Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2019
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Helping Doesn’t Always Help
My programming students are working on their final/semester projects. As is typical some of them are doing extra work on their projects at home. Normally that is pretty great. They get better projects and they learn that they…
From Schneier on Security
The Human Cost of Cyberattacks
The International Committee of the Red Cross has just published a report: "The Potential Human Cost of Cyber-Operations." It's the result of an "ICRC Expert Meeting" from last year, but was published this week. Here's a shorter…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Hundred-Million-Year-Old Squid Relative Found in Amber
This is a really interesting find. 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 Gloves for Feeling Results
The broad idea has been around for while, we tried it for tracking a manufacturing process to determine the 'feel' of output based on handling it. A kind of test that could indicated if maintenance or mixing parameters needed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Public Decentralized Applications Not Broadly Used
The idea of a Dapp (Distributed Application) is often included in the idea of 'smart contracts'. The idea of inserting a Dapp into a blockchain is often mentioned. The below refers to 'public' blockchains and the creation…
From insideHPC
Apply Now for the Blue Waters Petascale Computing Hackathon
NCSA is now accepting team applications for the Blue Waters Petascale Computing Hackathon. The event will take place September 9-13, 2019 at NCSA. "The Hackathon will pair research teams with expert mentors with the goal to enable…
From insideHPC
Converging Workflows Pushing Converged Software onto HPC Platforms
Are we witnessing the convergence of HPC, big data analytics, and AI? Once, these were separate domains, each with its own system architecture and software stack, but the data deluge is driving their convergence. Traditional
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advances in Automated Machine Learning
Automated machine learning is inevitable. How good will it be, and how much human oversight needs to be applied to ensure confidence in their results is important. This article is a good overview of work underway. Its no
Cracking…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Irene Qualters from LANL Shares Life Lessons on HPC and Diversity
In this Big Compute Podcast episode Gabriel Broner interviews Irene Qualters about her career and the evolution of HPC. "Some of the most profound advances that I have seen come from groups of people that have very different
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart IRL Store With Virtual Shelves in the Store
This picture through the ACM in the Chicago Tribune. Shows a scene in Wal-Mart's new smart store, called their IRL.
Appears to be a virtual shelf placed on an end cap to demonstrate or test the placement of product on shelf. …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Healthcare Uses of AI
Not sure I would call this 'Top' perhaps common uses of AI in healthcare. Somewhat limited in scope. Still some useful ideas to get people started in where the technology applies. Been asked to comment on the topic and I…
From insideHPC
Scalable and Distributed DNN Training on Modern HPC Systems
DK Panda from Ohio State University gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. "We will provide an overview of interesting trends in DNN design and how cutting-edge hardware architectures are playing a key role in moving the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Small Racing Drone
Always been interested by the possibilities of the very small drone. Here aimed at racing, and not meant to swarm to tasks with other drones. But notably fast and autonomous. Small means we do need to do motion prediction…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Revolution has not arrived Yet?
Late to this, but always new thoughts depending on the definition of the term and its goals. Not if its general intelligence, but if it is assistance or narrower and useful problem solving, its moving rapidly.
Artificial Intelligence…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Interview with Turing Award recipients on Neural Nets
We read some of the earliest work of Hinton and were inspired by the direction. Also a lesson about hype and the lessons from the fringe of typical research. But this is still not complete enough to create strong AI. Lots…
From The Eponymous Pickle
David Brin Interviewed on Resiliency
We connected with David Brin a number of times through IFTF. He is a well known futurist, physicist and Scifi Author. Also consultant to NASA and NIAC. Thoughtful piece I am reading. Resilience is the ability to bounce…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF/CISE Search Committee for Computer and Network Systems (CNS) Division Director Now Closes 6/21
The following is a previously posted letter to the community from James Kurose, Assistant Director, and Erwin Gianchandani, Deputy Assistant Director, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Computer & Information…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Recorded Future Bought by Insight Partners
Recorded Future is a company we worked with in its early years, and reported here about them since then. Good company. Their recent movement towards 'threat intelligence' analysis is of interest.
The security acquisitions continue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wolfram: Mining the Computational Universe
Intriguing half hour talk. A response to the broad entry of AI, or a claim to a new architecture of computation? Just recently reexamined here the anniversary of Wolfram Alpha.
In the Edge:
Mining the Computational Universe…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Takes on the Opioid Crisis
In this special guest feature from the SC19 Blog, Dan Jacobson and Wayne Joubert from ORNL describes how the Summit supercomputer is helping untangle how genetic variants, gleaned from vast datasets, can impact whether an individual…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automated Order Taking
Decreasing errors, wait times, learning patterns to anticipate demand.
Automated Order Takers May Reshape Future of Drive-Through Restaurants
Medill Reports
By Yixuan Xie
Three artificial intelligence (AI) companies are developing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facial Recognition Comes to US Schools
Not unexpected. Happening in UK, China. But I am intrigued to see how much push back will occur. Here will be primarily to detect sex offenders, unauthorized people, specifically banned people, etc. As opposed to students…
From insideHPC
NEC to Host Aurora Forum on Vector Computing at ISC 2019
NEC will host their Aurora Forum at ISC 2019. Designed for developers and users SX-Aurora TSUBA vector computing technology, the The half-day meeting takes place June 17 in Frankfurt, Germany. "The NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA is the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon and Small Suppliers
I am not sure this makes much difference for most small retailers, they have already made the transition, lived with their particular context or failed. Our own experience with a small retail within Amazon saw little support…
From insideHPC
Tachyum Boots Linux on Universal Processor Chip
Today Tachyum announced it has successfully deployed the Linux OS on its Prodigy Universal Processor architecture, a foundation for 64-core, ultra-low power, high-performance processor. “Running an OS directly on the chip, without…
From Schneier on Security
Fraudulent Academic Papers
The term "fake news" has lost much of its meaning, but it describes a real and dangerous Internet trend. Because it's hard for many people to differentiate a real news site from a fraudulent one, they can be hoodwinked by fictitious…
From insideHPC
Microway Shipping Intel Cascade Lake Systems in Volume
Today Microway announced that the company is now shipping 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors in volume, including next-generation NumberSmasher clusters, servers, and WhisperStations. "This new family of processors…
From insideHPC
Video: Multi-GPU FFT Performance on Different Hardware Configurations
Kevin Roe from the Maui High Performance Computing Center gave this talk at the GPU Technology Conference. "We will characterize the performance of multi-GPU systems in an effort to determine their viability for running physics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GigaOm Interviews about AI
Byron does a great job of interviewing emerging expertise. Been a follower for along time, join up.
Voices in AI – Episode 88: A Conversation with Ron Green By Byron Reese
Episode 88 of Voices in AI features Byron speaking with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Business Cards and Big Data
This made me think of other 'lost' sources of data
Here’s How Big Data And Business Card Marketing Go Together
Big data and business card marketing are a match made in heaven, and contrary to popular belief, business card marketing…