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 insideHPC
Seagate ClusterStor Employees Move to Cray in Strategic Transaction
Is Seagate getting out of the HPC business? That would appear to be the case with news that Cray has signed a definitive agreement with Seagate to complete a strategic transaction and enter into a partnership centered around
…
From insideHPC
Speeding Up Big Data Analysis With Intel MKL and Intel DAAL
"New algorithms that can query massive amounts of data an draw conclusions have been developed, but these algorithms need to be optimized on the underlying hardware. This is where the expertise of vendors who develop the hardware…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wayfind Research on Amazon and History
Research pieces in Wayfind regarding Amazon and Customer Experience
Current Issue
- Alexa is Brand Agnostic
- If it’s the Amazon Century, how did we get here?
- Amazon’s Place in History
- The Customer You’ve Never Met
- Will the Amazon…
From Computational Complexity
Lessons from Norway
For the last two weeks, the wife and I took a vacation to beautiful Norway to see the fjords and the North Cape, effectively the northernmost point in Europe. It was a visit though to the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Stavanger…
From Schneier on Security
Firing a Locked Smart Gun
The Armatix IP1 "smart gun" can only be fired by someone who is wearing a special watch. Unfortunately, this security measure is easily hackable....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Completion Obsession
Recall making some very informal observations in this space. It also appears to be a particular obsession with some people. A completion obsession? Application for work, for retail, advertising? Irrational, or some comfort…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Model Ensembling to Reduce Error
Technical but nicely done piece, with code and intuitive arguments as to value.
Via O'Reilly:
An introduction to model ensembling by Jovan Sardinha
Model ensembling represents a family of techniques that help reduce generalization…
From BLOG@CACM
On the Ethics of Cyberwar
Keith Abney of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences group of California Polytechnic State University surveys the moral landscape of cyberwar.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Innovation at Fujitsu
Via Ideaconnection.com
Open Innovation Gateway
is dedicated to activating innovative practices — faster
Open Innovation Gateway uses a collaborative approach to innovation that mirrors Fujitsu’s brand promise of “shaping tomorrow…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Great Innovative Idea- Modeling of Robotic Artificial Muscles
The following Great Innovative Idea is from Jun Zhang and Michael Yip. Their paper called Three-Dimensional Hysteresis Modeling of Robotic Artificial Muscles with Application to Shape Memory Alloy Actuators was one of the featured…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Science of Brute Force
A technical point, but with important implications. Analysts look for Algorithms, or simplified statements of what will be solutions in specific contexts. These predict. Algorithms can be a set of math or logical statements…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Time to Include More Hardware Devices in Teaching Computer Science?
Lately I have been thinking hard about including small programmable devices in my programming courses. Talking about his on Twitter brought me both encouragement and some discouragement. The discouragement challenged me to think…
From insideHPC
CERN openlab Joins Intel Modern Code Developer Challenge
James Reinders writes that a new Intel Modern Code Developer Challenge has teamed up with CERN openlab. "It is always an exciting time when I get to announce a Modern Code Developer Challenge from my friends at Intel, but it
…
From insideHPC
LANL’s Herbert Van de Sompel to Receive Paul Evan Peters Award
"For the last two decades Herbert, working with a range of collaborators, has made a sustained series of key contributions that have helped shape the current networked infrastructure to support scholarship,” noted CNI executive…
From insideHPC
DOE Helps Tackle Biology’s Big Data
Six proposals have been selected to participate in a new partnership between two U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) user facilities through the “Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science” (FICUS) initiative. The expertise…
From insideHPC
Cryo-EM Moves Forward with $9.3M NIH Award
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $9.3 million to the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to support ongoing development of PHENIX, a software suite for solving three-dimensional…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing by API: Connecting Modern Web Apps to HPC
In this video from OpenStack Australia, David Perry from the University of Melbourne presents: Supercomputing by API - Connecting Modern Web Apps to HPC. "OpenStack is a free and open-source set of software tools for building…
From insideHPC
Using HPC to Track Massive Ice Shelves
Mellanox Technologies' Vice President of Marketing, Gilad Shainer, discusses the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Mellanox’s high performance computing work that is tracking the Earth's most massive ice shelves. Essentially…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automated Machine Learning
Excellent piece on this topic. Am in the process of preparing a talk to a Columbia University Group on exactly this topic. Useful detail at the link. I think it is inevitable we will see highly automated processes of these types…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Another China Smart Speaker
But available only in China, and in Mandarin. Still the considerable number and low costs are interesting. Following Alibaba's entry.
Xiaomi’s take on the Amazon Echo smart speaker costs less than $50 by Jon Russell in TechCrunch…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Flaw of AI Implementation
Disagree with the 'fatal' part, but it is a major problem. Been talking this since the last AI summer. Its best to model or at least sketch out the business process first, before you start, to make sure you are addressing the…
From Schneier on Security
Roombas will Spy on You
The company that sells the Roomba autonomous vacuum wants to sell the data about your home that it collects....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Myth of the Machine Learning Black Box
Was unable to get to see this, but of interest. Most all machine learning projects need to be updated, maintained and reevaluated. Maybe they are not black boxes .... but are effectively so, because the decision makers have…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why AI Can't Write this Article
We jousted with Roger Schank at the time of the first AI eruption, very well known at that time, and I continue to track his work. Recognizing and understanding stories are a key part of our intelligence. See the tag below.
Why…
From insideHPC
Gabriel Broner Joins Rescale as VP & GM of HPC
Today HPC Cloud provider Rescale announced that Gabriel Broner has joined the company as Vice President and General Manager of High Performance Computing. "Rescale offers HPC users the possibility to instantly run simulations…
From insideHPC
ORNL Taps D-Wave for Exascale Computing Project
Today Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) announced they’re bringing on D-Wave to use quantum computing as an accelerator for the Exascale Computing Project. "Advancing the problem-solving capabilities of quantum computing takes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gamifying the E-Commerce Experience
Something we explored, with only a bit of success. Not specifically endorsing this vendor, Iterable, but the report is interesting. Requires sign-in.
Game On
What E-Commerce Can Learn From the Top 100 Mobile Games
Gamification…
From insideHPC
Podcast: A Retrospective on Great Science and the Stampede Supercomputer
TACC will soon deploy Phase 2 of the Stampede II supercomputer. In this podcast, they celebrate by looking back on some of the great science computed on the original Stampede machine. "In 2017, the Stampede supercomputer, funded…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Material Robotics (MaRo) Workshop at 2017 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS)
Contributions to this post were made by Yigit Menguc from Oregon State University. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a workshop at the 2017 Robotics Science and Systems Conference called Material Robotics…
From insideHPC
Supercomputers turn the clock back on Storms with “Hindcasting”
Researchers are using supercomputers at LBNL to determine how global climate change has affected the severity of storms and resultant flooding. "The group used the publicly available model, which can be used to forecast future…