Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2018
From insideHPC
How to Become a Dynamic Technology Leader
The difference between a digitally dynamic business, and one who can’t keep up, is the inclusion of a capable technology leader. As the role has evolved, so too have the demands on Chief Information Officers. "Awareness of digital…
From insideHPC
HPE Data Management Framework – Tiering, Organizing and Protecting your Data
In this video from ISC 2018, Mark Seamans from HPC describes how the HPE Data Management Framework optimizes data accessibility and storage resource utilization by enabling a hierarchical, tiered storage management architecture…
From insideHPC
Where Ready Nodes are the Optimal Choice
The perennial question for IT asset acquisition is whether to build or consume, and there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer to the question. Individual components provide the maximum flexibility, but also require the maximum
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Interpretability Testing Examined
Testing machine learning interpretability techniques In O'Reilly
By Patrick Hall,Navdeep Gill,Lingyao Meng
The importance of testing your tools, using multiple tools, and seeking consistency across various interpretability techniques…
From Schneier on Security
WPA3
Everyone is writing about the new WPA3 Wi-Fi security standard, and how it improves security over the current WPA2 standard. This summary is as good as any other: The first big new feature in WPA3 is protection against offline…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Microsoft Makes Large Commitment to CSTA
One of the big announcements at the recent Computer Science Teachers Association conference was that Microsoft is donating two million dollars to CSTA over the next three years.
This is obviously a big deal. This money is first…
From Computational Complexity
The Six Degrees of VDW
A long long time ago a HS student, Justin Kruskal (Clyde's son) was working with me on upper bounds on some Poly VDW numbers (see here for a statement of PVDW). His school required that he have an application. Here is what…
From Mostafa Dehghani
Universal Transformers
This work is the outcome of my internship at Google Brain with Jakob Uszkoreit, Lukasz Kaiser, and Stephan Gouws from Brain team and Oriol Vinyals from DeepMind. Fully-attentional feed-forward and Convolutional and architectures…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
You Cannot Do That
How hard is it to prove certain theorems? Maruti Ram Murty is a famous number theorist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. He is a prolific author of books. His webpage has thumbnails of over a dozen. He has an Erdős number…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Taking the Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) Exam
Contrary to popular opinion I did not do it for the free t-shirt. Certaport was offering teachers at the CSTA Conference the opportunity to take a MTA exam (or exams) for free. If you passed you also got a t-shirt with your certificate…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are fungi making us sick?
Fungi are everywhere. Yeasts, molds, mushrooms. We eat them. They live on our skin. But are they making us sick? That’s a theory strongly held by Martin Laurence. Martin created his own lab (Shipshaw labs) and even wrote a book…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Source, Code, Tech and Decentralized Control
Interesting and considerable piece. What is ultimately the meaning of open source? Also the architecture of data and code and how it is controlled by just a small number of big players.
Open source hasn’t made tech more open…
From insideHPC
CSCS Takes on Big Data from the Paul Scherrer Institute
Today CSCS in Lugano announced plans to archive research data collected by the large-scale research facilities at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen. The collaboration between PSI and CSCS enabled major improvements…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI, Automation and the Future of Work
Succinctly put: what and why should we address these problems with new tech? We struggled with the same thing when we started with this in the 90s. We were already using analytical and statistical methods, but if we had to
AI…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality in e-Commerce
Its here, useful, especially in smart phone delivered Apps, but I still don't see it as ubiquitous except in some specific contexts. A survey of examples:
How augmented reality is transforming e-commerce
ugmented and mixed reality…
From insideHPC
Preliminary Agenda Posted for October HPC User Forum in Stuttgart
The October HPC User Forum at HLRS Will Showcase HPC Europe. The event takes place Oct. 1-2, 2018 in Stuttgart, Germany. "Key topics will be HPC in Germany, HPC in Europe, automated driving systems and urban AI uses, plus an
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Walmart Testing Cashierless
Our future, an expectation?
Inside Walmart’s journey to cashierless retail
by Suman Bhattacharyya in DigiDay
Walmart is testing the waters of cashier automation, first by letting customers scan and pay for items within an app,
It…
From insideHPC
PASC18 Conference Grows in Attendance and Scope
Over at CSCS, Valentina Tamburello writes that more than 400 scientists from all over the world met in Basel in early July for PASC18. With more than 200 talks centered around the conference theme of “Fast and Big Data, Fast
…
From insideHPC
HPE Teams with WekaIO for HPC and Machine Learning
In this video from the HPE booth at ISC 2018, Barbara Murphy from WekaIO describes how the company's fast parallel file system for NVMe devices speeds HPC and Machine Learning workloads. "You invested in the best infrastructure…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Logic Of Logistics
I was reminded of this book through a recent modeling effort. A very complete look at classic supply chain problems. Not a how to, or pointer to codes to use, and technical, but very complete survey of useful supply chain optimization…
From The Eponymous Pickle
End to End Supply Chain talk
Upcoming IBM talk on The combination of AI and Blockchain is interesting. Attending.
" .. In the age of the start-up disruptors, existing businesses are challenged to change their models to disrupt the disruptors. These changes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Generating a voice Driven Westworld Maze Skill for Alexa
Was wondering what could be done beyond the very simplistic interactions in most Alexa skills. This Adage article show how some more creative things can be done. With a few details of the construction, but not enough to do…
From Schneier on Security
Department of Commerce Report on the Botnet Threat
Last month, the US Department of Commerce released a report on the threat of botnets and what to do about it. I note that it explicitly said that the IoT makes the threat worse, and that the solutions are largely economic. The…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Reflecting on #CSTA2018
I feel like I have really fallen behind on reporting on the CSTA Conference in Omaha. Part of the problem is being a bit overwhelmed. Usually I write blog posts in boring sessions. I didn’t attend any boring sessions. I have…
From Putting People First
Sometimes patients simply need other patients
In an ideal world, when we are faced with a new health problem, a clinician is available to sit down and address all our questions and anxieties about the condition and its treatment. This ideal is rarely met in the United States…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Connecting AI to Mind Mapping
Plan to attend. Some of the description below is what we tried to use as a method of building a knowledge map that described interaction and process.
How AI Will Transform Mind Mapping?
Webinar: Date: 17 July 2018 09:30-10:30…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GDPR and Better Marketing
Intriguing point, if we fully understood the GDPR fully in its application as yet.
How GDPR Can Lead to Better Personalized Marketing
By Michelle Chiantera in the Cisco Blog
As marketers, we’ve come a long way in becoming data…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Trip Report from ISC 2018
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team offers up a Trip Report from ISC 2018 in Frankfurt. It was a whirlwind week for news with a new USA machine on the TOP500, but the other big news centered around the convergence of HPC…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger Goes Fashion
About to get a tour of a local Kroger Marketplace. Impressive new additions, including in-store restaurants. The fashion angle was new to me.
Kroger set to roll out Dip fashion brand
Exclusive apparel label to debut in FredBy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Survey: Retailers Missing the Mark
Results of a survey:
How Retailers are Missing the Mark with Shoppers by Sara Spivey in ChiefMarketer
Consumers are continuously changing the way they shop. They have high expectations for speed and convenience, they consult…