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 The Eponymous Pickle
Siri Opens to Third Party Developers
Saw this annoncement. A near requirement after Echo moved in this space. Depends too on precisely what 'open source' means here. How narrowly is the API defined? Will the connection include some of the later developments…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Buys Wand Labs
More movement toward conversations, bot style, AI. Read my Bots tag below for some of our experience in this space. Bots have an element of 'cognitive' in the form of human conversations. Like those that Cortana uses.Microsoft…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Growing Up Leadership
I sat in a small conference room in the summer of 2009 with several other CS teachers from around the US. CSTA brought us all there for advocacy leadership training and the beginning of what some called a grass roots … Continue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Unilever Using Instacart to Test and Learn
In Retailwire:" ... Unilever is one of dozens of CPG partners finding Instacart to be more effective in certain ways when promoting their brands than traditional shopper and in-store marketing in the brick & mortar environment…
From insideHPC
Helping the Compiler Speed Intel Xeon Phi
The vector parallel capabilities of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor are similar in many ways with vectorizing code for the main CPU. The performance improvement when coding smartly and using the tools available can be tremendous…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft and LinkedIn
Twit podcast on the motivations of Microsoft acquiring Linkedin. Useful thought piece. Mention of Office Graph. Privacy implications. Continuing to follow. Emphasis on a social channel with much less noise. Value of real…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rodney Brooks on AI
Famed robotics innovator, we linked with for home applications with IRobot, talks AI and related robotics." .... On how far along artificial intelligence actually is:"I think there's a bunch of scientists and engineers who…
From insideHPC
SC16 General Chair John West on Moving the HPC Community Forward
For SC16, we’re beginning a three-year thrust that will expand state-of-the-practice discussions with content throughout the conference tracks that emphasizes the innovation happening in operations, tools, and software through…
From insideHPC
Asetek to Showcase Liquid Cooling at ISC 2016
Asetek will highlight its liquid cooling solutions and successful installations at ISC 2016 next week in Frankfurt. For the first time, Asetek will be displaying its new InRackCDU cooling solution. InRackCDU provides the option…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Book: Algorithms to Live by
Interesting idea, not read yet, but having worked with many algorithms and I think we are a considerable way from doing this ..... But we are working with business process that can be directed and then improved by algorithm.New…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Changing Sketches to Artistic Images
I recall this being proposed for generating advertising or architecture art images from sketches. It is an example of providing artistic imagery skill to non artists. Or augmenting typical human skill. In Technology Review…
From insideHPC
NAG Optimizes C and C++ Algorithms for ARM-based Cavium ThunderX Processors
The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) has engineered NAG C Library algorithms to execute efficiently on Cavium ThunderX ARMv8-A based Workload Optimized Processors. Preliminary results, announced at ISC 2016, show excellent scaling…
From insideHPC
Simulations of Hydrogen Ingestion Flashes in Giant Stars
"My team at the University of Minnesota has been collaborating with the team of Falk Herwig at the University of Victoria to simulate brief events in the lives of stars that can greatly affect the heavy elements they synthesize…
From Computational Complexity
Karp v Wigderson 20 Years Later
The 48th ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing starts this weekend in Boston. Let's go back twenty years to the 28th STOC, part of the second Federated Computing Research Conference in Philadelphia. A year earlier in JuneTheory…
From insideHPC
OpenHPC Establishes Leadership & Releases Initial Software Stack
Today the Linux Foundation announced a set of technical, leadership and member investment milestones for OpenHPC, a Linux Foundation project to develop an open source framework for High Performance Computing environments. "The…
From insideHPC
PASC16 Wraps in Lausanne
Scientists from a wide range of disciplines gathered at the SwissTech Convention Center in Lausanne from 8 to 10 June 2016 for this year’s PASC Conference. The use of high-performance computing in their research was the common…
From insideHPC
Cavium to Acquire QLogic
"Today’s acquisition of QLogic is highly complementary and strategic to Cavium and it creates a diversified pure-play infrastructure semiconductor leader,” stated Syed Ali, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cavium. “QLogic…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Artificial Intelligence for Social Good
Imagine diagnosing a hospital patient with septicemia 25 hours before the onset of sepsis shock, dispatching the right police officer to de-escalate a situation, or increasing agricultural productivity based on weather knowledge…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast is tabulation-based hashing? The downsides of Zobrist…
In practice, hashing is the process of taking an input, such as a string, and turning it into an integer value. It is a fundamental tool in programming, as most software relies on hashing in one way or another. We often expect…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Tests Robotic Shopping Carts
In Bloomberg. This is different from the 'smart cart' idea heavily prototyped previously. Now including self powering and navigating features. Previously self-driving shopping carts were not mentioned" ... Wal-Mart Stores…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Making Computer Chips
Early on had an introduction to the optimization of computer chip making. Fascnating piece here on the state of the art of chip making today. In Bloomberg.
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
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From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
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From insideHPC
IBM POWER8 System to Advance Genomic Health Research at University of Calgary
Today IBM and the University of Calgary announced a five-year collaboration to accelerate and expand genomic research into common childhood conditions such as autism, congenital diseases and the many unknown causes of illness…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Watson Analytics Experience
New piece on how to get started with Watson Analytics, worth a closer look. Good user experience in place. Question remains how autonomous such systems can be, and who their users will be.
From Putting People First
Six recent articles from UXMatters
UXMatters has a new design and this seems to have benefited the quality as well, as there are more inspiring articles than ever. Here my pick: June 14 edition Algorithms as the New Material of Design A column by Pamela Pavliscak…
From insideHPC
How to Control Your Supercomputing Programs
Pressures by management for cost containment are answered by improving software maintenance procedures and automating many of the repetitive activities that have been handled manually. This lowers Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)…
From insideHPC
Slidecast: Announcing Mellanox ConnnextX-5 100G InfiniBand Adapter
“Today, scalable compute and storage systems suffer from data bottlenecks that limit research, product development, and constrain application services. ConnectX-5 will help unleash business potential with faster, more effective…
From ACM on Huffington Post
Rediscovering Virtual Reality
From Schneier on Security
Infecting Systems by Typosquatting Programming Language Libraries
Typosquatting is an old trick of registering a domain name a typo away from a popular domain name and using it for various nefarious purposes. Nikolai Philipp Tschacher just published a bachelor's thesis where he does the same…