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 The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Alexa Experience Center
Maybe not so much for current experience, but a place to demonstrate what may be coming.
Amazon's Experience Centers let you try out Alexa in a home setting
They’re available in eight cities across the US. .... "
By Mallory Locklear…
From The Eponymous Pickle
HP Doubles down on AI
Another player enters the fray, had worked with them much in the past, without hearing much of them in this space. But being much in the services space, makes lots of sense.
HPE Doubles Down on AI By James Kobielus
Hewlett…
From Schneier on Security
Virginia Beach Police Want Encrypted Radios
This article says that the Virginia Beach police are looking to buy encrypted radios. Virginia Beach police believe encryption will prevent criminals from listening to police communications. They said officer safety would increase…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neurala Claims Faster Deep Neural Nets
New to me.
Neurala’s new neural network reduces AI training times from hours to seconds by Mike Wheatley
Artificial intelligence startup Neurala Inc. is claiming a major breakthrough with its deep learning platform, saying it
Neurala…
From insideHPC
POWER9 for AI & HPC
Jeff Stuecheli from IBM gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Tucson. "Built from the ground-up for data intensive workloads, POWER9 is the only processor with state-of-the-art I/O subsystem technology, including next generation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Beating Amazon
Forrester Blogs The Counterintuitive CEO
How To Beat Amazon By George Colony CEO ...
Amazon has an Achilles’ heel: emotion. The company delivers, but its customers don’t feel empathy for the brand. This vulnerability offers…
From Computational Complexity
Second of N posts on G4G13. Maybe
(Don't forget to vote for SIGACT posistions:here 9th workshop on Flexible network design, May 22-25 at College Park, here.)
My first poston G4G13 is arguably here. To see why its debatable, see that post.
FOXTROT HALF-EMPTY…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How quickly can you check that a string is valid unicode (UTF-8)?
Though character strings are represented as bytes (values in [0,255]), not all sequences of bytes are valid strings. By far the most popular character encoding today is UTF-8, part of the unicode standard. How quickly can weContinue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why Does Machine Learning Work?
Provocative piece
Big Data’s Mathematical Mysteries
This article was posted by Ingrid Daubechies on Quanta Magazine. Ingrid is the James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Yet Another Way to Check out
Wal-Mart tests another way to checkout. Makes sense in Garden where there can be lots of seasonal traffic tie ups. Seen it in other Retail.
Walmart associates check out customers on the floor in pilot program by Tom Ryan in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Improves Conversation
This is always what I have wanted, an assistant conversation that starts with shared memory, uses the strongest context ongoing, and leads to actual goals. Google/Home assistant is not there yet, but moving in the right direction…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Global City Teams Challenge Updates
Check out the following Global City Teams Challenge Updates Global Tech Jam 2018 Bringing together forward-looking research institutions, federal agencies, leading private sector companies, and municipalities interested in preparing…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Visual Studio Live Share–Something CS Teachers Can Use?
Microsoft is having their big MS Build event this week. I don’t have time to watch it live but I have been seeing hints of things via social media. Most of what they are talking about it for professional developers and is far…
From insideHPC
D-Wave Launches Quadrant Business Unit for Machine Learning
Today D-Wave Systems launch its new Quadrant business unit, formed to provide machine learning services that make state-of-the-art deep learning accessible to companies across a wide range of industries and application areas.…
From insideHPC
Univa Navops Launch powers Cloudbursting for Mellanox Hybrid Cloud
Today Univa announced that Mellanox has selected Univa’s Navops Launch to extend its on-premise EDA cluster to the cloud, providing Mellanox with cost-effective, on-demand capacity. "Mellanox Technologies provides high-performance…
From insideHPC
Kubernetes as a Service Built on OpenStack
Saverio Proto from SWITCH gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. "At SWITCH we are looking to provide a container platform as a Service solution. We are working on Kubernetes leveraging the Openstack cloud provider integration…
From insideHPC
ClusterVision to build Scandinavia’s Most Powerful Supercomputer
Today Sweden's National Supercomputing Centre (NSC) at Linköping University announced it has awarded ClusterVision a contract to build its new flagship cluster, Tetralith. Available to all researchers in Sweden, the 4 Petaflop…
From Schneier on Security
The US Is Unprepared for Election-Related Hacking in 2018
This survey and report is not surprising: The survey of nearly forty Republican and Democratic campaign operatives, administered through November and December 2017, revealed that American political campaign staff -- primarily…
From insideHPC
Lustre 2.11.0 Released
Today OpenSFS announced the release of Lustre 2.11.0, the fastest and most scalable parallel file system. OpenSFS, founded in 2010 to advance Lustre development, is the premier non-profit organization promoting the use of Lustre…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Pushes Big Changes in AI
Missed this, again the emphasis is towards business solutions. Have not seen much from Cortana being useful for consumers. Have tested it for business, where it should have value, and quickly abandoned it for regular use.
Are…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Five Attributes of Useful AI
Useful, if somewhat too broad. Measurable and clearly process linked. Very useful statement about how data will not remain stable.
IBM outlines the 5 attributes of useful AI
By Dinesh Nirmal in Venturebeat
A few weeks ago,
That…
From The Eponymous Pickle
O'Reilly AI Conference 2018
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cortana and Alexa, together?
Saw this potential collaboration announced last year. Now finally some movement. But is it substantial? Alexa's movement into business oriented assistance delivery may have made them more competitive, thus limiting the collaboration…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Marketing Measurement and Attribution
Fairly rare that I have seen attribution and accurate measurement. Sounds like an old and well known question, as the old story tells us ....
Thoughts from Think with Google:
The hidden challenge with moving to data-driven attribution…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Workshop on Robotic Materials
The following blog post is by Robotic Materials organizer Nikolaus Correll from the University of Colorado at Boulder. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a workshop on “Robotic Materials” in Washington…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Faster Learning and Operations in Theater
Though the examples are military, the use of the same methods could be in many sensory rich, real time application of machine learning and operations. IOT too.
Artificial intelligence helps Soldiers learn many times faster in…
From My Biased Coin
SIGACT-Related Stuff
Some SIGACT related-stuff of import:
First, there's an election going on!!! If you're an ACM/SIGACT member, you've probably gotten an e-mail about this, and it's probably gone into some folder that you probably never look at.…
From insideHPC
New AI Performance Milestones with NVIDIA Volta GPU Tensor Cores
Over at the NVIDIA blog, Loyd Case shares some recent advancements that deliver dramatic performance gains on GPUs to the AI community. "We have achieved record-setting ResNet-50 performance for a single chip and single server…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Does the Math on pending CORAL-2 Exascale Machines
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team takes a look at daunting performance targets for the DOE’s CORAL-2 RFP for Exascale Computers. “So, 1.5 million TeraFlops divided by 7.8 Teraflops per GPU is how many individual accelerators…
From insideHPC
Cavium ThunderX2 Processor goes GA for HPC and Beyond
Today Cavium announced the General Availability of ThunderX2, Cavium's second generation of Armv8-A SoC processors. "Integrating ThunderX2 into the HPE Apollo 70 Servers is another example of HPE's leadership in driving innovation…