Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2015
From The Eponymous Pickle
Making Information Useful
Podcast and text, interesting thoughts.Thomson Reuters on making information usefulThe CEO of the news, information, and professional-software company, Jim Smith, discusses how truly meeting customer expectations is at the heart…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Effective Scenario Planning
In McKinsey: Has been a while since I have worked with this technique, some good ideas and hints to make it useful. Not the same thing as Business Process Modeling, but some of the suggestions are similar. I would like"…
From insideHPC
Students Win ASC15 Competition with K80 GPUs
Over at the Nvidia Blog, George Middleton writes that Tesla K80 GPUs powered the winning team from Tsinghua University at the recent ASC15 International Student Cluster Competition.
The post Students Win ASC15 Competition with…From Schneier on Security
The History of Internet Insecurity
The Washington Post has a good two part story on the history of insecurity of the Internet....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Marketers and Predictive Analytics
This makes much sense. Marketing as a whole is a kind of prediction with considerable risk. Anything that can be done to improve your accuracy is of value. Taking analytics to the next stage, providing prescriptive advice,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI and the Angry Customer
Addressing the angry customer with AI? Have investigated this in the past with advisory systems. People do react to systems differently than people. Possible yes, see hints at this in our Mr. Clean effort, link in tag below…
From insideHPC
Concurrent Kernel Offloading
"The combination of using a host cpu such as an Intel Xeon combined with a dedicated coprocessor such as the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor has been shown in many cases to improve the performance of an application by significant …
From insideHPC
Will Europe be First to Exascale?
"The strengths and the limitations of Europe’s supercomputing strategy were laid out at the PRACEDdays15 conference in Dublin at the end of May, with the minds of many delegates concentrated by the announcement in the USA over…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Last Day of School
Today is the final day for teachers at my school. Students finished yesterday. Through some luck of timing and hard work all my grades are already in the system. After our final meeting as a faculty, a closing of school Mass …
From insideHPC
InsideHPC Special Reports
Over the past year the insideHPC editorial team have put together a series of special reports on a variety of HPC topics. These reports can be read online in an article fashion or you can download these reports from the insideHPC…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Product CPG Innovation Shifting
Interesting view of consumer product mix:" ... Despite the fact that 85 percent of American household needs are consistently filled with the same 150 items1, new product innovation is the lifeblood of the CPG industry. But bringing…
From Schneier on Security
Duqu 2.0
Kaspersky Labs has discovered and publicized details of a new nation-state surveillance malware system, called Duqu 2.0. It's being attributed to Israel. There's a lot of details, and I recommend reading them. There was probably…
From insideHPC
Video: From Megaflop to Petaflop and Beyond
Arden Bement from Purdue University presented this keynote at the NCSA Blue Waters Symposium. "Over the three decades supercomputer throughput rates have increased dramatically from 100s of MFLOPs in 1985 to tens of PFLOPS today…
From CERIAS Blog
Proposed Changes in Export Control
The U.S. limits the export of certain high-tech items that might be used inappropriately (from the government’s point of view). This is intended to prevent (or slow) the spread of technologies that could be used in weapons, used…
From CERIAS Blog
Proposed Changes in Export Control
The U.S. limits the export of certain high-tech items that might be used inappropriately (from the government’s point of view). This is intended to prevent (or slow) the spread of technologies that could be used in weapons, used…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Data Myths and Cautions
From DSC, by Martyn Jones. I add: Not a bad selection of warnings and cautions of the use and use of Big Data. Similar things could have been said about many residents of the hype-cycle over the years. I know, I have ridden…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger Expands Online Shopping
In Cincinnati, A good example of how bricks retailers are testing shop online and pickup grocery shopping. For Kroger pickup is only at one store so far. The demographics would be interesting, and link to loyalty propositions…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Everything Will Recognize You
In TechDirt: Consider this an extension of the IOT: smaller and smaller visual sensors connected to systems that can quickly analyze what they are looking at. Counting, tracking, identifying. Sensing signals, establishing…
From Schneier on Security
Security and Human Behavior (SHB 2015)
Earlier this week, I was at the eighth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior. This is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security. The fifty people in the room include psychologists…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
New ‘toolkit’ clarifies NSF OLPA resources; helps agency tell NSF-funded stories better
The following blog post is from the National Science Foundation Office of Legislative and Public Affairs on improving science communication. A new interactive resource available through NSF’s website will help NSF-funded principal…
From insideHPC
HPC News Bytes for June 11, 2015
While we're always on the lookout for HPC news, not everything makes it to the front page. Global HPC news items from this week include updates from Cray, Dell, DSRC, Oak Ridge, and Sentient Technologies.
The post HPC News Bytes…From The Eponymous Pickle
June Issue of Shopper Marketing
Steve Frenda writes:The June 2015 issue of Shopper Marketing is available. Digital version: http://goo.gl/qEcbkQ. if you prefer a .pdf: https://goo.gl/YT23Fn
From The Eponymous Pickle
Semantic Parsing for Human Reason and Understanding
Today's CSIG talk:Lenhart Schubert from the University of Rochester, presented "From Semantic Parsing to Reasoning." ... Slides here. This presentation is quite technical, but also gives an excellent non technical introduction…
From insideHPC
Ciena Builds Advanced Network for NOAA Environmental Research
Today Ciena announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is building a private optical network powered by the company's converged packet optical platforms. As part of its ongoing mission to connect…
From insideHPC
Video: Towards Exascale Simulation of Turbulent Combustion
"Exascale computing will enable combustion simulations in parameter regimes relevant to next-generation combustors burning alternative fuels. The first principles direct numerical simulations (DNS) are needed to provide the underlying…
From Blog@Ubiquity
Will the Internet Crash Democracy?
Many people in the Western world believe Internet freedom equals freedom of social and political life. The more access we get, the more freedom and democracy we will have. But, there is little to support this Western meme. Internet…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cisco on the Gateway to the Future
Have recently been watching Cisco scroll by on my 'set top box', and musing how this is all efficiently brings together internet and other media and the future connected home. Found this recent piece:By Joe Chow, vice president…
From Computational Complexity
A Metric Group Product
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Oil Embraces Big Data
Last year discussed analytics with an energy services company.Big Data and Big Oil: GE’s Systems and Sensors Drive Efficiencies for BPWith energy demands rising and reserves of oil and gas becoming more challenging to access,…
From Schneier on Security
Reassessing Airport Security
News that the Transportation Security Administration missed a whopping 95% of guns and bombs in recent airport security "red team" tests was justifiably shocking. It's clear that we're not getting value for the $7 billion we're…