Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2019
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pizza Robotics is at the Door
More traffic for the suburbs?
Nuros Pizza Robot Will Bring You a Domino's Pie
By Alex Davies in Wired
Nuro's vehicle looks like an avant-garde handbag, but it’s actually a little robot that will soon start hauling pizza around…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Why is HPE buying Cray?
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team tackles the HPE-Cray acquisition as it reviews the companies' recent moves, strengths, and market conditions. Hint: part of it has to do with the emergence of AI as a must-do enterprise…
From insideHPC
Video: Dr. Michela Taufer sets the stage for SC19 with ‘HPC is Now’
In this video, Dr. Michela Taufer from the University of Tennessee recaps PASC19 and looks ahead to SC19. "SC is still a place to share new and futuristic ideas, but our plenary sessions, panels, papers and conversations, aren…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predicting Emergence of Self Driving
Was interviewed about my opinion of when self-driving would become common in a recent study. So now am following these predictions more closely. Now major tech players are starting to make related announcements. Autonomous…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Change, Order, Randomness
Fascinating, technical. Implications?
Proof Finds That All Change Is a Mix of Order and Randomness
All descriptions of change are a unique blend of chance and determinism, according to the sweeping mathematical proof of the “weak…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Analytics Acqisitions
A number I had not heard of, interesting review of analytics advances and implications.
8 Data Analytics Acquisitions That Will Re-Shape the Industry in 7wData
Big data is big business, and the marketplace for data analytics
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Chinese Intelligent Uniforms
Apparently in test.
Chinese schools keep tabs on kids with 'intelligent uniforms'
All in all, you're just another chip in the wall. .... "
By Jon Fingas, @jonfingas in Engadget
From The Eponymous Pickle
Improved AI EcoSystems Drive Adoption
Its often about the ecosystem. Its the how rather than the what that makes the most long term value useful.
AI adoption is being fueled by an improved tool ecosystem
We now are in the implementation phase for AI technologies.
By…
From Schneier on Security
Research on Human Honesty
New research from Science: "Civic honesty around the globe": Abstract: Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between…
From Putting People First
Experientia on addressing vaccine hesitancy
Vaccine hesitancy is a top10 global health threat. Dealing with it successfully requires understanding it as a behaviour and generating a holistic view of people’s perspectives & ecosystems. This way we can identify the best
…
From insideHPC
NEC Steps up with SX-Aurora Vector Engine for HPC
In this video from ISC 2019, Shintaro Momose, Ph. D. from NEC describes the company's SX-Aurora Vector Engine. "These days, vector functions are added to scalar supercomputers to improve performance in most cases. That means
…
From insideHPC
ISC 2019 Recap from Glenn Lockwood
In this special guest feature, Glenn Lockwood from NERSC shares his impressions of ISC 2019 from an I/O perspective. "I was fortunate enough to attend the ISC HPC conference this year, and it was a delightful experience from
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Accenture Patents Link of Classical and Quantum Computing for Deep Learning
Their second patent in Quantum. A bit surprising in this space, but companies file patents for all sorts of reasons. The basic statement of its use below seems obvious.
Accenture Awarded Second U.S. Patent for Quantum Computing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intro to GAN's by Jason Brownlee
Good intro, have just passed this on to a group ...
A Gentle Introduction to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)
by Jason Brownlee on June 17, 2019 in Generative Adversarial Networks Follow him, good understandable content.…
From Schneier on Security
US Journalist Detained When Returning to US
Pretty horrible story of a US journalist who had his computer and phone searched at the border when returning to the US from Mexico. After I gave him the password to my iPhone, Moncivias spent three hours reviewing hundreds of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
NRF on Retail Customer Reaction to Technology
Some very useful anylyses of NRF surveys:
Robot in the Room Survey analysis by National Retail Foundation (NRF)
Consumers’ choices in term of where, how and why they buy are redefining retail and creating a new playbook for the…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
New NIST Report on Consideration for Managing Internet of Things (IoT) Cybersecurity and Privacy Risks
I recently linked my child’s smart robot toy to the Internet. Did I feel a little strange about it? Yes. But was giving the robot the ability to play “Baby Shark” and dance to it while making my child laugh, worth it the risk…
From insideHPC
Realize the Massive Potential of Your AI Infrastructure with Bright Computing and NVIDIA
"As organizations continue to leverage GPUs for HPC applications and also host AI workloads on existing HPC clusters, a growing trend is to add DGX servers to these clusters alongside traditional CPU-based Linux servers. Because…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tiny Motor Does Tasks, Create Subunits for Construction
We had talks with aneil Gershenfeld in the early days of 3D printing. Like much the idea of such devices creating others. Being 'subunits' like amino acids. See his books and related writing.
Tiny motor can “walk” to carry…
From insideHPC
Combining Big Data and HPC in a GRIDScalar Environment at BSF
Dr. Stephen Shenk from BSF gave this talk at the DDN User Group. "The talk will give an overview of recent activities in Digitalization of BASF’s Research & Development. It will focus in particular on how Big Data and HPC workflows…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger to Create Digital HQ in CIncinnati
More Kroger plans locally for digital expansion.
Kroger Co. will create a digital headquarters in downtown Cincinnati.
By Erin Caproni – Digital Producer, Cincinnati Business Courier
The Cincinnati-based grocer (NYSE: KR) received…
From insideHPC
Baidu Collaborates on Intel Nervana Neural Network Processor for Training
Intel is collaborating with Baidu on development of the new Intel Nervana Neural Network Processor for training (NNP-T). The two companies will team up on hardware and software design for the new custom accelerator for "training…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Genetic Algorithms Revisited
We used Genetic Algorithms a few times, but turned out it was rarely useful for the kind of marketing and supply chain problems we encountered. Often because the problems contained much metadata complexity that was hard to…
From insideHPC
FPGAs and the Road to Reprogrammable HPC
In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Robert Roe writes that FPGAs provide an early insight into possibile architectural specialization options for HPC and machine learning. "Architectural specialization…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Mathematics of Gerrymandering
Can theory help? [ art: Bill Hennessy ] John Roberts is the Chief Justice of the United States. Today I will discuss the recent Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering. The 5-4 decision in Rucho v. Common Cause takes the courts…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI for Manufacturing Specializing Design
Manufacturing design example. Details at the link.
AI-designed heat pumps consume less energy
by Laure-Anne Pessina, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Techxplore
"... At EPFL's Laboratory for Applied Mechanical Design…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On the Science of Breakthroughs
Saw a number of cases of this in the enterprise. Ownership often misplaced.
The Science of Breakthroughs: What Holds Some Ideas Back?
Podcast and discussion transcript
Wharton's Anoop Menon discusses his research on why some
Why…
From Schneier on Security
Digital License Plates
They're a thing: Developers say digital plates utilize "advanced telematics" -- to collect tolls, pay for parking and send out Amber Alerts when a child is abducted. They also help recover stolen vehicles by changing the display…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
A fast 16-bit random number generator?
In software, we often need to generate random numbers. Commonly, we use pseudo-random number generators. A simple generator is wyhash. It is a multiplication followed by an XOR: uint64_t wyhash64_x; uint64_t wyhash64() { wyhash64_x…
From Computational Complexity
Local Kid Makes History
The blogosphere is blowing up over Hao Huang's just posted proof of the sensitivity conjecture, what was one of the more frustrating open questions in complexity.Huang, an assistant professor in the math department at Emory…