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
Augmented Intelligence in Healthcare
Expert discusses Augmented Intelligence in Healthcare
in Public Library of Science
The potential of using machine learning techniques in medicine is immense. As electronic health records have become widely available, there is
We…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Will GDPR Impact Machine Learning
Well done piece on the issue. Still unclear how this effect experimentation and delivery.
How will the GDPR impact machine learning?
Answers to the three most commonly asked questions about maintaining GDPR-compliant machine
By…
From Schneier on Security
Accessing Cell Phone Location Information
The New York Times is reporting about a company called Securus Technologies that gives police the ability to track cell phone locations without a warrant: The service can find the whereabouts of almost any cellphone in the country…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtual Doctor Comes via 5G
An interesting preview. Will 5G be fast enough everywhere to provide services like imaging? I note also the term IOMT Internet of Medical Things.
Previewing 5G’s effect on the health care industry via Qualcomm
Your (virtual)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facebook Adds AI Labs
Need for analytics and advanced AI capabilities continues to expand. Saw this at today's Analytics for Leadership Meeting at the Center for Business Analytics Summit 2018. ...
... Participated in a talk on Analytics Leadership…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rapid AI Experimentation with AWS
Via O'Reilly:
Rapid AI experimentation and innovation on Amazon Web Services
Dan Mbanga explores how accelerating AI experimentation has influenced innovations such as Amazon Alexa, Prime Air, and Go.
This is a keynote from the
This…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Validating UTF-8 strings using as little as 0.7 cycles per byte
Most strings found on the Internet are encoded using a particular unicode format called UTF-8. However, not all strings of bytes are valid UTF-8. The rules as to what constitute a valid UTF-8 string are somewhat arcane. Yet it…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Indoor Precision Location
New Methods Drive Indoor Location Technologies Beyond the Beacon
Posted by David Oro in Apps and Tools in IOTCentral
As demand for location services in all areas of the Internet of Things (IoT) grows, so too has the requirement…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet
CCC Council member Maja Mataric from the University of Southern California provided contributions to this post. If we train Artificial Intelligence (AI) to do our work for us it will still need to be periodically checked for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cell Carriers are Selling Your Location
Not unexpected, privacy implications. Probably not much to most people. Good to know though.
Your Cell Carrier Is Selling Your Location Data By Ryan Whitwam in Extremetech
There’s a lot of hand-wringing over the amount…
From insideHPC
Universal Coding of the Reals: Alternatives to IEEE Floating Point
Peter Lindstrom from LLNL gave this talk at the Conference on Next Generation Arithmetic in Singapore. "We propose a modular framework for representing the real numbers that generalizes IEEE, POSITS, and related floating-point…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Artificial Empathy Needed
Also includes engagement. Gets back to the nature of a conversation. Does it engage, promote understanding, remember past interactions, help? All those lead to a minimum amount of empathy. If a conversation does not have…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Asks for Higher Priced Products
Not a surprise, different competitive positioning, margins.
No joke – Walmart asks CPGs for higher priced products
by Matthew Stern in Retailwire with expert comments.
Walmart is known for its commitment to low prices, but the
Last…
From insideHPC
DDN GridScaler Powers Neuroscience and Behavioral Research at Harvard
Today DDN that Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Research Computing (FASRC) has deployed DDN’s GRIDScaler GS7KX parallel file system appliance with 1PB of storage. The installation has sped the collection of images…
From insideHPC
Ohio Supercomputer Center Upgrades HPC Access Portal
The Ohio Supercomputer Center has updated its innovative web-based portal for accessing high performance computing services. As part of this effort, OSC recently announced the release of Open OnDemand 1.3, the first version using…
From insideHPC
HPE: Design Challenges at Scale
Jimmy Daley from HPE gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Tucson. "High performance clusters are all about high speed interconnects. Today, these clusters are often built out of a mix of copper and active optical cables. While…
From insideHPC
High Performance Big Data Computing Using Harp-DAAL
Harp-DAAL is a framework developed at Indiana University that brings together the capabilities of big data (Hadoop) and techniques that have previously been adopted for high performance computing. Together, employees can become…
From Schneier on Security
Sending Inaudible Commands to Voice Assistants
Researchers have demonstrated the ability to send inaudible commands to voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that…
From Computational Complexity
What does it mean for a student to guess an answer?
On my final in Aut Theory I wanted to ask a TRUE/FALSE/UNKNOWN TO SCIENCE
question but did not want them to guess. Hence I had +4 for a right answer, -3 for a wrong answer.
Here is the question:
-----------------------------…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automated Checkout Growing
Seems that checkout-free experiences will be the future.
Amazon will open checkout-free stores in Chicago and San Francisco
You won't have to visit Seattle to experience automated shopping.
By Jon Fingas, @jonfingas in Engadget
You…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
ACM-W Connections – May 2018
Letter from ACM-W Chair News from ACM-W Celebrations News from ACM-W Professional Chapters News from ACM-W Student Chapters News from ACM-W Europe Welcome from the ACM-W Chair Back in December, we announced the launch of our…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is research sick?
One of the most important database researchers of all time, Michael Stonebraker, has given a talk recently on the state of database research. I believe that many of his points are of general interest: We have a lost our consumers…
From Schneier on Security
Details on a New PGP Vulnerability
A new PGP vulnerability was announced today. Basically, the vulnerability makes use of the fact that modern e-mail programs allow for embedded HTML objects. Essentially, if an attacker can intercept and modify a message in transit…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Deepmind for Navigation
Another kind of problem, which may well have applications in industry.
Google DeepMind's AI Learns Human Navigation Skills
In The Guardian By Ian Sample
Google's DeepMind unit has developed an algorithm that outperforms people…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blockchain for Marketing
Another example where Blockchain has potential use.
What Blockchain Could Mean for Marketing By Anindya Ghose in the HBR
Companies are collecting more data than ever before, and are making significant business decisions based…
From insideHPC
BSC Powers Climate Services for Agriculture in Europe
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is a partner in the MED-GOLD project, which will foster the creation of highly specialized climate services for wine, olive oil, and durum crops, providing indicators to optimize agricultural…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
AMIA Webinar on Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) will hold a webinar on sociotechnical interventions for health disparity reduction on Wednesday, May 16th at 1pm ET. During the webinar, Katie Siek (Indiana) and Tiffany Veinot…
From insideHPC
Quantum Computing: Its Principles, Capabilities and Challenges
Dr. Mark Mattingley-Scott from IBM gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. "Quantum Computing is here, right now - and we are at the start of a new way of computing, which will impact us the way the revolution started by
…
From insideHPC
Let’s Talk Exascale: Making Software Development more Efficient
In this episode of Let's Talk Exascale, Mike Heroux from Sandia National Labs describes the Exascale Computing Project’s Software Development Kit, an organizational approach to reduce the complexity of the project management
…
From Schneier on Security
Critical PGP Vulnerability
EFF is reporting that a critical vulnerability has been discovered in PGP and S/MIME. No details have been published yet, but one of the researchers wrote: We'll publish critical vulnerabilities in PGP/GPG and S/MIME email encryption…