gold (that’s about 1/4 of a cubic foot) out of Hong Kong. It was disguised as machine parts:
On March 27, customs officials x-rayed two air compressors and discovered that they…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
A simple algorithm to compute the square root of an integer, byte by byte
A reader asked me for some help in computing (1 – sqrt(0.5)) to an arbitrary precision, from scratch. A simpler but equivalent problem is to compute the square root of an integer (e.g., 2). There are many sophisticated algorithms…
From insideHPC
NTT: Photonics Network Connects Data Centers in U.S. and U.K.
NTT Corporation (NTT) and NTT DATA announced the successful demonstration of All-Photonics Network (APN)-driven connections between data centers in the United States and the United Kingdom. In the U.K., NTT connected data centers…
From insideHPC
Georgia Tech Unveils AI Makerspace with NVIDIA
Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering has established an artificial intelligence supercomputer hub dedicated exclusively to teaching students. The initiative — the AI Makerspace — was launched in collaboration with NVIDIA. College…
From Schneier on Security
Backdoor in XZ Utils That Almost Happened
Last week, the internet dodged a major nation-state attack that would have had catastrophic cybersecurity repercussions worldwide. It’s a catastrophe that didn’t happen, so it won’t get much attention—but it should. There’s an…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Testing AIs in Minecraft
by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London What makes a good environment for child AI learning development? Possibly the same as for human child learning development: Minecraft. Lego is one of the best games to play forContinue…
From insideHPC
INCITE Call for Proposals for Access to Leadership-Class Supercomputers Open through June 14
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program is now accepting proposals for high-impact, computationally intensive research projects in a broad array of science…
From insideHPC
Two Researchers to Share 2024 Jack Dongarra Early Career HPC Award at ISC
Two early career researchers, Edgar Solomonik of the University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign and Amanda Randles of Duke University, have been selected as the recipients of the Jack Dongarra Early Career Award, to be presented…
From Computational Complexity
Avi wins the Turing Award
From insideHPC
ALCF User Community: Call for Argonne Art of Science Images, April 23 Deadline
Argonne National Laboratory has issued call for images for the 2024 Argonne Art of Science Contest.Submission deadline for science visualizations: Tuesday, April 23. For submission and prize details, visit this webpage. This…
From insideHPC
Sylabs Launches the Singularity Containers Certification
Reno, NV – (April 10, 2024) – Sylabs, a provider of tools and services for performance-intensive container technology, today announces the launch of a new certification focusing on the Singularity container platform. Rooted in…
From insideHPC
TSMC March 2024 Revenue Report: Up 34% YoY
HSINCHU, Taiwan, R.O.C. – Apr. 10, 2024 – TSMC (TWSE: 2330, NYSE: TSM) today announced its net revenue for March 2024: On a consolidated basis, revenue for March 2024 was approximately NT$195.21 billion, an increase of 7.5 percent…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Visioning Workshop Report Released: The Future of Research on Social Technologies
In November 2023, CCC hosted a workshop on “The Future of Research on Social Technologies” in Washington, DC. The event, also supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, addressed the past, present and future of…