Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2020
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Way to Consider and Onboard AI
Thoughtful results from a survey from multiple countries. A look at AI in the form of Assistant, Monitor, Coach and Teammate. Reasonable ways to think of their use and implications.
A Better Way to Onboard AI by Boris Babic…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Platt Retail Institute on Robot Adoption in Retail
Some new thoughts about robotics being used a changed context.
Via Platt Retail Institute by Northwestern
There has been growing interest in robotic automation in retail and supply chain for some time. COVID-19 will accelerate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alphabet Buying North Glasses
Somewhat Unexpected perhaps, but some indication of seriousness on the ultimate wearable. Had heard from others that North Glasses were good.
Report: Alphabet looking to buy smart glasses startup North for $180M By Maria Deutscher…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
GNU GCC does not round floating-point divisions to the nearest value
I know that floating-point arithmetic is a bit crazy on modern computers. For example, floating-point numbers are not associative: 0.1+(0.2+0.3) == 0.599999999999999978 (0.1+0.2)+0.3 == 0.600000000000000089 But, at least, this…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Fishing for Jumbo Squid
Interesting article on the rise of the jumbo squid industry as a result of climate change. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Code as Evidence in Contracts, Disputes
A UK piece on the topic of computing and dispute resolutions, code as evidence, which came up with respect to smart contracts. Click through for useful and detailed links.
The role of usability, power dynamics, and incentives…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talk: Robots as a Service in a Post Pandemic World
I had mentioned this talk, here is the recording:
Correspondent Jim Spohrer talks about robot tech in our pandemic futures. ...
ISSIP Speaker Series: COVID-19 & Future of Work and Learning
Speaker: Jim Spohrer, Director, Cognitive…
From insideHPC
The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Rich Brueckner Talks with Jack Collins about the Emergence of ‘HPC Everywhere’ and Its Impact on Science
HPC industry veteran Jack Collins, long-time fixture in the scientific supercomputing community, has seen it all in HPC, from the days when his input/output device for storing integrals was nine-track tape to today’s 750-GPU
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why Your AI Project May Fail
This is true, if you don't have ready understanding/access into the local architecture, its much harder to get the data to train models in context. And certainly also very hard to implement them into any sort of an deployed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dash Shopping Wand to be Bricked
As predicted, the Dash Wand has gone away. I don't think I ever bought anything with it, just put it on a list to look at or buy later. As noted below, they will be bricked ... and I won't be able to do anything with them…
From insideHPC
Let’s Talk Exascale: Forecasting Water Resources and Severe Weather with Greater Confidence
In this episode of Let’s Talk Exascale, Mark Taylor of Sandia National Laboratories talks about using exascale supercomputers for severe weather and water resource forecasting. A sub-project within the US Department of Energy…
From Schneier on Security
The Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity
Interesting research: "Identifying Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity Countermeasures": Abstract: Well-meaning cybersecurity risk owners will deploy countermeasures (technologies or procedures) to manage risks to their services…
From insideHPC
Quantum Superiority: How Far Away?
Some technologies, it’s said, are “always 10 years away” – we hear this in reference to autonomous vehicles and quantum computing. Of course, how far away we think they are has a lot to do with how they’re defined. Semi-autonomous…
From insideHPC
Intel, NSF Name Winners of Wireless Machine Learning Research Funding
Intel and the National Science Foundation (NSF), joint funders of the Machine Learning for Wireless Networking Systems (MLWiNS) program, today announced recipients of awards for research projects into ultra-dense wireless systems…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
ACM SIGARCH BLOG: Highlights of 2020 Security Conferences for Computer Architects
While some in computing saw computing security as mostly a software issue, 2018’s Meltdown and Spectre publicized that security is a hardware issue as well. This recent post in Computer Architecture Today by Dmitry Ponomarev…
From My Biased Coin
Writing Code for a Paper : A Note to Students
This post both relates to some of the stuff I'll be presenting at Friday's STOC workshop on Algorithms with Predictions, but is also for future students in my classes, who sometimes wonder why I have them write code on theory…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtualitics June Newsletter
I see that Virtualitics has a June Newsletter out, we helped test early beta versions. I see you can now schedule a 30 day free immersive trial. See my past experiences and comments on it with the tag 'virtualitics' below.
JUNE…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon and Counterfeiting Crimes
An area we also worked in, detecting counterfeits. But then isn't this another cooperation with law enforcement?
Amazon forms Counterfeit Crimes Unit to tackle its fake goods problem
The unit will work with brands and law enforcement…
From insideHPC
Collaboration Moves to the Cloud in a Work-from-home World
In this Sponsored Post, our friends over at Altair explain how remote access and cloud collaboration tools allow companies of all sizes to discover and innovate, anywhere and anytime, and in today’s distributed world they can…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Polinating by Drone and Bubbles
Fascinating detail. As a long time part time botanist, of interest. But how well can it effectively being done? Will the use of drones interfere with natural methods? Depends on the plants involved and their current pollination…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Ways to Build Assistant Voice Apps
Look forward to the details on this, any way you can create better intelligence is good. Note changes in training methods.
Google Assistant Upgrades Action Developer Tools to Streamline Building and Running Voice Apps
By Eric…
From Schneier on Security
Analyzing IoT Security Best Practices
New research: "Best Practices for IoT Security: What Does That Even Mean?" by Christopher Bellman and Paul C. van Oorschot: Abstract: Best practices for Internet of Things (IoT) security have recently attracted considerable attention…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Getting Pay for Data
Another project with aim at paying users for their data. Links to our long term data as an asset view.
Andrew Yang Is Pushing Big Tech to Pay Users for Data
By The Verge
June 22, 2020
Andrew Yang wants people to get paid for the…
From insideHPC
Never Enough Bandwidth: Optical I/O Consortium Formed to Set Interconnect Standards
More than 20 companies have joined an industry consortium to establish specifications for multi-wavelength integrated optics – the emerging interconnect technology whose advocates say is critical to next-generation HPC and AI…
From Schneier on Security
COVID-19 Risks of Flying
I fly a lot. Over the past five years, my average speed has been 32 miles an hour. That all changed mid-March. It's been 105 days since I've been on an airplane -- longer than any other time in my adult life -- and I have no…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP and IBM Announce New Intelligence Offerings
Next steps between SAP and IBM partnership: Digital Transformation towards the intelligent enterprise.
In Cision: PRNewswire https://www.prnewswire.com/
IBM and SAP Announce New Offerings to Help Companies' Journey to the Intelligent…
From insideHPC
SeRC Turns to oneAPI Multi-Chip Programming Model for Accelerated Research
At ISC 2020 Digital, the Swedish e-Science Research Center (SeRC), Stockholm, has announced plans to use Intel’s oneAPI unified programming language by researchers conducting massive simulations powered by CPUs and GPUs. The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hitchhiking Drones
And had mentioned this novel idea as well in a recent post. Also covered in considerable detail in IEEE Spectrum. As noted will require some considerable design changes for public Transportation.
Delivery Drones Could Hitchhike…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Spot Robotic Dog Now Available
It here, good piece on the rollout in IEEE Spectrum by Evan Ackerman. Been noting some application plans here over several years. Expensive, but if it effectively replaces a person or more, not really. What then is our…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Domain-Specific Supercomputer for Training Deep Neural Networks
Good explanation of the phases of using computing power for these kinds of problems.
A Domain-Specific Supercomputer for Training Deep Neural Networks
By Norman P. Jouppi, Doe Hyun Yoon, George Kurian, Sheng Li, Nishant Patil,
Communications…