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 The Eponymous Pickle
Origami Robots Moving Without Battery Power
Following uses of origami folding methods for simplifying robotics. See much written before on this space regarding practical Origami, at the tag below.
Harvard's Folding Origami Robot can move without Requiring Battery Power…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Aspen Ideas on Future of Intelligence
The Future of Intelligence Aspen Ideas Festival
Bill Gates portends doomsday is coming. Stephen Hawking says we should prepare for our robot overlords to take their thrones. But is the future as glaring as Hal’s red eye? Or
Speakers…
From insideHPC
Altair Showcases PBScloud.IO at ISC 2017
In this video, Jérémie Bourdoncle from Altair describes the company's new PBScloud.IO offering for private clouds. "Altair is excited to announce the availability of PBScloud.io, its latest appliance solution to enable and expand…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Software Engineer at NCAR
NCAR in Boulder is seeking a Software Engineer in our Job of the Week. "This position focuses primarily on the development of tools to meet the needs for the NCAR/IT community, and the design, writing, implementation, and support…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Squid Caught Off the Coast of Ireland
It's the second in two months. Video. 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 guidelines here....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robot Physical Therapy
This came to mind in a recent physical therapy session, with my PT describing how muscles could be trained back into health Why not hook up a sensory means to watch the muscles, detect changes in pattern, and adjust the
In…
From insideHPC
OpenACC Brings Directives to Accelerated Computing at ISC 2017
In this video from ISC 2017, Sunita Chandrasekaran and Michael Wolfe describe how OpenACC makes GPU-accelerated computing more accessible to scientists and engineers. "OpenACC is a user-driven directive-based performance-portable…
From insideHPC
Agenda Posted: August MVAPICH User Group Meeting in Ohio
The MVAPICH User Group Meeting (MUG) has posted its meeting agenda. The event takes place August 14-16, 2017 in Columbus, Ohio. "As the annual gathering of MVAPICH2 users, researchers, developers, and system administrators, the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Towards Lights-Out Fulfillment
'Lights-Out' used to be a favorite term when we worked in AI applications for the enterprise. Dramatically implying no humans, or lights needed to be involved. Near total automation is still not here, but is approaching. Consider…
From insideHPC
Red Hat Ceph Storage Powers Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham
Today Red Hat announced that the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is using Red Hat Ceph Storage to support the growing needs of its research community. UAB selected Red Hat Ceph Storage because it offers researchers
…
From insideHPC
Video: Towards Quantum High Performance Computing
"Following an introduction to the exceptional computational power of quantum computers using analogies with classical high performance computing systems, I will discuss real-world application problems that can be tackled on medium…
From Wild WebMink
Assume Good Faith
You feel slighted by a comment on a mailing list, or a forum post has failed to be moderated live. How should you react?
A recent exchange on a user forum caught my eye, one that’s typical of many user interactions with open…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 21st, 2017)
Want proof that you live in the future? Ok. There is this “cryptocurrency” called ethereum and it is causing a shortage of microprocessors: Demand from Ethereum miners has created temporary shortages of some of the graphics cards…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Exceeding Human Performance
Predictions are cheap, machines have been faster than humans for some time, but when inserted in a set of tasks that that need to be done can be very different. Thoughtful ideas here:
Intelligent Machines
Experts Predict When…
From Schneier on Security
Hacking a Segway
The Segway has a mobile app. It is hackable: While analyzing the communication between the app and the Segway scooter itself, Kilbride noticed that a user PIN number meant to protect the Bluetooth communication from unauthorized…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Five Must Read Blogs for Computer Science Teachers
I maintain a computer science education blog roll with as many good blogs for computer science teachers as I can find. It's a good like for the most part. Some of the blogs listed are seldom updated though. And some are really…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sears Integrates Alexa in Appliances, Sells on Amazon
Have noted earlier that GE is also integrating voice control on appliances. In Adage:
Sears to Integrate Alexa Into Appliances and Start Selling on Amazon
Shares in Sears Holdings kicked off their biggest rally in almost two
Terms…
From Computational Complexity
I would call these Galois Games but I can't
Here is a game (Darling says I only blog about non-fun games. This post will NOT prove her wrong.)
Let D be a domain, d ≥ 1 and 0 ≠ a0 ∈ D. There are two players Wanda (for Wants root) and Nora (for No root). One of the players…
From XRDS
The Power of WordNet and How to Use It in Python
In this post, I am going to talk about the relations in WordNet (https://wordnet.princeton.edu) and how you can use these in a Python project. WordNet is a database of English words with different relations between the words.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Spark Crowdsources Advertising?
Amazon takes another step forward. I would imagine this will also emerge on the new Amazon Show screen as well. A crowdsourcing of advertising to enthusiastic consumers? Note their creation of an influencer program. Seems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Analytics Magazine
The latest analytics Magazine from Informs. A practically oriented view of how analytics can be used in business today. Industry News and Articles.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Limitations of Machine Learning
Just the introductory paragraphs to post in the Keras Blog. Worth following. Useful statement of limitations, on both narrow aspects of deep learning, and more generally about AI. Technical, but readable as well. I agree…
From insideHPC
Intel Launches Movidius Neural Compute Stick
Today, Intel launched the Movidius Neural Compute Stick, the world’s first USB-based deep learning inference kit and self-contained artificial intelligence accelerator that delivers dedicated deep neural network processing capabilities…
From insideHPC
Fernanda Foertter Elected SIG HPC Education Vice Chair
Today the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) announced that Fernanda Foertter from ORNL is the new Vice Chair of the organization's Education Committee. In this…
From insideHPC
Interview: The Computational Challenges of Fusion Energy
In this video from PASC17, Idamura Yasuhiro from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and Laurent Villard from EPFL discuss the computational challenges of developing Fusion reactors. "Numerical plasma physics models are used to improve…
From insideHPC
Interview: DDN’s Jessica Popp on the Importance of Diversity in HPC
In this video, ISC Diversity Chair Kim McMahon interviews Jessica Popp from DDN about the importance of fostering diversity in High Performance Computing. “Through collaboration and networking, the Women in HPC community strives…
From Schneier on Security
Ethereum Hacks
The press is reporting a $32M theft of the cryptocurrency Ethereum. Like all such thefts, they're not a result of a cryptographic failure in the currencies, but instead a software vulnerability in the software surrounding the…
From insideHPC
Go with Intel® Data Analytics Acceleration Library and Go*
Use of the Go* programming language and it’s developer community has grown significantly since it’s official launch by Google in 2009. Like many popular programming languages (C and Java come to mind), Go started as an experiment…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Game Theory for Competitive Strategy
A favorite topic for corporate strategy considerations, but as we discovered, somewhat hard to apply in realistic circumstances. Especially for competitive interactions. Fairly non-technical view.
In Game Theory, No Clear Path…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Algorithms, Bias, and Beautiful Women
I've been keeping my eyes open for things to discuss with students this fall, especially in Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles. This week bias in algorithms kept crossing my path. It was even a topic for the #EthicalCS…