Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2016
From insideHPC
1998 ATLAS Paper Wins SC16 Test of Time Award
SC16 has announced the winner of their Test of Time Award. This year the winning paper "Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software" by Clint Whaley and Jack Dongarra. The paper, which has received hundreds of citations with …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The strange case of the copyright of open-source software
Economists make a grave mistake when they fail to mention open-source software as one of the critical innovation of our era. Open-source software offers a great reference for the type of innovation we will get in the post-industrial…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talk on Using Retail Beacons
In Retailwire: " ... There is hope for in-store beacons yet, but the primary ways retailers have been implementing them thus far have been the wrong ones. That was the main takeaway in a session given by Adam Silverman, principal…
From Schneier on Security
NSA Using Insecure Word Macros
There's an interesting message in the documents about Snowden that Vice magazine got out of the NSA with a FOIA request. At least in 2012, the NSA was using Word macros internally...
From insideHPC
ISC to Livestream Student Cluster Awards Ceremony
ISC 2016 is only a week away, and the conference expects to host over 3000 supercomputing professionals from around the world. To bring some of the highlights home, the conference is planning to livestream video from the HPCAC…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 13 June 2016
School is out for the summer! Well it is for me as of noon today. Teacher wrap up but my grades are in and my room is cleaned up for the summer. Looking forward to some time off mixed in with a bunch of summer professional development…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Recency Bias in Big Data
In the BBC: Good points made. " .... There’s a counter-intuitive downside to collecting vast amounts of information about economics and human behaviour: it can mean we ignore the lessons of history. ... " . This also happens…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Audible Team
Have examined various kinds of audible experiences, including book reading online. Here is the Audible team from Amazon.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Adding AI to the Development Mix
Now have been involved in several 'next generation' examination of AI and development systems, and understanding is itself still lacking.DevOps increasingly embracing AI systems, but security fears persistby Mike WheatleyDevelopers…
From CERIAS Blog
Nominations solicitied for the CSHOF
The nomination cycle for the 2016 induction into the Cyber Security Hall of Fame is now open.
Details on the nomination procedure are available online. Nominations are due by July 20.From CERIAS Blog
Nominations solicitied for the CSHOF
The nomination cycle for the 2016 induction into the Cyber Security Hall of Fame is now open.
Details on the nomination procedure are available online.
Nominations are due by July 20.
From Computational Complexity
When does n divide a_n in this sequence?
Consider the following sequence: a(1)=0 a(2)=2 a(3)=3 for all n ≥ 4 a(n) = a(n-2)+a(n-3) Here is a table of a(n) for 2 ≤ n ≤ 23 n 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 a(n) 2 3…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Addressing Cognitive Overload
Via David Ing, in CSIG. We are all expeiencing overload, produced in part by the very systems that are meant to augment us.Cognitive overload as business opportunity for IBM since 2005Cognitive overload is beyond AI as a challenge…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Case Studies for the IOT
This from IOT Central. These are fairly obvious examples, and lack much depth regarding the specific issues each industry involves. But is worth a scan for anyone interested in how widely the idea is being applied. Join…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tele Cooking, Personal Learning
Teaching Italian cooking using telepresence. As a long time amateur cook, nice to see the example. We have had seen visual expertise delivered for a long time. How does the movement to the interactively virtual provide additonal…
From The Noisy Channel
Mark, I did try migrating The Noisy Channel to Medium as a publication following these instructions…
I didn’t mind creating a publication — in fact, I saw that as a plus, since much my Noisy Channel material is a bit different from the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
No Tricorder from Google yet
In Statnews: Google does not yet quite deliver on 'instant' medicine sci fi .... Tricorder still not ready for delivery three years later. Still a hard to thing to combine a large number of accurate sensors? What are the…
From insideHPC
OCF Staffs Up Largest HPC Delivery Team in the UK
OCF in the UK reports that the company continues to expand its operations. The high performance computing integrator is recruiting a number of new staff to meet the growing appetite and demand for HPC and data analytics solutions…
From insideHPC
Learnings from Operating 200 PB of Disk-Based Storage
Gleb Budman from Backblaze presented this talk at the 2016 MSST Conference. "For Q1 2016 we are reporting on 61,590 operational hard drives used to store encrypted customer data in our data center. In Q1 2016, the hard drives…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tango Mapping Phone Hands on
In Engadget: Mapping interior spaces.Up close and Personal with the First Tango phoneLenovo's Phab2 Pro has a lousy name, but Google's 3D mapping technology could make it a game changer. ... "
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google's Trippy VR Experiment
Google and their deep dream experiment." ... Google's latest VR experiment involves feeding footage captured by its 360-degree camera rig through the DeepDream machine. Since the company's DeepDream program uses a neural network…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Freight Forwarding via Flexport
Addressing the opportunity in outwardly boring businesses. Good overview." .... To get the best deal on each leg of the journey and handle the hand-offs through customs, freight forwarding services serve as an organizational…
From Putting People First
Reflecting on the Enterprise UX conference
Anthropologist and UX professional Natalie Hanson attended the Enterprise UX conference in San Antonio, Texas this week. The conference is dedicated to delivering useful, delightful, and humane experiences to people who work …
From Putting People First
Time for big anthropology
“Big data” is one of the most promising developments in health care in a decade. Yet, writes Dan Beckham, they too often breed myopic overconfidence. “The numbers, after all, never lie — except when they do. Numbers without context…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Computer Science Because Students Like It
Code.org posted this image of the class students like the most on their blog.
The full survey data is on slide 48 of this PowerPoint from the researchers who did the survey.
There is a lot of detail in the referenced PowerPoint…From insideHPC
Video: Speeding Up Code with the Intel Distribution for Python
David Bolton from Slashdot shows how ‘embarrassingly parallel’ code can be sped up over 2000x (not percent) by utilizing Intel tools including the Intel Python compiler and OpenMP. "The Intel Distribution for Python* 2017 Beta…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Siri Playing Catch up
Siri was the first general assistant of its kind, but despite the fact that I have had it at my fingertips for a long time, I find myself using it less. My take is that assistants need a focusing need to make them work. More…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Associate Director for Computation at Livermore
Lawrence Livermore National Lab is seeking an Associate Director for Computation in our Job of the Week. LLNL seeks to fill the position of Associate Director (AD) for Computation, a position key to the continued success of LLNL…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Getty Images Adapts to VR
An indication of seriousness, business adapts to needs. Here we are starting to build libraries of virtual reality content.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Buiding Morality into Machines
Remember when this was discussed during the last emergence of smart machines. The problem has not gone away. Good detailed piece with a number of useful case descritpions. Note the decision aspect. Decisions need to be improved…