Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2020
From BLOG@CACM
Restoring Industry Participation in Computer Science Conferences
When I complained at ISCA 2019 about a lack of papers on real industrial products, I was assigned to help fix the problem.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Japanese Robots Learn Food Prep: Resemble Kangaroos
Note the proposal that at first the food will be prepared by humans remotely, and those motions will be learned. Then the system will use that learning to prepare foods afterwards. By robots resembling kangaroos.
Japanese
Reuters…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Politeness of Machines
Do we expect the same politeness from machines? Are we polite to them? They can detect some aspects of our demeanor by the words we use. Will we begin to hide that? Or is it useful to adjust the conversation?
Could Your…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Revamped GMail to Compete
Used GMail since we tested it in the enterprise. Later because we collaborated with universities who got it for free. Always liked it, and the following GSuite, but its design was always a bit quirkily 'academic' as well…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Adds Cortana to Outlook on Android
Been following Microsoft and what they are doing with Cortana. Had always thought they could do more, but perhaps because of some early and recent problems with chatbot/AI have been very careful. This is new, an indication…
From insideHPC
Argonne Claims Largest Engine Flow Simulation Using Theta Supercomputer
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have conducted what they claim is the largest simulation of flow inside an internal combustion engine. Insights gained from the simulation – run
…
From insideHPC
The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Supercomputing Populist Merle Giles on the Business Realities of Commercial HPC
This interview is with Merle Giles, founder and CEO of Moonshot Research and a tireless advocate for HPC’s role as an accelerator to industrial innovation. While he was at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)…
From Schneier on Security
Twitter Hackers May Have Bribed an Insider
Motherboard is reporting that this week's Twitter hack involved a bribed insider. Twitter has denied it. I have been taking press calls all day about this. And while I know everyone wants to speculate about the details of the…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The cost of runtime dispatch
For high-performance software, it is sometimes needed to use different functions, depending on what the hardware supports. You might write different functions, some functions for advanced processors, others for legacy processors…
From insideHPC
ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Goes to Tel Aviv University Graduate
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) today announced that Dor Minzer receives the 2019 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “On Monotonicity Testing and the 2-to-2-Games Conjecture.” The key contributions…
From insideHPC
Core Scientific Acquires Atrio, Adds to its AI Capabilities as the Cloud for Data Scientists
Core Scientific, an infrastructure and software solutions provider for AI and blockchain led by CEO Kevin Turner, the former COO of Microsoft, announced the acquisition of certain assets and technology of Atrio Inc., a performance…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
ACM SIGARCH BLOG: Genesis and Reflections on the Return of Industry Products to ISCA 2020
The following is from CCC Chair Emeritus Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Computing is a field with substantial interaction between academia and industry even in research. Last year, for example, CCC reported…
From insideHPC
Chenbro Unveils 2U 8-Bay Rack Mount Server for HPC, Data Center
Chenbro has launched the RB23708, a Level 6, 2U rackmount server barebone designed for mission-critical, storage-focused applications in data center and HPC enterprise. The RB23708 is pre-integrated with an Intel Server Board…
From Putting People First
Behavioral Covid-19 research in Italy
The Milan-based consumer and health research center EngageMinds HUB of the Università Cattolica has done some timely research on how Covid-19 has influenced the behavior of Italians.
The reports are all in Italian, so you should…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Spins off Chinese Chatbot
Somewhat surprising, the demos I had seen looked interesting.
Microsoft Spins Off Chinese Chatbot Xiaoice by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, July 14, 2020
Microsoft is spinning off its AI-based chatbot technology, Xiaoice, into…
From BLOG@CACM
Ten Challenges of Data Science Education
We highlight 10 challenges of data science education, clustered into three categories: (a) Discipline, (b) Skills, and (c) Environment.
From The Eponymous Pickle
BMW Sees Car as Digital Platform
Interesting regards the breadth of integrated technology, but the reaction of consumers to 'microtransactions' or payment/subscription for many elemental features in already high cost luxury vehicles, may be very negative. But…
From insideHPC
InfiniBand Powers World’s Leading Weather Forecasters’ Supercomputers
In this feature article from our friends over at Mellanox, we discuss how weather and climate models are both compute and data intensive. Forecast quality scales with modeling complexity and resolution. Resolution depends on
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
MIT Auto-ID Laboratory
MIT AUTO-ID LABORATORY
The MIT AUTO-ID LABORATORY coined the term Internet of Things (IoT) and traces its roots back to 1999 with the founding of the Auto-ID Center, which laid much of the groundwork for the standardization of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
OpenAI Monitors Machine Learning Efficiency
For now, the most measurable and definable kind of AI is machine learning, It uses much data and compute cycles. Useful to measure the advances in efficiency. That has been improving. according to OpenAI. Notably that'…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google's Tsunami for Network Security Scanning
Here is a new and somewhat unexpected thing I was just introduced to by TWIT. See their generalized writeup below. Note still in pre-alpha form, but would seem to be a very useful thing to be aware of and if appropriate…
From insideHPC
The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Ryan Quick on Putting Together the ‘Prometheus Fire’ where HPC, Hyperscale and AI Converge
Ryan Quick works at the crossroads of advanced technology innovation, where hyperscale, HPC and AI come together. A principal and co-founder of boutique consulting firm Providentia Worldwide, which implements systems solutions…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Thoughts on Virtual Conferences - CSTA 2020
The first online CSTA Conference is now about 24 hours behind me. I was fortunate to experience it both as an attendee and a presenter. After mulling it over a bit I have to say it was a much better experience than I expected…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Avatarin for Healthcare Robotics
We visited Japan in the 90s to talk robotics in retail. Ended up mainly seeing eldercare and related home solutions. Impressed, but did not see that many really implemented. Is this changing now? Will Pandemic add to new…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Home Robotics with a Reaching Tele-Assistant
What looks like a minimalist robot, but with a great reach. Evidently primarily for tele-operation. And thinking about it, reach is a big component of convenience in a home, say for assisting a disabled person. Unclear if it…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Thinking Decentralized Dependent Decision Problems
Struck me as quite interesting, how do we make societal decisions? Can we learn the right information to support the right decisions? You can usually state sub problems in a way that they can optimized based on goals and constraints…
From Schneier on Security
NSA on Securing VPNs
The NSA's Central Security Service -- that's the part that's supposed to work on defense -- has released two documents (a full and an abridged version) on securing virtual private networks. Some of it is basic, but it contains…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Samsung Talks Mobile Holograms and Digital Twins
Piece in Venturebeat talks 6G and says it will fundamentally enable tech like holograms and Digital Twins. Note the date, 2028 is a long way out to predict. And the two technologies are very different. Digital Twins,
Samsung…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Trys a Re-Emergence of the Smart Cart
We looked at many applications of the smart shopping cart for work in our innovation centers. The idea seemed to fade then, after 2010, and none of them succeeded in real practice. Now surprisingly, Amazon, which has been …
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC: The Persistence of Memory
In this episode, we drill down on what Intel is doing with their cool Optane memory tech, shooting for speeds that remind you of memory, sizes that look like storage, and costs that make it look like a deal, with real byte-addressable…