Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2014
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building Knowledge Graphs for Assistants
The MindMeld API: With an interesting mission. Leading to more intelligent voice? " .... Social physics is a big data science that models how networks of people behave and uses these network models to create actionable intelligence…
From Schneier on Security
More Details on NSA Tapping the Internet Backbone
Two new stories: one from Der Spiegel in Germany (also reported in the Intercept) and the other from Dagbladet in Denmark (again, also reported in the Intercept). Lots of good information in both stories....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hawking and AI
In CNet News: Not sure its that funny, but the caution is understood. Eventually we will need to deal wit this, but it may be some time away. " ... In a hilarious appearance on John Oliver's HBO show, the famous physicist muses…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Things You Love Are Made With Code
Well it looks like Google is jumping into the effort to get more girls interested in computer science in a big way. Their new program is called Made with Code.
From the official Google blog.
Today, we’re attempting toMade…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Cyber-Physical Systems Security and Privacy Solicitation includes Ideas Lab
As reported in this blog earlier in the month, the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and Intel Labs recently announced a new partnership to support novel…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mobile Apps for Professional Development
Good overview of continued professional education using mobile Apps. A nice idea. In particular this talks about a nursing education series.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Business Innovation Technology Lunch
Thanks to all who attended my business process innovation lunch today. I enjoyed it and learned much myself. Stay connected with me to continue the process. Always interested in thinking new possibilities.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building Anticipatory Supply Chains
From BLOG@CACM
Small-Group Code Reviews For Education
Real-time, small-group code reviews are great learning opportunities for students.
From The Eponymous Pickle
House Key as Tool and Technology
In the NYT: The simple house key, how little it has changed, and a look at the number of recent technological attempts to replace it. I like stories about how technologies replace each other, and how our digital world evolves…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building an All-Star Team
In the HBR: by Michael C. Mankins Though our typical view of being 'all star', is often skewed by many existing operational agendas , which is why this is hard to do in the enterprise.
From Schneier on Security
Paying People to Infect their Computers
Research paper: "It’s All About The Benjamins: An empirical study on incentivizing users to ignore security advice, by Nicolas Christin, Serge Egelman, Timothy Vidas, and Jens Grossklags. Abstract: We examine the cost for an…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Programming as Storytelling
Code tells a story. When I hear someone talking about telling a story in code I tend to think of tools like Alice, Kodu and Scratch. After all those are tools with lots of pretty pictures and commands that seem to scream “use…
From The Eponymous Pickle
BigDataLens
Also recently brought to my attention, Big Data Lens, examining. " ... Custom Big Data Algorithms and Predictive Analytics .... "" .... Bringing together human-like comprehension of web pages, advanced analysis, and cloud based…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Natural Language Conversations
Some believe this problem has been completely solved. Not so, a fascinating piece addressing the challenges. In Computing Now. In particular for the domain of personal assistants, an area heating up quickly.The Road to Natural…
From Computational Complexity
Favorite Theorem: PCP Simplified
The famous Probabilistically Checkable Proof Theorem due to Arora, Lund, Motwani, Sudan and Szegedy states that every problem in NP has a proof that can be checked efficiently by a verifier using O(log n) random coins and a constant…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
The Problem of Catching Chess Cheaters
The detection game Howard Goldowsky is the author of this month’s Chess Life cover story. Every month this magazine is mailed to about a quarter of a million players, but this cover story was deemed so important by Daniel Lucas…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cojoin Analytics Startup
New colleague Thomas Ciszek points me to Cojoin.com: In Beta, you can request access. " ... We are a team of agency, web and science data veterans who grew frustrated with enterprise sales and wanted to simplify data warehousing…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
GLS10 Keynote Scot Osterweil: It's Not About the Game
When I attended the 2014 Games, Learning and Society Conference (GLS10) in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin, I did not expect to engage much with the topic of stories in games. True, it's a hot topic these days, but I didn't think…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Replacing Power Plants with Batteries
In IEEE Spectrum: Mostly as a demand leveling device, not unlike methods still used, pumping water into uphill reservoirs to store energy. Some of the statistics are interesting, some power plants, built to address urban peak…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intel Very Interested in Wearables
Intel, apparently drawn by the opportunity of many more chip bearing devices, is closely examining the Wearable computing market. Here an overview their interests. " ... The chipmaker is developing several platforms -- Edison…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Metadata
Via Robin Bloor. I will note here that the term metadata has multiple functional definitions, but this still has some useful thoughts.Does Big Data Mean Big Metadata? Why is there so much metadata?Maybe you don’t think there…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sparseness of Linguistic Big Data
Interesting comment that we can confirm, but it's not unlike many events, statistically rare events are often problematic. In Language Log: At first I disagreed, we generate huge amounts of textual content every day. But…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Careers in Statistics Evolve and Expand
In Science Magazine:" ... Workers with statistics backgrounds have long been in healthy demand for academic, actuarial, pharmaceutical, or government jobs. Those traditional statistics jobs aren't going away anytime soon, asBut…
From Schneier on Security
The Democratization of Surveillance
MarketWatch has a list of five apps for spying on your spouse....
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Computers Don’t Do Ambiguity Well
I’ve seen several variations of the image below over the years. The last time I saw it I decided I’m going to use it with my computer science students next year.
I suspect that most people can read that. Some may struggleI…From The Eponymous Pickle
Hypothalamus as Brain Operating System?
In Technology Review:Coordinating sensory inputs, making sense of them, and coordinating response. Have seen this mentioned before, but we should be cautious about using computer inspired models. The article points to come …
From Schneier on Security
Story of a $10 Million Remote Scam
This is a bizarre story of an almost-happened $10 million scam. It reads like an obviously phony Nigerian 419 scam, but it actually fooled what seem to be smart people. What's amazing to me is that there was no face-to-face interaction…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Competing in a Digital Age
McKinsey piece that has some excellent statistics and specific examples. What does it mean to go digital? How does it help you compete? " ... Strategic principles for competing in the digital ageDigitization is rewriting the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Linked Data for Gathering Knowledge
I was referred back to the use of what is called Linked Data: In the WP: " ... In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked andTim…