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
Crime Matching with GEDMatch
Interesting this has just become apparent, genetic matching starts to work against increasing stored data and matching. Shows the power of cowdsourced databases. Other examples? Technology Review Shows why and how:
Another…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tesla Releases some of its Code
Intriguing, but as you might expect, the autopilot is very technical. Tesla is not known for releasing its source code. Hardly directly understandable, but gives you an impression of the complexity involved. I am still of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Potential of Data Science
Towards a better definition of data science.
Realizing the Potential of Data Science
By Francine Berman, Rob Rutenbar, Brent Hailpern, Henrik Christensen, Susan Davidson, Deborah Estrin, Michael Franklin, Margaret Martonosi, Padma…
From insideHPC
AWS Announces EC2 Bare Metal instances and C5D instances with local SSD Storage
HPC in the Cloud got a boost this week with this announcement of two updates to the Amazon EC2 instance family. EC2 Bare Metal instances provide customers’ applications with direct access to the processor and memory resources…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Reviews the Results from the ASC 2018 Student Cluster Competition
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the results of the ASC 2018 Student Cluster Competition.
"The ASC 2018 Student Supercomputer Challenge finalist were announced on March 20, 2018. The 20 finalists will design and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gartner on the Value of AI: $1.2 Trillion
Such valuations are always difficult. But it can be expected to be high if it truly augments human effort.
Artificial intelligence will be worth $1.2 trillion to the enterprise in 2018
Gartner says that AI-based customer experience…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blockchain Definitions
A thoughtful set of definitions:
What is a blockchain?
Unpacking the complexity of blockchain, term by term.
By Mike Loukides May 17, 2018
Read "What are Enterprise Blockchains?" and learn how organizations are applying blockchain…
From BLOG@CACM
When Will We Learn?
Massive software failure once again, with no lesson from past occurrences and no lesson for future systems.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Judea Pearl Criticizes Machine Learning
Quite interesting view. Pearl's view is interesting. Bayesian networks in particular has shown a more broadly insightful and transparent view to modeling than machine learning. But machine learning deep learning can target…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AT&T Builds a Dash-Like Button
Always thought there was a place for simple buttons to link to IOT networks, to make requests of many kinds, beyond just ordering something. Why doesn't IFTTT have something like this? This seems to be that, The way I read…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Lost in Complexity
Should we expect simplicity in a theory named for complexity? Amer. Phy. Soc. interview source Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies who works on quantum gravity. She is also noted…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Business of Artificial Intelligence
Good statement of expectations, what it is doing, what has been promised, delivered and not, and where it needs to go. As a practitioner, I have seen it all to date. ... It needs care, caution and closer links to business…
From insideHPC
The Galactos Project: Using HPC To Run One of Cosmology’s Hardest Challenges
Debbie Bard from NERSC gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "We present Galactos, a high performance implementation of a novel, O(N2 ) algorithm that uses a load-balanced k-d tree and spherical harmonic expansions to compute…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Application Programmer at UC San Diego
The University of California at San Diego is seeking an Applications Programmer in our Job of the Week. "The Applications Programmer will assist the Neurosciences IT Manager and business office IT team. Provides technical support…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How to be a SystemsThinker
Podcast video interview. Its a good idea to create deep understanding. But shallower understanding sometimes leads to things that are useful, there has been quite a long history of engineering to show that. Thoughtful piece…
From The Eponymous Pickle
OpenAI Lets Robots Learn from Hindsight
In IEEE Spectrum.
OpenAI Releases Algorithm That Helps Robots Learn from Hindsight
It's not a failure if you just pretend that you meant to do it all along By Evan Ackerman
Being able to learn from mistakes is a powerful ability…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Flying Squid
Flying squid are real. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Speakers Show us What AI is
I do like the way that Amazon is promoting citizen construction of skills. Will this beat out the professional delivery of assistant intelligence? Probably the first time this kind of competition has ever been tried. The experiment…
From BLOG@CACM
Why Not Program Right?
Not your grandmother's class invariant.
From insideHPC
Video: Doug Kothe Looks Ahead at The Exascale Computing Project
In this video, Doug Kothe from ORNl provides an update on the Exascale Computing Project. "With respect to progress, marrying high-risk exploratory and high-return R&D with formal project management is a formidable challenge.…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (May 18th, 2018)
How is memory encoded in your brain? If you are like me, you assume that it is encoded in the manner in which your brain cells are connected together. Strong and weak connections between brain cells create memories. Some people…
From insideHPC
Altair acquires FluiDyna CFD Technology for GPUs
Altair has acquired Germany-based FluiDyna GmbH, a renowned developer of NVIDIA CUDA and GPU-based Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and numerical simulation technologies in whom Altair made an initial investment in 2015. FluiDyna…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Supercomputing the Emergence of Material Behavior
In this TACC Podcast, Chemists at the University of California, San Diego describe how they used supercomputing to design a sheet of proteins that toggle between different states of porosity and density. This is a first in biomolecular…
From insideHPC
New Tachyum Prodigy Chip has “More than 10x the Performance of Conventional Processors”
Today Silicon Valley startup Tachyum Inc. unveiled its new processor family – codenamed “Prodigy” – that combines the advantages of CPUs with GP-GPUs, and specialized AI chips in a single universal processor platform. According…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google's Selfish Ledger
Remember this from then, but at the time not too much in the way of reaction. Now there seems to be more caution regarding what large companies can think about leveraging.
Google's Selfish Ledger is an unsettling vision of Silicon…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Introducing Vulnerability Management
The specific term is new to me, but have worked the risk management direction for a long time. At the link much more including the references mentioned.
We Scan and We Patch, but We Don’t Do Vulnerability Management by Anton…
From insideHPC
Satoshi Matsuoka to receive High Performance Parallel Distributed Computation Achievement Award
Today ACM announced that that Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka will receive the annual HPDC Achievement Award for his pioneering research in the design, implementation, and application of high performance systems and software tools for parallel…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cryptocurrency and IOT
This company hopes its cryptocurrency can help the internet of things reach its true potential Helium, a startup focused on connecting low-power devices, thinks a blockchain can seed the spread of cheap, ubiquitous connectivity…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Social Networks and Innovations
An interesting view of how social networks influence elements of opinion. In particular addressing the kinds of innovations.
How Social Networks Contribute to the Spread of Unproven Innovations
Wharton's Valentina Assenova discusses…
From Schneier on Security
Maliciously Changing Someone's Address
Someone changed the address of UPS corporate headquarters to his own apartment in Chicago. The company discovered it three months later. The problem, of course, is that there isn't any authentication of change-of-address submissions…