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
Intel’s Xeon Scalable Processors Provide Cooling Challenges for HPC
Unless you reduce node and rack density, the wattages of today's high-poweredCPUs and GPUs are simply no longer addressable with air cooling alone. Asetek explores how new processors, such as Intel's Xeon Scalable processors,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
HoloLens 2 Adding AI Processor
Augmented realities will need better edge intelligence to provide value. By John Brandon, Computerworld. Some interesting applications are described.
Why Microsoft is adding an AI co-processor to HoloLens 2
With more processing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Voicelabs Ads
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retail Analytics and Store Viz
We also worked on this kind of analytics. ... Good points made, its all about context.
Retail Analytics and Store Visualization by Gary Angel In CustomerThink:
Making sense of behavioral data is always a challenge. Suppose…
From Schneier on Security
Alternatives to Government-Mandated Encryption Backdoors
Policy essay: "Encryption Substitutes," by Andrew Keane Woods: In this short essay, I make a few simple assumptions that bear mentioning at the outset. First, I assume that governments have good and legitimate reasons for getting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Introduction to Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Shades of expert systems, but with the ability to learn. The integration of rule-based application of logic and analytic and deep learning methodologies. Explicit and transparent expression of rules in play. Including the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Roomba Maps for Smart Homes
This reminds me of work we did with test Roombas. We were interested in how they compared with human cleaning process and also usage of possible cleansing liquids, in lab settings. But I can see how the resulting maps might…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Swarms in Control
A favorite topic. All systems are controlled by multiple entities. Call that a swarm. Stanford and their Platfom Lab developing infrastructure for such systems. Call it 'Big Control'.
Who Will Control the Swarm?
Stanford…
From insideHPC
Surprising Stories from 17 National Labs in 17 Minutes
In this video, the U.S. Department of Energy gives a quick tour of all 17 National Labs. Each one comes with a surprising story on what these labs do for us as a Nation. "And they all do really different stuff. Think of a big…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at AI Ethics and a Tale of Henry’s Super Heroism
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team learns about Henry's first exploit as an Ethical Superhero. "After witnessing a hit-and-run fender bender, Henry confronted the culprit and ensured that the miscreant left a note on the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ignoring the Robots
Fascinating piece on the history of 'robots'. Back to the 15th century. Meant to do real jobs or just impress? Far too expensive to just impress, but I will accept that is part of the reason. ...... And we have long known…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Christopher Ahlberg Talks AI
Christopher Ahlberg, CEO at Recorded Future, and Staffan Truvé, Recorded Future’s chief technology officer, talks about AI in a Recorded Future podcast.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Acquiring Digital Companies
Via Bain:
3 Ways M&A Is Different When You’re Acquiring a Digital Company by Arnaud Leroi
Even for experienced deal makers, a first digital acquisition is bound to be an education. Companies acquire to accelerate their overall…
From insideHPC
LANL Adds Capacity to Trinity Supercomputer for Stockpile Stewardship
Los Alamos National Laboratory has boosted the computational capacity of their Trinity supercomputer with a merger of two system partitions. “With this merge completed, we have now successfully released one of the most capable…
From insideHPC
A Scalable Object Store for Meteorological and Climate Data
Simon D. Smart gave this talk at the PASC17 conference. "Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) and Climate simulations sit in the intersection between classically understood HPC and the Big Data communities. Driven by ever more
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Autonomous Cargo Ships Coming
Electrically Powered. But how they will address dangers like still common piracy is unclear.
The world’s first autonomous cargo ship will launch next year By Duncan Riley in SiliconAngle.
The world’s first autonomous cargo ship…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Amazon Research Awards Call For Proposals
The Amazon Research Awards (ARA) program has opened a call for proposals for the 2017 round of Amazon Research Awards in a number of areas, including computer vision, general AI, knowledge management and data quality, machine…
From Schneier on Security
US Army Researching Bot Swarms
The US Army Research Agency is funding research into autonomous bot swarms. From the announcement: The objective of this CRA is to perform enabling basic and applied research to extend the reach, situational awareness, and operational…
From Computational Complexity
What are the top Computer science programs for women?
What are the top Computer Science Programs for Women?
How would one even answer the question?
Some people did a study based on National Center for Education Statistics and Payscale. The results are here.
1) While I believe…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Is Computer Science Education Facing a Bursting Bubble?
The other day Audrey Watters, one of my favorite contrarians, posted Why Are Coding Bootcamps Going Out of Business? which focused on the failure of some coding bootcamps and the consolidation of others. Today I read A TechBoth…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning and Big Data
I was recently asked, whats the difference? .... Just Architecture vs Math?
Machine learning with Big Data is, in many ways, different than "regular" machine learning. This informative image is helpful in identifying the steps…
From insideHPC
Survey: Training and Support #1 Concern for the HPC Community
Initial results of the Scientific Computing World (SCW) HPC readership survey have shown training and support for HPC resources are the number one concern for both those that operate and manage HPC facilities and researchers
…
From insideHPC
Video: ddR – Distributed Data Structures in R
"A few weeks ago, we revealed ddR (Distributed Data-structures in R), an exciting new project started by R-Core, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and others that provides a fresh new set of computational primitives for distributed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Game of Checkers
Back on our early AI days, we looked closely at problem solving for games. Notably the work of Arthur Samuel in machine learning. This piece below on the seemingly simple game of checkers. Good about the people involved, but…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Chats
Anytime by Amazon
Will customers use an Amazon app to chat? by Matthew Stern in Retailwire. With discussion.
Smartphone messaging is perhaps one of the only areas of technology where we haven’t seen Amazon.com’s name show up…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning and Hidden Decision Trees
Had posted about this once before. We used decision trees effectively in the enterprise, and they can be useful due to their transparency. In particular because it has a built in relationship to process. Use it to work…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Design for the Users, not a Mythical Generation
The other day the question came up about how we should carefully design our user interface to match the generation of the current predicted user base. Were they Gen X or Gen Y? But have always felt this was a lame way to design…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Using Social Media to Find Top Customers
In Knowedge@Wharton.
Influencing the Influencers: Using Social Media to Find Top Customers
Wharton's Gad Allon discusses his research on using social media data to identify a company's top customers.
Podcast/Text
Social mediaDennis…
From My Biased Coin
Current Harvard Oddness
It's summer. And I'm now on sabbatical. So perhaps I shouldn't care about strange Harvard politics goings-on, but I can't help it.
Here's the tl;dr version, which is already too long. (What's the recursive form of tl;dr?)
Several…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Disney Tests Facial Expression Analysis for Movies
Back to using facial expression detection and coding. Not new, Something we also experimented with, in lab settings, but here with new data science doing the analysis. Some details in Phys.org.
Disney Uses Neural Net Technology…