Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2018
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Academically rigorous is incomplete without computer science
Mark Guzdial linked to this post on his blog - Feeling disadvantaged in CS courses at University of XXX – Original post at Minimal exposure
Interesting line from the original post: "Although my high school was academically rigorous…From Schneier on Security
Airline Ticket Fraud
New research: "Leaving on a jet plane: the trade in fraudulently obtained airline tickets:" Abstract: Every day, hundreds of people fly on airline tickets that have been obtained fraudulently. This crime script analysis provides…
From Computational Complexity
Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
When I took cryptography from Manuel Blum, he handed out copies of the chapter "Safecracker Meets Safecracker" from Richard Feynman's book Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman. Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist who was
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dealing with a Big Stream of Analytics Data
An interesting piece that deals with the process of working with large data streams. The particular solution experience is useful.
By Alban Perillat-Merceroz in Medium
Software Engineer @Teads
Give meaning to 100 billion analytics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Duplex Calling Will Let You know its an AI
The presentation of the Google Duplex calling service, demonstrated this week and planned for this summer, impressed many as a great idea. A system that could construct a goal-driven interaction with other people or devices…
From Putting People First
[Book] Massive Codesign
![[Book] Massive Codesign](/system/assets/0000/1953/030209_Vanderbeeken_Mark_250.small_square.jpg?1476779420&1260281963)
Massive Codesign. A Proposal for a Collaborative Design Framework By Anna Meroni, Daniela Selloni and Martina Rossi Released with the Creative Commons License Attribution-NoDerivatives 3.0 Italia (CC BY-ND 3.0 IT) in the peer…
From Putting People First
[Book] Massive Codesign
Massive Codesign. A Proposal for a Collaborative Design Framework By Anna Meroni, Daniela Selloni and Martina Rossi Released with the Creative Commons License Attribution-NoDerivatives 3.0 Italia (CC BY-ND 3.0 IT) in the peer…
From Putting People First
A design lab is making rituals for secular people
At the Ritual Design Lab in Silicon Valley, a small team of “interaction designers” is working to generate new rituals for modern life, with an eye to user experience. Created by Kursat Ozenc and Margaret Hagan, the lab crafts…
From Putting People First
A design lab is making rituals for secular people
At the Ritual Design Lab in Silicon Valley, a small team of “interaction designers” is working to generate new rituals for modern life, with an eye to user experience. Created by Kursat Ozenc and Margaret Hagan, the lab crafts…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Train Computers in Virtual Reality
Its all about having enough real data.
Want Computers to See Better in the Real World? Train Them in a Virtual Reality EurekAlert
Chinese researchers have developed a new method for improving how computers "see" and "understand"…
From insideHPC
XTREME-D to Launch Gateway Appliance for Secure HPC Cloud Access
"XTREME-Stargate is a small set-top linux appliance that can easily connect to HPC cloud with basic setup over a web portal using the XTREME-DNA interface. It functions as a “super head node” for HPC cloud clusters, providing…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF WATCH TALK- Why the Census Bureau Adopted Differential Privacy for the 2020 Census of Population
The next WATCH talk, called Why the Census Bureau Adopted Differential Privacy for the 2020 Census of Population, from John M. Abowd, Chief Scientist and Associate Director for Research and Methodology at the U.S. Census Bureau…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Misty II Personal Robot
Another example of a personal assistant, perhaps useful for home applications. Considerable detail in the IEEE article examines design elements. Appears to be more general and adaptable, and expensive than others available…
From insideHPC
Mateo Valero on how RISC-V can play a major role in New Supercomputer Architectures
In this eeNews report, Mateo Valero, Director of the Barcelona Supercomputer center, explains how the RISC-V architecture can play a main role in new supercomputer architectures. Valero was the keynote speaker at the recent RISC…
From The Eponymous Pickle
BMW Blockchain Pilot
BMW Leasing Arm Supports Blockhain Pilot
BMW invited DOVU to participate in its innovation lab, which seeks new and disruptive ideas. The 10-week pilot began Jan.15 at the London BMW headquarters.
Three executives from Alphabet…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Forestry Management by Drone and AI
Our own forestry management efforts could have used this, along with additional capabilities to detect growth changes, like tree diameters and height.
An AI learns to spot tree species, with help from a drone
A consumer-grade…
From insideHPC
ArrayFire Releases v3.6 Parallel Libraries
Today ArrayFire announced the release of ArrayFire v3.6, the company's open source library of parallel computing functions supporting CUDA, OpenCL, and CPU devices. This new version of ArrayFire includes several new features
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Eye Tracking API in Windows
Newly announced. Broader accessibility and data tracking capabilities.
How to create accessible apps and immersive game experiences with new eye tracking APIs By Jacob Cohen / Program Manager, Windows Input Platform Team
Last…
From insideHPC
The Need for Deep Learning Transparency
Steve Conway from Hyperion Research gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "We humans don’t fully understand how humans think. When it comes to deep learning, humans also don’t understand yet how computers think. That’s a big
…
From insideHPC
Let’s Talk Exascale: Transforming Combustion Science and Technology
In this episode of Let's Talk Exascale, Jackie Chen from Sandia National Laboratories describes the Combustion-Pele project, which uses predictive simulation for the development of cleaner-burning engines. "Almost all practical…
From Schneier on Security
Supply-Chain Security
Earlier this month, the Pentagon stopped selling phones made by the Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei on military bases because they might be used to spy on their users. It's a legitimate fear, and perhaps a prudent action. But…
From insideHPC
Intel FPGAs Power Realtime AI in the Azure cloud
At the Microsoft Build conference held this week, Microsoft announced Azure Machine Learning Hardware Accelerated Models powered by Project Brainwave integrated with the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning SDK. In this configuration…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More on Conversational Chatbots
Not Quite what it means by more conversation chat, or AI. Its also about memory and context, common sense reasoning and shades of autonomy. . I will take this as a useful demonstration. And Turings test is far less sophisticated…
From XRDS
The walled gardens we use for our project communication
Over the past decade, we have seen a shift that caught many long-time computer users and developers off-guard: The advent of apps. Up to ten years ago, there was a clear trend of distributed applications becoming webapps, and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Qualitative Analysis
Early on, long before machine learning, we did content analysis. We still did quantitative analytics, but only after we had structured our problem with qualitative methods. In fact you always start with qualitative. Here a…
From insideHPC
Viking Technology Introduces NVMe Persistent Memory Drives
Today Viking Technology announced its new VT-PM8 and VT-PM16 persistent memory drives that deliver performance and unlimited write endurance similar to that of DRAM, while simultaneously providing the data persistence desired…
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: High Performance Machine Learning Workshop – HPML 2018
The HPML 2018 High Performance Machine Learning Workshop has issued its Call for Papers. The event takes place September 24 in Lyon, France. "This workshop is intended to bring together the Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence…
From insideHPC
Gauss Centre in Germany Allocates 1 Billion Computing Core Hours for Science
"With the 19th Call for Large-Scale Projects, the GCS steering committee granted a total of more than 1 billion core hours to 17 ambitious research projects. The research teams represent a wide range of scientific disciplines…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Programming is easy. Debugging is hard.
I may be in a minority in this but in some ways the most fun part of my job is debugging student code. Students are very clever at wring code that doesn’t work in obscure ways. Some how they manage to create errors that lookThe…
From insideHPC
MareNostrum provides 470 million core hours to European scientists
The PRACE initiative continues to sponsor ground-breaking research in Europe. "In the 16th PRACE Call for Project Access, Spain has allocated 470 million core hours on MareNostrum to 17 projects led by scientists from different…