Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2017
From The Eponymous Pickle
On the Limits of Computing
Read his books during the last AI summer. Still worth looking at.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, Philosopher of the Limits of Computers, Dies at 87 By The New York Times
" ... Hubert L. Dreyfus, a philosopher whose 1972 book "What Computers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Preparing for the Job Future
Broad view of the automated future, in the CACM:
How to Prepare for an Automated Future by Claire Cain Miller @Clairecm
We don't know how quickly machines will displace people's jobs, or how many they'll take, but we know
From…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Allo
Been following Google Allo but still quite unimpressed. Odd coming from AI giant Google. Where is the conversational magic we need to make? How will it integrate with the much vaunted Knowledge Graph?
Google is still adding…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
A National Research Agenda for Intelligent Infrastructure
CCC Chair Beth Mynatt contributed to this post. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) in collaboration with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association (ECEDHA) recently released eight white papers…
From insideHPC
Interview: Peter Braam on How Campaign Storage Bridges the Small, Fast, and Slow
Peter Braam is well-known in the HPC Community for his early work with Lustre and other projects like the SKA telescope Science Data Processor. As one of the featured speakers at the upcoming MSST Mass Storage Conference, Braam…
From insideHPC
Agenda Posted for HP-CAST at ISC 2017
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has posted their Preliminary Agenda for HP-CAST. As HPE's user group meeting for high performance computing, the event takes place June 16-17 in Frankfurt, just prior to ISC 2017. "The High Performance…
From insideHPC
Trends in Systems and How to Get Efficient Performance
Martin Hilgeman from Dell gave this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. "With all the advances in massively parallel and multi-core computing with CPUs and accelerators it is often overlooked whether the computational work…
From Schneier on Security
Forging Voice
LyreBird is a system that can accurately reproduce the voice of someone, given a large amount of sample inputs. It's pretty good -- listen to the demo here -- and will only get better over time. The applications for recorded-voice…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Success with Predictive Analytics
Good overview, I like the addition of business rules (aka process), though I would study it closely first. Sometimes you can get good value by just making an adjustment there. Get the business process expert involved early…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Walmart vs Amazon
Been following Wal-Mart acquired Jet.com for some time. Note the additional acquisitions. Via Retailwire:
" Competing with Amazon ... Walmart got Marc Lore to run its e-commerce business in the U.S. when it acquired Jet.com…
From insideHPC
Nvidia Funds AI Startup Fastdata.io
Today Fastdata.io announced it has raised a total of $1.5 million from NVIDIA and other investors. The company is introducing "the world’s fastest and most efficient stream processing software engine" to meet the critical and…
From insideHPC
Comet Supercomputer Doubles Down on Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs
The San Diego Supercomputer Center has been granted a supplemental award from the National Science Foundation to double the number of graphic processing units, or GPUs, on its petascale-level Comet supercomputer in direct response…
From insideHPC
Intel Processors for Machine Learning
Machine Learning is a hot topic for many industries and is showing tremendous promise to change how we use systems. From design and manufacturing to searching for cures for diseases, machine learning can be a great disrupter,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Need for Democratization of Machine Learning
Good overview piece. Statistics and pushing more need for open source capabilities and Transparency.
Why do we need the Democratization of Machine Learning?
We are living in an era of hype. In this article, I am trying to discover…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Music for Sleep
Links to one of my own personal experiments.
Music as medicine: how songs could soon replace painkillers and help you sleep better
Marko Ahtisaari is attempting to fight opioid dependency with the natural high triggered by music…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GE Alexa Lamp
The futuristic Alexa lamp, functioning as lighting and assistant, reported on last year, is reported as coming out by fall for the Smart home:
GE’s Alexa lamp will be available in September for $200 by Jacob Kastrenakes
From Computational Complexity
Summer Conferences
Ahh summer. No Classes. Baseball. Opera Festivals. Time to focus on research and starting a new book. But, of course, many computer scientists travel the world to various conferences. I went to too many last year and trying to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Project Intu
Open source cognitive functions.
Use Project Intu to embed cognitive functions in various forms such as spaces, avatars, or other IoT devices.
See all Open Source projects
Project Intu is an experimental service that allows developers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Interpreting Deep Learning Models
Interpretability via attentional and memory-based interfaces, using TensorFlow
A closer look at the reasoning inside your deep networks.
By Goku Mohandas April 12, 2017 ....
From XRDS
How 1 Million App Calls can Tell you a Bit About Malware – Part 2
In my previous blog post, I described some of my findings regarding malicious mobile apps. In summary, I observed that there are POSIX abstractions, which are popular only for malicious apps. The findings were derived from aContinue…
From insideHPC
One Stop Systems Announces SkyScale HPC as a Service
Today One Stop Systems (OSS) annouced the launch of SkyScale, a new company that provides HPC as a Service (HPCaaS). For years OSS has been designing and manufacturing the latest in high performance computing and storage systems…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
AI for Good: Maximizing the economic and societal benefits of AI
Contributions to the following blog were made by former CCC Chair Greg Hager and Tom Kalil, former Deputy Director for Technology and Innovation in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. It is clear that Artificial Intelligence…
From Schneier on Security
Security of St. Jude Pacemakers
This is a good summary article about the horrible security of St. Jude pacemakers, and the history of the company not doing anything about it....
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
AAAI Human Computation and Crowdsourcing Conference 2017
The Fifth AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing will be held in Quebec City, Canada, October 24-26, 2017. It will be sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Included below…
From insideHPC
Rock Stars of HPC: DK Panda
As our newest Rock Star of HPC, DK Panda sat down with us to discuss his passion for teaching High Performance Computing. "During the last several years, HPC systems have been going through rapid changes to incorporate accelerators…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtual Assistants of the Alexa Kind in the Office?
AI assistance in the workplace. Been thinking that since installing several standalone assistance of several kinds. This made me think of a number of focused knowledge systems we created in the first AI era. These worked…
From insideHPC
Video: The Molecular Sciences Software Institute
Daniel Crawford from Virginia Tech presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. "The Molecular Sciences Software Institute serves as a nexus for science, education, and cooperation serving the worldwide community of computational…
From insideHPC
NASA Spins Up High Performance Computing Challenge
Today NASA announced a code-speedup contest called the High Performance Fast Computing Challenge (HPFCC). The competition will reward qualified contenders who can manipulate the agency’s FUN3D design software so it runs ten to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GE as a Software Company
Good direction. Working with GE Digital for our Summit meetings. More to follow.
GE starts to make good on that 'software company' promise
Every company is now a software company. GE makes good on its hyperbolic statements.
A few…
From insideHPC
Cloud Computing Continues to Influence HPC
Cloud technologies are influencing HPC just as it is the rest of enterprise IT. This is the second entry in an insideHPC series that explores the HPC transition to the cloud, and what your business needs to know about this evolution…