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 insideHPC
The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Rich Brueckner and Mike Bernhardt Talk Exascale, HPC Marketing: How the HPC Community Tells its Story to the World
After more than three decades in supercomputing as a strategic marketing and communications executive, Mike Bernhardt has seen the HPC community evolve through the many phases of its existence. A “Perennial” (see below) at the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Qualcomm Mobile Chip
Advances in hardware improve where and how efficiently problems can be solved. We are moving forward.
Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 865 Plus is its most powerful mobile chip, designed for gaming (and AI)
10 percent more power than…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Short examples of the Value of Emergent Analytic Tech
O'Reilly puts together four interesting examples of the use of emergent tech. Worth a look.
O'Reilly Radar by Nat Torkington
Four short links: 8 July 2020 AI Weirdness, Experimentation, ML Ops, and Engineer Productivity
- When…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tool Turns Math into Pictures
Lovely thought, you can browse the images, and edit or choose the best. To produce a best explanation. A means to communicate math concepts with management, decision makers? Good examples at the link.
Carnegie Mellon Tool…
From Schneier on Security
Half a Million IoT Passwords Leaked
It is amazing that this sort of thing can still happen: ...the list was compiled by scanning the entire internet for devices that were exposing their Telnet port. The hacker then tried using (1) factory-set default usernames…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Vs Amazon with Premium Subscription Services
Not too surprising, but closely follow the effectiveness of the execution used. I like the emergence of competition here.
Walmart Spent Years on a Secret Plan to Attack Amazon. The War Is About to Begin By Bill Murphy Jr
Excerpt…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Marc Pritchard Says Consumer Expectations Are Greater Than Ever
in AdWeek A former colleague of mine discusses consumer expectations of business,
Marc Pritchard Says Consumer Expectations Are Greater Than Ever
In his first keynote since the Covid-19 pandemic began, the P&G CBO said that the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Conifer: Revisiting Web Pages
Brought to my attention again, how effective is this to use? Will be testing.
Conifer: Collect and revisit web pages.
Conifer is a web archiving service that creates an interactive copy of any web page that you browse, including…
From insideHPC
Google Unveils 1st Public Cloud VMs using Nvidia Ampere A100 Tensor GPUs
Google today introduced the Accelerator-Optimized VM (A2) instance family on Google Compute Engine based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPU, launched in mid-May. Available in alpha and with up to 16 GPUs, A2 VMs are the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Drones of all Types in the Smart City
Good general piece on the topic. Inevitable. Their form, security, management and capabilities are still to be worked out in sufficient detail. Also the further specification of how autonomous these systems should be.
How …
From The Eponymous Pickle
AWS CodeGuru Available
Had not seen this yet, worth a close look. When we coded we had experts review its quality along a number of metrics. Automating this process should ensure better code. Addressing both critical bugs and efficiency. See
AWS…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Council Member Melanie Mitchell to Receive the Herbert A. Simon Award
The Herbert A. Simon Award is presented to researchers who have made important lifetime contributions to the field of complex systems science. It is named in memory of Herbert A. Simon for his pioneering work on complex systems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Get Started with the Alexa Skills Kit
Another introduction to how skills work in Alexa.
Get Started with the Alexa Skills Kit
Learn how Alexa skills work and how you can build one using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK). Check out the different types of skills you can build…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Overview of Federated Learning for Privacy Critical Learning
A look at federated learning (Via O'Reilly). Intro useful for anyone, then technical.
Federated learning enables machine learning in privacy-critical applications like medical imaging. This article in Nature Machine Intelligence…
From Schneier on Security
IoT Security Principles
The BSA -- also known as the Software Alliance, formerly the Business Software Alliance -- is an industry lobbying group. They just published "Policy Principles for Building a Secure and Trustworthy Internet of Things." They…
From BLOG@CACM
Computing Ethics and Teaching It
Ethics can and should be presented to computer science students in appropriate ways.
From insideHPC
Reports: TSMC May Commercialize Production of Cerebras-style AI Supercomputing Chips
Published reports state that TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) may begin commercial production within two years of specialized supercomputer AI chips, an outgrowth of the company’s customized fabrication of the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Challenge and Workshop for Open Domain Question Answering
Answer questions based on open domain Knowledge. Good general statement of the most important part of useful AI. Details at the link.
Presenting a Challenge and Workshop in Efficient Open-Domain Question Answering
\
Posted by…
From The Eponymous Pickle
VR System to Turn Smells into Temperatures
Here is quite an interesting play, hacking your nose to get a temperature experience? Skiing VR experiences? Thinking about the reality of this. Temperature sensations .... how about others?
VR System Hacks Your Nose to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microphone Signature Tracking of Covid Exposure
Interesting approach, with approval of the phone owner I assume, they could the release of such 'random tokens', and another phone within some radius, would pick it up. Producing a map trace of exposure. To be analyzed on
Using…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Catalyzing Computing Podcast Episode 26 – Science and Technology for National Intelligence with John Beieler (Live from AAAS 2020)
A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. This episode of the podcast was recorded live at the “This Study Shows” Sci-Mic stage at the 2020 AAAS Annual Meeting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cognixion: Unlocking Speech
Was reminded today of Cognixion, formerly Smartstones, and founder Andreas Forsland, which I have a connection with. Their site features a system called: Speakprose : " Giving Voice Speakprose empowers people with communication…
From The Eponymous Pickle
McDonald's Adapts Menus to Consumers
Been observing McDonald's operational marketing for some years, after making a short analysis of their data and how it interacted with how they did in-store, real-time marketing. Noted that Dynamic Yield was acquired by McDonald's…
From insideHPC
GigaOm Radar for Evaluating Data Warehouse Platforms
This new GigaOm Radar Report "GigaOm Radar for Evaluating Data Warehouse Platforms" provided by our friends over at Vertica, examines the leading platforms in the data warehouse marketplace, describes the fundamentals of the
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sweat Powering Wearables
Have heard this being proposed from time to time over the years, but it never happened. The power involved was always too low and the electricity too cheap. Good to know it is still possible for particular on-demand applications…
From Schneier on Security
ThiefQuest Ransomware for the Mac
There's a new ransomware for the Mac called ThiefQuest or EvilQuest. It's hard to get infected: For your Mac to become infected, you would need to torrent a compromised installer and then dismiss a series of warnings from Apple…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Voice Mental Health from Microsoft
Mental health likely a more useful direction using voice.
Microsoft Pilots Voice AI-Based Senior Mental Healthcare Program in South Korea
Eric Hal Schartz on July 1, 2020 at 12:00 pm in Voicebot.ai
Microsoft is running a mental…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Something Missing in Remote Work?
Nice view of the very nature of remote work. What is essential, what is a waste of time?
Remote Work is Surprisingly Productive, But For Many… Something Is Missing in Wladawsky-Bergers Blog
What If Working From Home Goes on …
A…
From Computational Complexity
A table for Matrix Mortality- what I wanted for Hilbert's 10th problem
In this post I speculated on why I could not find anywhere a table of which cases of Hilbert's 10th problem were solvable, unsolvable, and unknown. (I then made such a table. It was very clunky, which may answer the question…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advance of Automated Trucking
Looked at this topic last year, it continues to advance.
Are automated freight trucks ready to carry retail’s heavy load? in Retailwire by George Anderson
TuSimple, an automated trucking technology company, announced the launch…