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 Schneier on Security
Cryptanalyzing a Pair of Russian Encryption Algorithms
A pair of Russia-designed cryptographic algorithms -- the Kuznyechik block cipher and the Streebog hash function -- have the same flawed S-box that is almost certainly an intentional backdoor. It's just not the kind of mistake…
From Schneier on Security
Another NSA Leaker Identified and Charged
In 2015, the Intercept started publishing "The Drone Papers," based on classified documents leaked by an unknown whistleblower. Today, someone who worked at the NSA, and then at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, was…
From insideHPC
Speed Machine Learning with the Model Zoo for Intel Architecture
Intel has launched a Model Zoo for Intel Architecture, an open-sourced collection of optimized machine learning inference applications that demonstrates how to get the best performance on Intel platforms. The project contains…
From insideHPC
Red Hat Teams with NVIDIA to Accelerate Machine Learning in the Cloud
Today Red Hat announced it has deepened its alliance with NVIDIA to accelerate the enterprise adoption of AI, machine learning and data analytics workloads in production environments. To move thins along, Red Hat is launching…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CS for Social Good White Paper Competition
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC), in conjunction with Schmidt Futures, will sponsor and administer a white paper competition on the future of “CS for Social Good,” in order to harness CS to address societal challenges…
From insideHPC
Cray Powers Weather Forecasting at ZAMG in Austria
Today Cray announced that the Central Institution for Meteorology and Geodynamics in Austria (ZAMG) is using a Cray supercomputer to support a multi-year weather nowcasting project with the University of Vienna to benefit society…
From insideHPC
Mellanox to Accelerate EDA Workloads with WekaIO
Today WekaIO announced that Mellanox has selected the WekaIO Matrix file system to accelerate application performance scaling for their EDA workloads. "Mellanox is a forward-thinking company, we continuously improve our workflows…
From insideHPC
Airbus: Innovating the Future of Flight with HPC
Gerd Buttner from Airbus gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. "As a proven leader in the global aerospace sector, Airbus designs, produces and delivers innovative solutions with the aim to create a better-connected, safer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data as Value Asset
Have now addressed this problem for some time, its how the data gets used, including the risk of its use in context.
Managing data as an asset: An interview with the CEO of Informatica in McKinsey
Anil Chakravarthy draws on his…
From Computational Complexity
Multiple Provers
Just over thirty years ago on May 5, 1989, I defended my PhD Thesis Complexity-Theoretic Aspects of Interactive Proof Systems. It's starts off with a parable for interactive proof systems.
Victor, a venture capitalist, had everything…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Tests Digital Price Labels
Kroger is testing similar approaches.
Walmart Testing Digital Price Labels, LED Projectors
By Patrycja Malinowska - In ConsumerGoods
Walmart is pitting two different types of digital price labels against each other at two stores…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Drones in the Aisles?
Certainly only after hours? Even the order picking people in my local Kroger can create a traffic problem.
Drones in Aisle 5? Grocery Stores Becoming Unusual Hotbeds of Innovation By The Washington Post
Pensa says its droneData…
From Schneier on Security
Amazon Is Losing the War on Fraudulent Sellers
Excellent article on fraudulent seller tactics on Amazon. The most prominent black hat companies for US Amazon sellers offer ways to manipulate Amazon's ranking system to promote products, protect accounts from disciplinary actions…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Plans to Drive Automotive Tech
Continued plans and progress:
At I/O, Google looks to drive progress in automotive technologies By Mark Albertson in SiliconAngle
In a keynote address at Google I/O 2019 on Tuesday, Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Sundar Pichai
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pepsi Campaign testing Strategy using Blockchain
Fascinating aspect of testing testing strategy, blockchains and smart contracts. Don't understand the approach used here, but following up. More in MindshareWorld.
PepsiCo boosts efficiency with blockchain technology in theDrum…
From Geeking with Greg
Tech and Tech Idealism
It's been almost 2 years since my last post! I don't know if anyone is still reading this. If you are, thank you!
Why haven't I posted more? Partly it is the broad transition to microblogging, which everyone is using more
…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Great Innovative Idea- Building Ethically Bounded AI
The following Great Innovative Idea is from Francesca Rossi of IBM Research and Nicholas Mattei of Tulane University. They were one of the Blue Sky Award winners at AAAI 2019 for their paper Building Ethically Bounded AI. The…
From insideHPC
SC19 Posts Workshop Schedule
"These topical workshops are bringing together hardware and software trends spanning various subjects including data analysis, visualization, machine learning for HPC, deep learning, performance benchmarking, parallel computing…
From Schneier on Security
Leaked NSA Hacking Tools
In 2016, a hacker group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released a trove of 2013 NSA hacking tools and related documents. Most people believe it is a front for the Russian government. Since, then the vulnerabilities and tools…
From insideHPC
Google Cloud TPU Pods Speed Machine Learning
Today Google announced that its Google Cloud TPU Pods are now publicly available in beta. Designed to help Machine Learning researchers iterate faster and train more capable machine learning models, TPU Pods can include more
…
From insideHPC
How Singularity Containers can ease the Transition to RHEL 8
The general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was announced this week at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. In this special guest feature, Ian Lumb writes that the company's Singularity containers can ease the transition
…
From insideHPC
Hyperion Research to host HPC Market Update Breakfast at ISC 2019
Hyperion Research will hold their annual HPC Market Update briefing at ISC 2019 in Frankfurt. "As Hyperion Research, we continue all the worldwide activities that spawned the world’s most respected HPC industry analyst group.…
From insideHPC
ExaLearn: The ECP Co-Design Center for Machine Learning
In this video from the HPC User Forum, Frank Alexander from Brookhaven National Laboratory presents: ExaLearn - ECP Co-Design Center for Machine Learning. "It is increasingly clear that advances in learning technologies have
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Observations on the Blog
It was observed to me that this blog is observational rather than original, and that is true. Most posts in its long (18K posts and 2 million reads) history quote some external source, and then comment on their relevance in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Medium Impacts Message
Another example of where context of data creation matters. Podcast and transcript. Implications for interpretation of language use.
User-generated Content: The Medium Impacts the Message
Wharton's Shiri Melumad discusses her
From…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advances for Google Assistant
Had been hearing less about what was advancing in Assistant lately. Formerly was impressed by their multiple primary language approach, which I now frequently use. Now announcement out of I/O is indicating a deeper look into…
From Schneier on Security
Malicious MS Office Macro Creator
Evil Clippy is a tool for creating malicious Microsoft Office macros: At BlackHat Asia we released Evil Clippy, a tool which assists red teamers and security testers in creating malicious MS Office documents. Amongst others,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Writing Computer Code by Voice
Would have thought this would be very difficult to do, given the required syntactic accuracy required for coding. So a fascinating case study and demonstration video:
Code Talkers By Neil Savage
Communications of the ACM,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Operations and Predictive Analytics
Useful to think about operations. Prediction implies we can adjust operations within a process based on future predictions. Risk also come forward because of inaccuracy of predictions.
Predictive analytics in hybrid IT: The…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Almost picking N distinct numbers at random
In Picking N distinct numbers at random: how to do it fast?, I describe how to quickly pick N distinct values are random from a range of values. It comes down to using either bitset/bitmap or a hash set. The bitset approach is…