Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2016
From Phys.org Technology News
Delta resumes some service after hours of global outage
Delta Air Lines canceled around 300 flights Monday after its computer systems crashed worldwide, stranding thousands of passengers on a busy travel day.
From insideHPC
E8 Storage Launches NVMe Rack Scale Flash Appliance
Today E8 Storage launched the storage industry’s first-ever centralized, highly available rack scale flash appliance based on Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) drives. The E8-D24 is the first array that combines the high performance…
From Phys.org Technology News
Why technology makes us dishonest—ways to reduce cheating at self-service checkouts
Despite some technological safeguards, self-service checkout machines in supermarkets rely heavily on customer honesty to scan, and pay for, their shopping. It turns out however, that around a third of all customers "cheat" the…
From insideHPC
Riken’s Shoubu Supercomputer Leads Green500 List
Today the Green500 released their listing of the world's most energy efficient supercomputers. "Japan’s research institution RIKEN once again captured the top spot with its Shoubu supercomputer. With rating of 6673.84 MFLOPS/Watt…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Announcement of New NITRD NCO Director – Dr. Bryan Biegel
The following is an announcement from the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) National Coordination Office (NCO). The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD)…
From Phys.org Technology News
Study examines use of drones to aid emergency responders in mass casualty events
In the wake of a disaster, a difficult challenge for emergency response crews is to quickly assess damage and identify victims. Researchers at UMass Medical School are conducting a study to determine how unmanned aerial vehicles…
From Schneier on Security
More on Voting Machine Security
Good article. And I was interviews on WGBH on the topic....
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 8 August 2016
Today is back to school for some students. Also for some teachers. I know some teachers who reported to school last week. Whoa! It’s getting close for the rest of us. Many teachers at my school were in last week to pickup new…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New ACM Text Mining Book
Newly received:We are pleased to present the newest ACM Books title: Text Data Management and Analysis: A Practical Introduction to Information Retrieval and Text Mining, by ChengXiang Zhai and Sean Massung. Text Data Management…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Threads
Researchers Invent 'Smart' Thread That Collects Diagnostic Data When Sutured Into Tissue Tufts University researchers have integrated nanoscale sensors, electronics, and microfluidics into cotton and synthetic threads that can…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple Expands AI with Acquisition
More machine learning acquisition for AI. I have not examined Turi. More on them here.Apple expands its AI lineup by acquiring machine learning startup Turi by Duncan Riley in SiliconAngle. Apple, Inc. has made a serious…
From Computational Complexity
A Game Theory Conference! That sounds like fun!
Bill: Lance just came back from Games, a conference on Game Theory. Darling: That sound like fun! From what you tell me there is some nice math behind Monopoly(see here for a paper on Monopoly as a Markov Process), Risk (see …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Creating Models of Virtual Changes from Physical Interactions
A interesting effect. Here you create a model of how a real world object reacts to physical interactions. Say using a videotape of the object in motion under influences. Then you use that model to have it react the same way…
From insideHPC
AMD Boltzmann Initiative Promotes HPC Freedom of Choice
AMD’s motivation for developing these open-source GPU tools is based on an opportunity to remove the added complexity of proprietary programming frameworks to GPU application development. "If successful, these tools – or similar…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wide and Deep Learning with Tensorflow
Google open sources its Tensorflow for 'wide and deep' learning. I very much like the thought. In our own exploration of pattern matching with neural nets we often did what was essentially deep. We left the 'wide' to what…
From insideHPC
Leslie Greenguard Presents: Modeling Physical Systems in Complex Geometry
In this video from The Digital Future conference in Berlin, Leslie Greengard from the Simons Center for Data Analysis presents: Modeling Physical Systems in Complex Geometry. Greengard is an American mathematician, physician …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Fog Computing for Distributed IoT Analytics
I like the emergence of new ways to address the complexity and volume of data.How IoT Can Benefit from Fog Computing By Ben Dickson. ...What I’m mentioning a lot these days (and hearing about it as well) is the chaotic propagation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Source Required
In the CACM: On the use of open source. The history, evolution and the why of how big players are using it today. Every client I talk to today brings it up as a interest and need.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Linguistics at Google
Google research writes about what they are doing in computational linguistics. As it implies 'computational' means linguistics applied and delivered in systems. A very important topic in a world where cognitive systems need…
From The Eponymous Pickle
First Web Site Went Public 25 Years Ago
Quite an interesting anniversary. Tim Berners-Lee 1991 announcement of his Web Project. Its interesting that one of the other primary components of the Web, the hyperlink, existed before then. We used it as a means to linkhypertext…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smarter Health Delivery Systems
In RW: Smarter Health Delivery Systems. Givessome interesting examples, like that of compliance in drug usage. But I believe that in the short term, the use of augmented people will be far more effective towards the significant…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pingpad Building onto Slack for Knowledge Sharing
I see that long time connection Ross Mayfield, who we worked on in early corporate wiki days with Socialtext, is building onto Slack, He writes: " .... We are about to launch Pingpad for Slack teams to capture shared knowledge…
From insideHPC
ICC Updates Overclocked Vega Financial Servers with Broadwell-E
Today International Computer Concepts (ICC) announced that it has upgraded the company's ICC Vega line of high-frequency trading servers with the latest Broadwell-E microarchitecture from Intel. After extensive testing, the Vega…
From insideHPC
One Stop Systems Showcases Open Compute Flash Array with 500 TB in 2U
This week at the Flash Memory Summit, One Stop Systems showcased the OCP Flash Storage Array (OCP-FSA), supporting up to 500TB of Flash storage in a 2U form factor. Designed to comply with the Open Rack Standards set by the Open…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Random but with Geometric Order
A mathematical, but but not very technical article, but the implications are not easily thought about. The non-order called randomness has a remarkable number of practical applications. Such as crytology, for example or creating…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predictive Analytics Interview
Good piece, non technical, relatively little about how results will be integrated with the decision process.Talk with Eric Siegel on predictive analytics. Good, non technical interview:" ... What is predictive analytics? How…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Psychology of Loyalty Programs
In CustomerThink. by David Feldman of Catchit Loyalty. Straightforward overview.
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Ink Soda
You can order a cocktail made with squid ink soda at Hank's Oyster Bar in Washington, DC....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Deep Dive on Consumer Product Innovation
From Deloitte. Good overview ..Consumer product companies face ongoing challenges from slowing industry growth to declining brand loyalty and the rise of unconventional competitors. While innovation is key for companies to…
From Schneier on Security
Reddit "Ask Me Anything"
I did an AMA on Reddit a few days ago. My Reddit AMA from 2013....