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
Measuring Omnichannel in Retail
With some good expert discussion:
Are retailers measuring omnichannel all wrong? by Nikki Baird
Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of an article from Retail Paradox, RSR Research’s weekly analysis on
There…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Pushes AI Research
Microsoft creates an AI research lab to challenge Google and DeepMind
by Darrell Etherington (@etherington)
Microsoft has created a new research lab with a focus on developing general-purpose artificial intelligence technology…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Banning Recordings
I used to work gathering data about retail practices, and it was drilled into us that we needed to get permission from a store manager to do picture or video recordings in a store. As a customer I also gathered data from
Course…
From Schneier on Security
Tomato-Plant Security
I have a soft spot for interesting biological security measures, especially by plants. I've used them as examples in several of my books. Here's a new one: when tomato plants are attacked by caterpillars, they release a chemical…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Decisions and Process
In McKinsey:
" ... Untangling your organization’s decision making
By Aaron De Smet, Gerald Lackey, and Leigh M. Weiss
Any organization can improve the speed and quality of its decisions by paying more attention to what it’s deciding…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google's MultiModel for Multiple Tasks
New to me, examining. Premise sounds very useful. Or is it carrying the neural model architecture too far? Defining a useful task as? The architecture does make you think.
Google Presents MultiModel: A Neural Network Capable…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Computer Architecture Visioning — Why Not Emulate?
The following blog was written by CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill, with contributions from Sarita Adve and Alvin Lebeck. As readers of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) blog know, CCC seeks to promote information technology…
From insideHPC
IO Management with DDN IME 1.1
In this video from the 2017 DDN User Group meeting at ISC, James Coomer from DDN presents: IME Update - I/O Profiling of applications. "DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME) is a scale-out, flash-native, software-defined, storage…
From The Eponymous Pickle
KDNuggets Observer Paper
The latest headline paper from KDNuggets, a source that has been around for a long time, and always very useful. Good place to quickly scan Analytics and Machine Learning news and resources. Worth following. I won't continue…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Optimizes Drive Writes Per Day for SSDs
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at why Drive Writes Per Day are such an important metric for acquiring the right kind of SSD for your particular workload. "Drive writes per day (DWPD) is an endurance rating that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Launches 'Echo Squad' Help for Alexa Installs and Beyond
Had only a minor problem installing Alexa, Had somewhat more trouble with Google Home, which could have stymied a non tech user. In both cases dial-in help was helpful. Though depending on the 'smarthome 'architecture', there…
From insideHPC
Silicon Mechanics steps up with Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
Today Silicon Mechanics announced immediate availability of Intel's new family of processors, the Intel Xeon Scalable platform, formerly code-named Purley. Intel's newest processing platform features a selection of Intel Xeon…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Uses of Digital Twins
Datascience Central article on Digital Twins. I was introduced to the idea at GE, and then later through interaction with their analytics methods. This example is interesting because it addresses other kinds of applications…
From insideHPC
Nvidia Volta GPUs Power HPC & AI at ISC 2017
In this video from ISC 2017, Keith Morris from NVIDIA describes how the company's next-generation Volta GPU technology will drive HPC and AI applications to new levels of performance. "GV100 not only builds upon the advances
…
From insideHPC
New Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Accelerate HPC Systems
Intel outlines the highlights and features of the company's new Intel Xeon Scalable processors designed to accelerate HPC systems. The Intel Xeon processor Scalable Family, the newest Intel Xeon processors, are optimized to address…
From The Eponymous Pickle
iPhone Security
Don't usually follow this kind of news, but this seems very serious. Apple has this reputation for good security, which this seems to erode considerably, even on current and up to date devices. Contact Apple and complain, else…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why People Can't Write
Steven Pinker writes about writing, have heard this point of his before. Good thoughts. Particularly important in technical topics. Where communications have to be made to non technical management.
The Single Reason Why People…
From Schneier on Security
More on the NSA's Use of Traffic Shaping
"Traffic shaping" -- the practice of tricking data to flow through a particular route on the Internet so it can be more easily surveiled -- is an NSA technique that has gotten much less attention than it deserves. It's a powerful…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Linkedin Mentor Matching
Been looking for how Linkedin, after acquisition, will be planning to innovate with its gigantic, novel and ubiquitous database. Can they use it to help assign mentors? By Lydia Dishman in Fast Company:
LinkedIn Is Testing
"…
From ACM on Huffington Post
Artificial Intelligence Poised to Improve Lives of People With Disabilities
By Shari Trewin, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and Chair, Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Methods in Enterprise Software
OK , but with still a narrow view of AI, by these definitions we were using analytics/AI in the enterprise in the 80s. Still some good recent examples and a good direction to make these new business process and operations oriented…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Adam Optimization for Machine Learning
Been enjoying some of the writing of Jason Brownlee, who below introduces us to Adam Optimization, new to me. He has compiled some of his other writing at the link, worth examining and buying. Have done that. As in all methods…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Intelligent Infrastructure for Smart Agriculture
Agriculture provides approximately 1 in 10 U.S. jobs and supports food and nutrition security as well as energy independence. However, U.S. global competitiveness is at risk because of accelerated investments by many other countries…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Morphological Analysis Update
Tom Ritchey sends this along, see my previous notes on this under the tag GMA. Note that Morphology means structure .... and just the structure of a problem, rather than including numerical specifications.
Dear Network,
General…
From insideHPC
New Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Boost HPC Performance
The new Intel Xeon Scalable Processors provide up to a 2x FLOPs/clock improvement1 with Intel AVX-512 as well as integrated Intel Omni-Path Architecture ports, delivering improved compute capability, I/O flexibility and memory…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Algorithms Playing the Marketing Game
Gartner on Algorithms and games in Marketing.
So its an AI, but ultimately it is playing against and with a context of customers and clients and competitors. An AI implies you can find a best solution in a given context.
…
From insideHPC
DDN: Enabling Scientific Discovery and Exascale Initiatives
Alex Bouzari gave this talk at the DDN User Group. "The goal of the event is to gather the community during ISC to discover how HPC organizations are assessing and leveraging technology to raise the bar on HPC innovations and…
From insideHPC
Developing a Software Stack for Exascale
In this special guest feature, Rajeev Thakur from Argonne describes why Exascale would be a daunting software challenge even if we had the hardware today. “The scale makes it complicated. And we don’t have a system that large…
From insideHPC
Penguin Computing Announces Transition to Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
Today Penguin Computing announced completion of the company’s major technology transition to the Intel Xeon Scalable platform for all Penguin Computing product lines. "Penguin Computing’s server solution offers an unrivaled array…
From insideHPC
Video: Computational Discovery in the 21st Century
Nicola Marzari from EPFL gave this public lecture at PASC17. "The talk offers a perspective on the current state-of-the-art in the field, its power and limitations, and on the role and opportunities for novel models of doing
…