Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2016
From The Eponymous Pickle
Proximus Retail Analysis
Brought to my attention: Proximus. Acquire. Analyse. Improve.Real-time insightsOur unique technology tracks every single customer in-store to an accuracy of 1.5m every second without cameras nor smartphones. Optimal product…
From insideHPC
Teratec Forum to Put Spotlight on Big Data & HPC
The TERATEC Forum has posted their agenda for their 11th annual meeting. The event takes place June 28-29 in Palaiseau, France. "TERATEC brings together top international experts in high performance numerical design, simulation…
From insideHPC
Michael Feldman Joins TOP500.org as Managing Editor
Today the ISC Group, promoter of the TOP500 list, is pleased to announce the appointment of high performance computing industry journalist Michael Feldman to the position of managing editor of TOP500 News. In his new role, Feldman…
From Phys.org Technology News
Phones at the dinner table: Study explores attitudes
Checking email for work. Posting a photo to Facebook. Texting the kids to come downstairs. Sending a quick snap to a friend. People of all ages might use their smartphones in these ways during shared meals.
From insideHPC
MarsFS – A Near-POSIX Namespace Leveraging Scalable Object Storage
David Bonnie from LANL presented this talk at the 2016 MSST Conference. "As we continue to scale system memory footprint, it becomes more and more challenging to scale the long-term storage systems with it. Scaling tape access…
From insideHPC
Intel® Enterprise Edition for Lustre* Software—High-performance File System
Intel has been working on a new HPC design philosophy for HPC systems called Intel® Scalable System Framework (Intel® SSF), an approach designed to enable sustained, balanced performance in HPC as the community pushes towards…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
West Big Data Hub All Hands Meeting
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has launched a program on Industry-Academic Collaboration through the Big Data Regional Hubs. The West Big Data Hub, is holding their All Hand Meeting, this Thursday, May 12th at UC Berkeley…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Copying Code–Steal from the Best
Not every coding mistake makes it into the news but one did recently which carries a cautionary message for students (and others who code.) Nissan app developer busted for copying code from Stack Overflow It’s funny in a way…
From Schneier on Security
Children of Spies
Fascinating story of Tim and Alex Foley, the children of Russian spies Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley....
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Patient Will see You Now
In MIT Sloan:Digital technology empowers patients to set their own course of care." .... Digital technology is empowering patients to participate in developing their own treatment plans, but only if the organization’s culture…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Support Vector Machines
On support vector machines. Often for classification. An overview. Somewhat technical." ... Support Vector Machines are perhaps one of the most popular and talked about machine learning algorithms. They were extremely popular…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Human Perception and Data Visualization
A look at what we know about the topic. In Medium. Research and art. Nice outline of what we think we know and where to find out more ..." ... There is visualization in practice and there is visualization in theory and research…
From insideHPC
ACM Awards 2016 Gödel Prize to Inventors of Concurrent Separation Logic
Today the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) announced that Stephen Brookes and Peter…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Revealed on Virtual Assistant Viv
Viv, from Siri's creators, is the virtual assistant of your dreamsIt's one step closer to giving us the AI from "Her."Siri made the world aware of the potential of virtual assistants, but several years after its release, it's…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Challenging Metrics
Challenging metrics, usually a good thing to do, even in a thought experiment. In Adage: Why Google's 'Time Spent' Metric May Not Be the Best MeasureMarketers Need an Accurate Way to Measure How Their Content Is PerformingBy…
From Schneier on Security
Economist Detained for Doing Math on an Airplane
An economics professor was detained when he was spotted doing math on an airplane: On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man -- with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent -- boarded a plane. It was a regional…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Theory Meets Material Science
A great presentation on thermoelectrics Akram Boukai is a researcher in material science, and an expert on converting heat to electric energy: thermoelectrics. Today I wish to talk about a beautiful presentation he just gave…
From insideHPC
Personalized Medicine steps forward with Bioinformatics Method from BSC
In what is being cited as a step towards personalized medicine, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and IrsiCaixa have developed a bioinformatics method to predict the effects of mutation on the resistance of the virus …
From insideHPC
Storage Performance Modeling for Future Systems
In this video from the 2016 MSST Conference, Yoonho Park from IBM presents: Storage Performance Modeling for Future Systems. "The burst buffer is an intermediate, high-speed layer of storage that is positioned between the application…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robot Teaching Assistants
Reminiscent of the legendary Eliza system. .... Expectations are being driven higher .... See this mornings WSJ, may require registration. Imagine Discovering That Your Teaching Assistant Really Is a Robot More to follow…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Trip Reports from ASC16 & MSST
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team recaps the ASC16 Student Cluster Competition in China and the 2016 MSST Conference in Santa Clara. Dan spent a week in Wuxi interviewing ASC16 student teams, he came back impressed with…
From insideHPC
Three Questions to Ensure Your HPC Success
Successful HPC computing depends on choosing the architecture that addresses both application and institutional needs. In particular, finding a simple path to leading edge HPC and Data Analytics is not difficult, if you consider…
From Schneier on Security
NIST Starts Planning for Post-Quantum Cryptography
Last year, the NSA announced its plans for transitioning to cryptography that is resistant to a quantum computer. Now, it's NIST's turn. Its just-released report talks about the importance of algorithm agility and quantum resistance…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 9 May 2016
A lot of variety this week. Robots, professional development, news, curriculum. and some controversy around the AP CS A exam. None of it my fault. Interested in teaching computer science? @LetsTeachCS has 3K fellowships for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bots and Spam
Very interesting historical and technical view of Spam. First the history and then the look at how the technical model of a markov chain is involved. Great way to think about state models interact. And how these models start…
From Phys.org Technology News
Digital media may be changing how you think
Tablet and laptop users beware. Using digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly, according to a new…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smarter Bathrooms on the Supply Chain
A look at making consumer demand points made more intelligent. An intelligent endpoint in the supply chain. Here work by IBM and Kimberbly Clark. In Readwrite:" ... Kimberly-Clark Professional’s new Intelligent Restroom app…
From insideHPC
Video: Versity HSM – Archiving to Objects
In this video from the 2016 MSST Conference, Harriet Coverston from Versity presents: Versity - Archiving to Objects. "Introducing Versity Storage Manager - an enterprise-class storage virtualization and archiving system that…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We are passing the Turing test right on schedule
In 1950, the brilliant computing pioneer Alan Turing made the following prediction in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence: I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible, to programme computers, with…
From insideHPC
Agenda Posted for FLOW-3D European User Conference
Today Flow Science announced the speakers for its annual FLOW-3D European Users Conference that will take place on June 15-16, 2016 in Kraków, Poland.
The post Agenda Posted for FLOW-3D European User Conference appeared first…