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 Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Beautiful Squid Sculpture
Two years ago, I posted a photograph of a beautiful giant bronze squid sculpture by Kirk McGuire. He has a new sculpture: a squid table base. it's also beautiful. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Project CargoChain
[Notes]http://readwrite.com/2016/06/10/blockchain-and-iot-can-solve-the-challenges-of-international-freight-pl1/
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blockchain and IOT in the Supply Chain
In Readwrite:Can the blockchain and IoT solve international freight’s issues?It’s become well established that the blockchain has an almost infinite range of functional applications outside of pure financial transactions. This…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Where to Look for the Next Big Thing
In Innovation Excellence: I like this because it combines art and science. " ... Great innovators are not just smart, they are curious. They are rarely purists or polemicists, but are courageous enough to venture outside…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Congressional Briefing Marks the Fifth Anniversary of the National Robotics Initiative
In celebration of the fifth anniversary of the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), the Congressional Robotics Caucus Advisory Committee including IEEE-USA, Computing Research Association, Carnegie Mellon University, and Georgia…
From Schneier on Security
Financial Cyber Risk Is Not Systemic Risk
This interesting essay argues that financial risks are generally not systemic risks, and instead are generally much smaller. That's certainly been our experience to date: While systemic risk is frequently invoked as a key reason…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital not the Answer to Everything
In CustomerThink: Over-engineering the Customer Experience – ‘Digital’ is not the answer to everything! .... Ian Golding, CCXP CustomerThink Advisor featured columnist This article was originally written for my exclusive column…
From Schneier on Security
1944 CIA Sabotage Manual
It makes for interesting reading. Someone noticed that parts of it read like standard modern office procedures....
From insideHPC
Paul Messina on the New ECP Exascale Computing Project
Argonne Distinguished Fellow Paul Messina has been tapped to lead the Exascale Computing Project, heading a team with representation from the six major participating DOE national laboratories: Argonne, Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Phone Sensing its Environment
Phones sensing their environment in new ways. Have tracked the Project Tango idea for some time. An inverse of the beacon idea, with initiative given to the consumer device. Implications? More in CIO Today. " .... We're…
From insideHPC
Intel Developer Summer Workshops Coming to Stanford
Intel is offering a 4-part summer series of developer training workshops at Stanford University to introduce high performance computing tools.
The post Intel Developer Summer Workshops Coming to Stanford appeared first on insideHPC…From insideHPC
ACM Elects First All-Female Leadership Team
Today the ACM Association for Computing Machinery announced the election of new officers who will lead the organization for a two-year term beginning July 1. Heading the new team will be incoming President Vicki L. Hanson. Hanson…
From insideHPC
Video: Extreme-Scale Multigrid Components within PETSc
In this video from the PASC16 conference, Patrick Sanan from USi Lugano & ETC Zurich presents: Extreme-Scale Multigrid Components within PETSc. "Elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) frequently arise in continuum descriptions…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Laconia Supercomputer Coming to MSU
In this WKAR podcast, Andy Keen from MSU describes the University’s new Laconia supercomputer. The $3-million system is part of a cluster that’s run by MSU’s High Performance Computing Center. "It’s an exciting time for the computational…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lecture on Decision Trees
Video " ... Random forests, aka decision forests, and ensemble methods. Slides available at: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~nando/540-2013/... Course taught in 2013 at UBC by Nando de Freitas ... "
From insideHPC
insideHPC Guide to Production Supercomputing
While HPC has its roots in academia and government where extreme performance was the primary goal, high performance computing has evolved to serve the needs of businesses with sophisticated monitoring, pre-emptive memory error…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pushing the Interface of Voice Commands and Conversation
There is still a considerable way to go, but we have been shown that voice has real value. Most important, we need to accurately define the nature of a conversation and its expectations, when interacting with devices. ManyIn…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Shapes for Knowledge Specification
What is the shape of your data? Been involved in some related discussions. Deals ultimately with how knowledge and data is stored and utlized, an important issue for future AI. A kind of cloud of meta and contextual data…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open AI Publishes Requests for Research
Nice set of challenge examples in OpenAI, give you a good idea of the possibilities of deep learning applications. Will continue to follow this as it overlaps with my areas of interest. Thoughts?" .. It's easy to get started…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning for Simplifying Migration
A use case for Machine Learning – migration simplification. By its nature machine learning does promote opportunities for simplification. Can think of several not related to this. In Techrepublic " SAP invests in machine…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Solving Machine Learning Problems in a Distributed Way
Today's talk of interest:“Solving Large-Scale Machine Learning Problems in a Distributed Way” by Martin Takac, Assistant Professor, Lehigh University, gave a great presentation today on “Solving Large-Scale Machine Learning Problems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality in the Real World
As Virtual Reality Grows, Augmented Reality Hits The SpotlightWith the excitement growing as Facebook's Oculus and HTC's Vive hit homes, the tech industry has begun to pay close attention to the sleeping giant of Augmented Reality…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Loyalty and Retention
Good idea, with emphasis on good experience design to make this happen.A Loyalty Program Becomes a Retention HubWritten by Alex McEachern | @alexmcea .... Today’s top ecommerce sites are using retention to battle increasing digital…
From insideHPC
Bright Computing Partners with ProfitBricks for Elastic HPC
Today Bright Computing announced a partnership with ProfitBricks, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company based in Germany. "Cloud-based solutions are increasingly appealing as they offer a cost-effective alternative to…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
The Final Review of the K-12 CS Framework Now Open
Good stuff here. We really need a good review of this framework to make sure it is as good as it can be.
The ACM, CSTA, Code.org, CIC, and NMSI, along with lead states, districts, writers, and advisors, welcome you to engage…
From insideHPC
Compiler Directives for High Performance Computing
"Directives can be used as hints to the compiler to vectorize a loop. The developer would have better knowledge of any dependencies that a compiler, which must adhere to a number of rules when deciding if a loop can be vectorized…
From insideHPC
Mellanox Rolls Out ConnectX-4 25 Gb/s Ethernet Adapters
"The performance expectations placed on data centers today are unprecedented and require organizations to make infrastructure decisions that meet today’s demands while anticipating future growth needs,” said Kevin Deierling, …
From insideHPC
Specification Released for NVM Express over Fabrics
"Storage technologies are quickly innovating to reduce latency, providing a significant performance improvement for today's cutting-edge applications. NVM Express (NVMe) is a significant step forward in high-performance, low-latency…
From Computational Complexity
Math Movies
In 1997 Good Will Hunting, a fictional movie about the hidden mathematical talents of a MIT janitor grossed $225 million and won a best screenplay Oscar for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. At the time the chair of the Chicago math…
From Schneier on Security
Wayz Data Poisoning
People who don't want Wayz routing cars through their neighborhoods are feeding it false data. It was here that Connor learned that some Waze warriors had launched concerted campaigns to fool the app. Neighbors filed false reports…