Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2017
From Schneier on Security
Hacking Spotify
Some of the ways artists are hacking the music-streaming service Spotify....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Work Flow for AI
In O'Reilly:
Artificial intelligence in the software engineering workflow
The workflow of the AI researcher has been quite different from the workflow of the software developer. Peter Norvig explores how the two can come together…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How do People and AI Interact?
Addressing one of the most fundamental questions: How do people and AI work together? There are so many components, and they are likely to be continually changing as we progress. We examined, and continue to examine modes…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Science Article- ‘AI, people, and society’
The following is a Science Editorial from former CCC Council member and AI and Robotics Task Force Co-Chair Eric Horvitz, Head of Microsoft Research Labs. He is also a past president of the Association for the Advancement of…
From insideHPC
Video: Flash Poster Session at PASC17
In this video from PASC17, Maria Grazia Giuffreda (ETH Zurich / CSCS, Switzerland) moderates a Flash Poster Session. "The aim of this session is to allow poster presenters to introduce the topic of their poster and motivate the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Releases Massive Visual Databases
To train and use machine learning methods, you need lots of data to start with. Very significant amounts. Here Google releases much training data. In the work I have done in this space, you almost never have enough. And in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Booz Allen Makes Sailfish Free for Government and Academia
Worth a look, impressed by their online presence. Giving this a try.
Booz Allen Makes its Analytics Platform Free for Government (and Academia)
by: Morgan Lynch
Booz Allen Hamilton made its analytics platform free June 29 for the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brands According to Byron Sharp
World According to Byron Sharp. Former correspondent. Read by many in the CPG space. In Adage: " ... In the years since Byron Sharp published 'How Brands Grow,' his unorthodox theories have taken root with major marketers…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Pruning spaces faster on ARM processors with Vector Table Lookups
Last week, I asked how fast one could remove spaces from a string using ARM processors. On a particular benchmark, I got 2.4 cycles per byte using regular (scalar) code and as little as 1.8 cycles per byte using ARM NEON instructions…
From insideHPC
RCE Podcast Looks at Shifter Containers for HPC
In this RCE Podcast, Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Shane Canon and Doug Jacobsen from NERSC, the authors of Shifter. "Shifter is a prototype implementation that NERSC is developing and experimenting with as a scalable…
From insideHPC
Univa Powers Formula One and More at ISC 2017
In this video from ISC 2017, Gaétan Didier Head of CFD, Sahara Force India Formula One Racing Team describes how he uses Univa software to manage CFD workloads that simply cannot be done in a wind tunnel. After that, Bill Bryce…
From insideHPC
Testing Brain-Inspired Chips for Big Data Problems at Berkeley Lab
"The von Neumann design has also led computing to its current limits in efficiency and cooling. As engineers built increasingly complex chips to carry out sequential operations faster and faster, the speedier chips have also
…
From insideHPC
Video: OpenACC Update from ISC 2017
In this video from ISC 2017, Sunita and Michael Wolfe present an overview of OpenACC and a preview of upcoming GPU Hackathon events. "OpenACC is a user-driven directive-based performance-portable parallel programming model designed…
From XRDS
Natural Language Understanding : Let’s Play Dumb
What is the meaning of the word understanding? This was a question posed during a particularly enlightening lecture given by Dr. Anupam Basu, a professor with the Department of Computer Science Engineering at IIT Kharagpur,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Strategies for Digital Groceries
Some thoughtful views on the topic.
A Strategist’s Guide to the Digital Grocery
As Amazon and Walmart disrupt the grocery industry, smart retailers can compete by plying their wares in a technologically enabled way.
by Tim Laseter…
From Schneier on Security
The Future of Forgeries
This article argues that AI technologies will make image, audio, and video forgeries much easier in the future. Combined, the trajectory of cheap, high-quality media forgeries is worrying. At the current pace of progress, it…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tracking Humans in 3D with Off-the-shelf Webcams
Tracking Humans in 3D With Off-the-Shelf Webcams
Saarland University
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany have developed VNect, a system for capturing human movements digitally in three dimensions…
From Computational Complexity
Two hat problems you may or may not have seen but I have a point to make about one of them
Hat problems are fun and often require clever solutions. I have posted about one type of hat problem here.
In this post I ask three. For two of them I have a point to make which I will make when I post the answer later in the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Exploration of Business Apps for VR
Virtual Reality: Exploring The Business Applications
Charles Deering in VRFocus gives an overview on the story of VR so far - and the story yet to come. ...
Interesting, but the focus is still narrow.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Polinode and NodeXL
Via Andrew Pitts and Marc Smith (SMRF, NodeXL) Podcast:
Polinode and the Social Media Research Foundation recently announced an integration between NodeXL Pro and Polinode’s Networks product. Polinode Networks is a tool for…
From insideHPC
Deep Learning in the Spotlight at ISC
This year the ISC conference dedicated an entire day to deep learning, Wednesday, June 21, to discuss the recent advances in artificial intelligence based on deep learning technology. However it, not just the conference where…
From insideHPC
Video: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe with Supercomputers
Katrin Heitmann from the University of Chicago presented this talk at PASC17. "In this talk I will introduce HACC, the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code, which is being developed to combat the tremendous computational…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sideways Elevators
Recall this being discussed for use in the design of large hotels and in aggregated cityscapes. More than a quantum escalator. Does it have a real future? At the link, fascinating pictures of how it works. See also my posts…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Lens as Augmented Reality
We are soon to see a number of applications that will use our advanced smartphones as a form of 'augmented reality'. I saw the 'Google Lens' demonstrated this year which allows you point your phone at a flower, and the system…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Randomizing Routine
I can imagine a number of managers I have known who would have reacted to this as a person admitting they did not enough to do. But OK, might be worth a try, if you can obey an odd process ....
This Google Engineer Built an…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC System Administrator at Stanford
This position will specifically focus on management and support of an HPC cluster and multipetabyte storage platform that provides essential infrastructure for Stanford’s growing bioinformatics and genomics communities.
TheJob…
From insideHPC
Deep Learning Comes to the Student Cluster Competition
"We decided to use a slightly more interesting use case of solving for Captcha because it not only highlights the power of deep learning to be a useful tool create models to recognize and classify unwieldy data, such as distorted…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Can In-Store Experiences Save Retail?
I notice this article mentions my favorite experience store, Jungle Jims. Have covered from time to time here. Even they have been doing less of that, it seems, in recent years. More live action is needed. Is it enough…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Adobe Voice Analytics
Intriguing play, not where I would expect Adobe. We do need better understanding of voice interaction, especially in noisy environments. And understanding who the actual audience and context of these systems are, especially…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Discusses Their Mixed Reality Focus
Interesting to watch, because Microsoft crafts or influences much of the worlds personal computer user experience. So will user experience become VR or mixed reality? These technologies give great demonstrations, but how
Microsoft…