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 insideHPC
Supercomputing More Efficient Paper Production with HPC4MFG
Industry is collaborating with researchers at LBNL to significantly reduce paper production costs and increase energy efficiencies. The project is one of the seedlings for the DOE’s HPC for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) initiative,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Seeking Brainstorming Methods for Assembling Good Ideas
Been involved with classic brainstorming for innovation, and the 'voting with yellow-stickies, no criticism' brainstorm methods for an entire career. So always interested in alternatives. Also about to start a new 'skill'…
From Computational Complexity
Google Scholar thinks my Hilbert Number is 1
(I want to thank Lane Hemaspaandra for bringing this to my attention.)
When I google:
google scholar William Gasarch
I get this
(I wonder if what you get depends on who you are- I describe below what I get.)
The first…
From insideHPC
Ohio Supercomputer Center to Boost STEM Education at annual Summer Institute
Twenty Ohio high school students were selected to attend the Ohio Supercomputer Center’s 28th annual Summer Institute, June 4-16 at Ohio State University. These academically gifted students will investigate complex science and…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
MOBILITY21: Strategic Investments for Transportation Infrastructure & Technology
Contributions to the blog were made by Rahul Mangharam from the University of Pennsylvania and past CCC Chair Gregory Hager from Johns Hopkins University. How should we invest in transportation infrastructure and technology to…
From insideHPC
In Search Of: Radio Free HPC on the Hunt for the Aurora Supercomputer
In this podcast, Rich notes that recent reports on the Aurora supercomputer were incorrect. According to Rick Borchelt from the DoE: “On the record, Aurora contract is not cancelled." Before that, we follow Henry on an unprecedented…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Source Mycroft Assistant
Mentioned this assistant before. Now appears to be available. First open source example.
An Open-Source (and Cute) Alternative to Amazon Echo
Mycroft’s voice-enabled assistant is embodied in the startup’s friendly looking Mark…
From insideHPC
Adnan Khaleel on how Dell EMC Delivers HPC in the Cloud
In this video from the Dell EMC HPC Community meeting, Adnan Khaleel, Global Strategist for HPC at Dell describes how the company works with partners to deliver HPC in the Cloud. "By tapping into on-demand cloud resources as
…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Cheating In Computer Science Class
An article about cheating in CS classes from the New York Times (As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Cheating) has been all over my social networking feed this last weekend. Harvard’s famous CS50 is the big name example…
From The Noisy Channel
Entity Recognition
In the previous post on query scoping, we discussed query tagging as a special case of named-entity recognition (NER). In this post, we’ll dive a little bit deeper into the topic of entity recognition.
Entities
Entity recognition…From insideHPC
Increase in Wattage Trends Make Versatile Liquid Cooling the New Norm
Wattages are rising so high that to cool the nodes containing the highest performance chips used in HPC leaves one with little choice other than liquid cooling to maintain reasonable rack densities. Asetek explores how an increase…
From Putting People First
Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation, planning to embark in Turin, Italy
Today the print edition of the Italian newspaper Repubblica published an article (not yet available online) with the title “Nesta, i campioni dell’innovazione puntano su Torino”. Below is the English translation (with English…
From Schneier on Security
Who Are the Shadow Brokers?
In 2013, a mysterious group of hackers that calls itself the Shadow Brokers stole a few disks full of NSA secrets. Since last summer, they've been dumping these secrets on the Internet. They have publicly embarrassed the NSA…
From The Eponymous Pickle
TensorFlow Update for Mobile
Noted that Google was coming up with versions for mobile application, so revisited their offerings.
An open-source software library for Machine Intelligence
TensorFlow™ is an open source software library for numerical computation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automating Aspects of Machine Learning
A topic I brought up as a key part of the future of machine learning at our recent UC analytics summit. And as we might expect, Google is working on it. From the recent Google Research Blog. This kind of problem will need…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Corporate Values
In the HBR:
How Corporate Values Get Hijacked and Misused Ron Carucci
Leaders know company value statements often become nothing more than cosmetic window dressing. What appears less common is their understanding of the destructive…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
When Feedback Makes You Cry a Little
Feedback really is a gift. But feedback can also be hard, both to give and to get. I moved into a leadership role a little over a year ago, and got my first hard-hitting feedback at the end of 2016.
The fall was a stressfulsomething…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Unsigned vs. signed integer arithmetic
Given any non-negative integers x and d, we can write uniquely x = q d + r where q (the quotient) and r (the remainder) are non-negative and r is less than d. We write r = x mod d. Most modern processors represent signed andContinue…
From insideHPC
Video: Previewing the ISC 2017 Student Cluster Competition
"In a real-time challenge, 12 teams of six undergraduate students will build a small cluster of their own design on the ISC exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications…
From insideHPC
Cavium ThunderX2 Processors Power new Baymax HyperScale Server Platforms
Today Inventec in Taiwan announced Baymax, a new server platform optimized for Cloud compute, high-performance cloud storage and Big Data applications based on Cavium's second-generation 64-bit ARMv8 ThunderX2 processors. "Inventec's…
From Schneier on Security
Tainted Leaks
Last year, I wrote about the potential for doxers to alter documents before they leaked them. It was a theoretical threat when I wrote it, but now Citizen Lab has documented this technique in the wild: This report describes an…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New ASUS Phone Supports Tango AR
Have followed the Tango Augmented reality capability from Google for some time. It can model interior spaces for AR. Question is if there are enough Tango AR enabled Apps,. This is answered: " ... the number of Tango apps…
From The Eponymous Pickle
API.AI
Examining. Brought to my attention, a company acquired by Google:
API.AI ... Conversational User Experience Platform.
Now we're talking. .... Build brand-unique, natural language interactions
for bots, applications, services…
From insideHPC
What Does it Take to Get Started with AI?
We'll start by providing a handy five-step enterprise AI strategy designed to ensure your early AI deployment projects are a success. This article is part of a special insideHPC report that explores trends in machine learning…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lets Chat
I tried Amazon Alexa's pre school contest for robotics. You enter it my saying 'Alexa, Lets Chat' to your Echo device and off you go. I tried a few iterations, and they were mostly very crude. Initiative in particular was …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bots Asking Questions
A natural next step. In any conversation, questions go in both directions. With initiative from both sides. To test understanding, but also to establish context and progress towards a goal. To gather information to feed algorithms…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Echo Skills can Now Include Selling
Rumor is out that Amazon will now allow sales pitches within contributed Skills. Course I can now decide which skills I want to use. So I am choosing, and perhaps I want to buy things in that context. But this is something…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Social Media Endorsements
In Knowledge@Wharton:
Social Media Endorsements: Where Will Marketers Draw the Line?
What if advertisers found a stealthy new way to get their pitch across — a form of messaging perceived more as a friendly recommendation than
And…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Science Process
Like the idea. In KDNuggets:
Understanding the process requires not only wide technical background in machine learning but also basic notions of businesses administration; here I will share my experience on teaching the data
By…
From insideHPC
Learning from ZFS to Scale Storage on and under Containers
"What is so new about the container environment that a new class of storage software is emerging to address these use cases? And can container orchestration systems themselves be part of the solution? As is often the case in
…