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
Whiskers as Sensors
Tactile sensors, like the idea of using new kinds of sensors. Imagine the increased number of data that could be gathered and fed to deep learning techniques. Added to visual sensory input.
Want a Robot that can really feel…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Will GE Adapt to Change?
Will be interesting to follow. They impressed me as a talented group, but also lumbering about as a big company without paying enough attention to good standards. Will their Predix system take them in the right direction? In…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Eyeball Collector Wants a Giant-Squid Eyeball
They're rare: The one Dubielzig really wants is an eye from a giant squid, which has the biggest eye of any living animal -- it's the size of a dinner plate. "But there are no intact specimens of giant squid eyes, only rotten…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Thinking Avatar Dreams
Had never specifically heard of the term avatar dream. Its not in the Wikipedia. I could imagine a definition. As we drift into AI, its like the carpenter or crafts person identifying strongly with their tools. But now
Virtual…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Explanation Leading to Trust of Computers
Learning to explain. Ultimately a very important topic. Leading to trust.
AI Research Seeks to Grow Trust between Humans and Computers By BU Today
Researchers at Boston University and the University of California, Berkeley…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Vision, Real and Virtual
There have been many years of research about how vision works, but not enough about how this effects virtual and augmented reality. Ultimately it drives perception. An extended look at the topic:
Perception is Reality --Rebecca…
From Schneier on Security
Book Review: Twitter and Tear Gas, by Zeynep Tufekci
There are two opposing models of how the Internet has changed protest movements. The first is that the Internet has made protesters mightier than ever. This comes from the successful revolutions in Tunisia (2010-11), Egypt (2011)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Sleep Technologies
This covers a number of approaches now being examined to provide 'personalized optimization' for sleep related problems. Nicely laid out. Very similar to other health related pattern recognition problems. InVenturebeat.
From insideHPC
Open Science with OpenPMD
"We present the open meta data format openPMD for data format agnostic markup of particle-mesh data. Based on a minimal kernel of meta information and enriched with domain-specific extensions, we develop an open ecosystem of
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality Try-it-on App
So here is, at least in theory, the ideal augmented reality App. We tested a number of such related methods in the past with limited success. Except in its novelty. But will it succeed because of fewer returns? See especially…
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: HPC Systems Professionals Workshop
"The Second Annual HPC Systems Professionals Workshop will bring together systems administrators, systems architects, and systems analysts in order to share best practices, discuss cutting-edge technologies, and advance the…
From Wild WebMink
Why OSI License Approval Matters
Individual judgment about the presence of software freedom in a license is not the same as community consensus expressed through OSI approval.
Does it really matter if a copyright license is OSI Approved or not? Surely iflooks…From insideHPC
SKA and CERN Sign Big Data Agreement
Today the SKA Organization and CERN signed an agreement formalizing their growing collaboration in the area of extreme-scale computing. The agreement establishes a framework for collaborative projects that addresses joint challenges…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Microsoft Research Faculty Summit to Be Live Streamed July 17-18
The Microsoft Research Faculty Summit will be live streamed from Redmond, Washington on Monday, July 17 and Tuesday, July 18. This free online event offers keynotes and selected presentations from the Faculty Summit on artificial…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Ethics and Computer Science Education
Are ethics and the effects of computer science a reason to teach CS to everyone? Increasingly we are seeing all sort of impacts on daily life because of computing. Some are unintended but others are intended and often some of…
From insideHPC
How PBS Works Makes HPC Easy to Use
In this video from ISC 2017, Bill Nitzberg from Altair demonstrates how easy it is to launch jobs with PBS Pro. "Altair’s PBS Works workload management suite is used by thousands of organizations worldwide to simplify the administration…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 14th, 2017)
PC shipments are at the lowest level of the last 10 years, and they have been declining for the last two years. Using smartphone data, researchers are able for the first in history to measure objectively how active people are…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantum Machine Learning
If this says what I think it does, it could rapidly advance machine learning in a quantum computing world. Will this kind of thing bring true machine intelligence closer much more quickly? Technical.
Physicists uncover similarities…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mapping Critical Knowledge
Always liked the idea of using a map, especially for group interactions. Does require some paying attention to maintaining the knowledge involved. Here in Knowledge@Wharton:
Mapping Critical Knowledge for Digital Transformation…
From Schneier on Security
Forged Documents and Microsoft Fonts
A set of documents in Pakistan were detected as forgeries because their fonts were not in circulation at the time the documents were dated....
From insideHPC
Lustre 2.10.0 Released
Today OpenSFS announced that the Lustre 2.10.0 release has been declared GA and is available download. "Thanks to all those who have contributed to the creation of this release. This is the first release of the 2.10.x LTS release…
From Computational Complexity
Solutions to some Hat Problem AND some points of interest.
In my last blog here I asked three (known) hat problems since they may be new to you (one of them I just learned last week) and I had a point to make about them. I have WRITTEN UP the proofs here since html is clumsy with math…
From insideHPC
Teradata Acquires StackIQ
Today Teradata announced the acquisition of StackIQ, developers of one of the industry’s fastest bare metal software provisioning platforms which has managed the deployment of cloud and analytics software at millions of servers…
From insideHPC
Panel Looks at Improving Diversity in HPC
In this video from ISC 2017, Lara Kisielewska moderates a panel discussion on Diversity in HPC. "Through collaboration and networking, the Women in HPC community strives to bring together women in HPC and technical computing
…
From insideHPC
WekaIO Unveils Industry’s First Cloud-native Scalable File System
Today WekaIO, a venture backed high-performance cloud storage software company, today emerged from stealth to introduce the industry's first cloud-native scalable file system that delivers unprecedented performance to applications…
From insideHPC
Interview: Dr. Christoph Schär on Escaping the Data Avalanche for Climate Modeling
"There are large efforts towards refining the horizontal resolution of climate models to O(1 km) with the intent to represent convective clouds explicitly rather than using semi-empirical parameterizations. This refinement would…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
DataScience@NIH Updates
Check out the following updates from Data Science at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Data Science Opportunities: The NIH is looking for mentors for the Friday Afternoon Data Science Mentorship Program (FAM). The mentorship…
From insideHPC
Alan Turing Institute to Acquire Cray Urika-GX Graph Supercomputer
Today Cray announced the Company will provide a Cray Urika-GX system to the Alan Turing Institute. “The rise of data-intensive computing – where big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and supercomputing converge – has opened…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Science Pipelines
So rarely well thought out in the enterprise, a high level view. Well presented. Via O'Reilly and in Medium:
How to build a data science pipeline by Balázs Kégl
Start with y. Concentrate on formalizing the predictive problem…
From insideHPC
Cycles Per Instruction – Why it matters
To compare how one version of a part of the code is running to another version, since this is a ratio, it is important to keep one of the values constant in order to understand if the optimization is working. If more cpu cycles…