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 Schneier on Security
Should You Be Allowed to Prevent Drones from Flying Over Your Property?
Good debate in the Wall Street Journal. This isn't an obvious one; there are good arguments on both sides....
From Phys.org Technology News
How does a bike stay upright? Surprisingly, it's all in the mind
It's as easy as riding a bike … or so the saying goes. But how do we manage to stay upright on a bicycle? If anyone ventures an answer they most often say that it's because of the "gyroscopic effect" – but this can't be true.
From Phys.org Technology News
Gov't report: Feds spend billions to run ancient technology
The government is spending about three-fourths of its technology budget maintaining aging computer systems, including platforms more than 50 years old in vital areas from nuclear weapons to Social Security. One still uses floppy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ahold Optimizes Customer Data
How Ahold USA Optimizes Customer dataCollecting customer data and figuring out how to use it is a challenge for all retailers, one that Ahold USA has met by managing its data to help the company make decisions about different…
From insideHPC
Symbolic IO Emerges from Stealth with First Computational-Defined Storage Solution
Today Symbolic IO emerged from stealth mode with a suite of products destined to change the way industry defines storage and computing architecture, by bringing to market the first truly computational-defined storage solution…
From Schneier on Security
GCHQ Discloses Two OS X Vulnerabilities to Apple
This is good news: Communications and Electronics Security Group (CESG), the information security arm of GCHQ, was credited with the discovery of two vulnerabilities that were patched by Apple last week. The flaws could allow…
From insideHPC
CoolIT Systems Partners with STULZ on Chip-to-Atmosphere Cooling
Today CoolIT Systems announced a commercial partnership with STULZ USA. Under the agreement, the two companies will cooperate closely in delivering unique Chip-to-Atmosphere solutions across the globe.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Learning with Less Data
In Technology Review: Learning things with far fewer examples. Pushes at the edges of what is meant by learning, and varying kinds of errors that define success in varying contexts. Also, at the edge of innovative creativity…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmenting Work with VR
Related to recent thoughts. MIT Sloan on the relevance of reinventing work with Virtual Reality, Need some more good examples. If anyone has some, especially ones beyond the usual, will post them for discussion here.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Blue Sky Ideas Track Held at ICSE 2016
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), May 14-22, 2016 in Austin, TX. The purpose of this conference…
From insideHPC
Dell HPC Community Event Coming to Frankfurt on June 20
The Dell HPC Community will hold their user group meeting on Monday, June 20 at the Movenpick Hotel in Frankfurt. Held in conjunction with ISC 2016, the Dell HPC Community event will feature keynote presentations by HPC experts…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Practices and Concepts in Computer Science Education
Work on a framework for computer science education in grades Kindergarten through grade 12 continues with many of the writers and advisors meeting over the past few days in New Orleans. It is somewhat humbling to be involved …
From insideHPC
Cray Urika-GX System to Tackle Big Data Analytics
"We took the Aries system interconnect from our supercomputers, the industry-standard architecture of our clusters, the scalable graph engine from the Urika-GD appliance, and the pre-integrated, open infrastructure of our Urika…
From Phys.org Technology News
We need to know the algorithms the government uses to make important decisions about us
In criminal justice systems, credit markets, employment arenas, higher education admissions processes and even social media networks, data-driven algorithms now drive decision-making in ways that touch our economic, social and…
From insideHPC
Satoshi Matsuoka Presents: The Inevitable End of Moore’s Law
"The promising new parameter in place of the transistor count is the perceived increase in the capacity and bandwidth of storage, driven by device, architectural, as well as packaging innovations: DRAM-alternative Non-Volatile…
From Phys.org Technology News
Algerian authorities destroy mountain of pirated CDs, DVDs
Power shovels and a bulldozer have destroyed a huge mound of 2 million illegally copied CDs and DVDs outside Algeria's Culture Ministry, as part of a government pledge to crack down on long-rampant digital piracy.
From BLOG@CACM
Making the World Fair and Just
Wendy Powley and Gloria Childress Townsend report on the National Center for Women & IT Annual Summit, themed "making the world fair and just."
From Schneier on Security
Google Moving Forward on Automatic Logins
Google is trying to bring this to Android developers by the end of the year: Today, secure logins -- like those used by banks or in the enterprise environment -- often require more than just a username and password. They tend…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Head Mounted Displays and Knowing Your Space
In VR Focus, an overview of current announcements in head mounted displays and also notably Project Tango. Advertisers and marketers have taken notice, but I have yet to see an example of the use of a head mounted display 'in…
From Computational Complexity
My third post on Gathering for Gardners
(Workshop for women in computational topology in August: see here. For a post about these kinds of workshops see here.) (I have already posted twice on stuff I saw or heard at the Gathering Conference here and here,) MetaThe…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Balancing Automation and People
Finding the right balance between automation and peopleThis talks about fast food, primarily McDonald's, but the breadth of the problem in retail is considerable. As robots and smarter in store devices evolve, this will change…
From Phys.org Technology News
Perception research with motion simulators
In the Cyberneum at the Tübingen-based Max Planck Campus, people are transported into virtual worlds in order to investigate how our brain processes impressions. A motion simulator - a cable robot - has recently been developed…
From Phys.org Technology News
Smaller cities across US opening high-tech crime centers
Live video feeds from cameras across Hartford, Connecticut, light up a wall of flat-screen monitors in a high-tech room at the city's old police department, while computers take in data from license plate readers and a gunshot…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Scientific American Looks at Deep Learning
A good introduction. But still a narrow view. Unveiling the Hidden Layers of Deep LearningInteractive neural network “playground” visualization offers insights on how machines learnBy Amanda Montañez on May 20, 2016 ... "
From The Eponymous Pickle
Scalable Database Design
Had not heard of the specific concept, but make sense. ....What Makes a Scalable Database?Database scalability is a concept in database design that emphasizes on the capability of a database to handle growth in the amount of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Science and Machine Learning Online Encyclopedia
Another in process development from DSC. Exploring, but it will take some time. Bravo DSC." .... This is one of the first comprehensive machine learning, data science, statistical science, and computer science repository --…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The surprising cleverness of modern compilers
I wanted to know how a modern C compiler like clang would process the following C code: #include <stdint.h> int count(uint64_t x) { int v = 0; while(x != 0) { x &= x - 1; v++; } return v; } Can you guess? popcntq %rdi, %rax That…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
AppInventor Goes Local: adult students build an app inviting islanders to test their knowledge on the local dialect
I haven’t been shy to expose the insane decisions of the Greek Ministry of Education when necessary; one such time was 3 years ago, when the government removed the elective “Application Development in a Programming Environment…
From insideHPC
CCIX Open Acceleration Framework to Coherently Share Data with Accelerators
Today AMD, ARM, Huawei, IBM, Mellanox, Qualcomm, and Xilinx announced a collaboration to bring the CCIX high-performance open acceleration framework to data centers. The companies are collaborating on the specification for the…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Administration Issues Strategic Plan for Big Data Research and Development
Big Data has been a major theme of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) over the years. In addition to having a Convergence of Data and Computing Task Force, the CCC held two events for Big Data that coalesced the research…