Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2017
From insideHPC
NASA’s Develops SAFEGUARD Safety Net Technology for Drones
Flying drone aircraft are no longer rare sightings these day. In fact, their may be one above you somewhere taking pictures at this very moment. This begs the question: how do we keep our skies safe? "Scientists at NASA Langley…
From insideHPC
Simply Beautiful: MareNorstum4 Supercomputer Sports 13.7 Petaflops
Over at Lenovo, Gavin O'Hara writes that the world's most beautiful supercomputer center now sports a 13.7 Petaflop system so novel in design that it has captured the attention of the global HPC community. It landed at #13 on…
From insideHPC
Deep Learning Frameworks Get a Performance Benefit from Intel MKL Matrix-Matrix Multiplication
Intel® Math Kernel Library 2017 (Intel® MKL 2017) includes new GEMM kernels that are optimized for various skewed matrix sizes. The new kernels take advantage of Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512) and achieves…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Update on Kuri Robot
An update on the Kuri in home traveling 'friendly' robot by Mayfield, and camera. Says it can learn a space. Now at 1080p. Now can distinguish between dogs and people. Still, I think overpriced at $699 for the average home…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Teaching Cognitive Computing
" .... This a reminder about our Cognitive Systems Institute Speaker Series, on Thursday, June 22, 2016 at 10:30 am ET US (7:30 am PT). Our speaker is Ralph Badinelli from Virginia Tech, who will be presenting "Teaching Cognitive…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Become A Computer Science Teacher in Five Days
Garth Flint is a computer science teacher in Montana. While most computer science teachers are a bit isolated, most are the only CS teacher in their school. Garth is more so because Montana is a big state with a small population…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Top speed for top-k queries
Suppose that I give you a stream of values and you want to maintain the top-k smallest or largest values. You could accumulate all these values, sort them all and keep the smallest k values. You can do somewhat better by using…
From Schneier on Security
Is Continuing to Patch Windows XP a Mistake?
Last week, Microsoft issued a security patch for Windows XP, a 16-year-old operating system that Microsoft officially no longer supports. Last month, Microsoft issued a Windows XP patch for the vulnerability used in WannaCry.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
KD Nuggets Observer
Newly brought to my attention. Easy to scan. News and updates.
The KDnuggets Observer
What's Interesting in Data Science and Machine Learning ...
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIH Data Commons Webinar: Friday 6/23 12-2PM ET
Intrigued by our post a few days ago about the National Institute of Health‘s new Data Commons Pilot Phase and wanted to learn more? Then you are in luck! The NIH Common Fund and the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) program cordially…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Dash Wand with Alexa
Another way to scan, talk, ask, buy as part of a commercial process in your own home. Link to extensive recipe system. Includes the Alexa engine. The Amazon Dash Wand. Yet another commercial and semi-ambient idea offered…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft and AI
During the last AI go around, we worked with Microsoft. They were a natural partner, because they were also providing all the fundamental things to get work done. And get it done more intelligently. Then they did seem to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
2D Materials
The super materials that could trump graphene
A wave of innovative flat materials is following in the wake of graphene — but the most exciting applications could come from stacking them into 3D devices. ... by Elizabeth Gibney…
From insideHPC
Inspurs Unveils GX4 Ai Accelerator
Today Inspur unveiled GX4, a new flexible and high scalability AI accelerating box at ISC 2017. The GX4 is able to achieve the decoupling coprocessor resources including CPU and GPU, Xeon Phi and FPGA, expand the computing power…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Decision Makers or Data Clerks?
Having had more interactions with physicians in later life, I see this all the time. Seems they spend half their time looking for data and refilling the printer paper.
Culture and Technology
By Ajai Kapoor Partner at Goldratt…
From Schneier on Security
The Dangers of Secret Law
Last week, the Department of Justice released 18 new FISC opinions related to Section 702 as part of an EFF FOIA lawsuit. (Of course, they don't mention EFF or the lawsuit. They make it sound as if it was their idea.) There's…
From insideHPC
Intel’s Trish Damkroeger on why HPC Matters at ISC 2017
In this video from ISC 2017, Trish Damkroeger from Intel describes the company’s vision for HPC as more and more workloads move to the Cloud. She then goes on to preview the full week of Intel’s ISC activities. "Intel is transforming…
From insideHPC
How Intel is bringing AI & Machine Learning to the People
In this video from ISC 2017, Pradeep Dubey, Intel Fellow and Director of the Parallel Computing Lab at Intel, discusses how artificial intelligence impacts a wide range of industries and is driving the need for massive amounts…
From Wild WebMink
Growing The Community
How can you grow an open source community? Two blog posts from The Document Foundation (TDF) illustrate a proven double-ended strategy to sustain an existing community.
Since it was established in 2010, the LibreOffice project…From BLOG@CACM
Deep Dictionary
The abstraction from big data on English words of distributed vector representations computing simple semantic aspects has drawn interest from the computing community.
From The Eponymous Pickle
PC as a Deep Learning Machine
Interesting direction. Applicability to real world problem?
Google can turn an ordinary PC into a deep learning machine
You can speed up AI training without having to use a supercomputer.
Jon Fingas, @jonfingas .... "
From The Eponymous Pickle
Embedding AI in the Enterprise
Steps in getting AI in the enterprise. In Forbes. " ... In the context of contemporary applications, it's hard to think of an application that doesn't use a database. From mobile to web to the desktop, every modern application…
From Computational Complexity
Harvard revokes admission of students based on what was said in a private(?) chat room
Harvard revoked the admission of 10 students (see here) based on what the students said in a private (can't have been too private) chat room.
Normally I would be aghast (and I may still be aghast) because of the slippery slope…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIST Awards $38.5 Million to Accelerate Public Safety Communications Technologies
The U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has awarded $38.5 million to 33 research and development (R&D) projects aimed at advancing broadband communications technologies for first responders…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Movies for Computer Science Students
Today was watch movie day. I watched two movies that I have been thinking about showing to my computer science students.
The first one I watched was "The Imitation Game" about Alan Turing. Frankly I didn't like it. I like it even…From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Can Take Your Job
'All' is a very inclusive word.
AI may take your job - in 120 years
A global survey of experts in machine learning suggests it will be 120 years before all human jobs are automated.
In 45 years' time, though, half of jobs currently…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft and Accenture Build Blockchain Platform
Microsoft and Accenture team up to build a blockchain-based global ID platform By Duncan Riley
Microsoft Corp. has teamed up with management consulting firm Accenture PLC to design a blockchain-based platform that provides identification…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robotics Acquisitions
In IEEE Spectrum. Robotics continue to advance.
SoftBank Acquires Boston Dynamics and Schaft
By Erico Guizzo and Evan Ackerman
SoftBank's massive robot collection now includes Pepper, Boston Dynamics' BigDog and Handle, Schaft's…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Crowdflower with AI Augmentation
We spent considerable time using crowd sourcing techniques, and now follow some of the methods of Crowdflower. Could have used the methods in the enterprise. In SiliconAngle:
AI-augmented crowdsourcing company CrowdFlower raises…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Indoor Smart Garden
I am a long time gardener, nursery planner and amateur botanist, and a practitioner of 'smart', so this was intriguing. Seems impractical for any reasonable and useful volume of results. Still, makes me think about what…