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 The Noisy Channel
Enterprise Intelligence: Putting the Pieces Together
Today I had the honor to keynote the Workshop on Enterprise Intelligence, held in conjunction with the 22nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Real Pins for Pinterest
In AdWeek: Pinterest's Real-World Pins Let In-Store Shoppers Save Real Items to Virtual Boards DM9DDB tests the app in Brazil's biggest furniture store By Tim NuddI like the deal of connecting the real world to the virtual.…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
A Surprise For Big-Data Analytics
A simple but interesting issue with analyzing high-dimensional data Peter Landweber, Emanuel Lazar, and Neel Patel are mathematicians. I have never worked with Peter Landweber, but have written papers with Larry and Laura Landweber…
From insideHPC
Video: How the HPC Environment is Different from the Desktop (and Why)
"High performance computing has transformed how science and engineering research is conducted. Answering a question in 30 minutes that used to take 6 months can quickly change the way one asks questions. Large computing facilities…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Should Your Business Be in the Cloud?
Good, non technical overview of the positives and negatives of moving your business into the cloud, by Richard Smith.
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Robot You Really Want
Butlers, Bartenders, Maids, Window-washers, Clothes washing, drying and folding and putting them away. Its not the specification of the tasks, but doing them physically in varying contexts in a home that remains hard.The Robot…
From Putting People First
The psychology of scarcity: what behavioral economics can teach design
Eldar Shafir, professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University and coauthor, with Sendhil Mullainathan, of the book Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives (Picador, 2013), talks…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cisco and Retailer of the Future
In the Cisco Blog:" ... More than ever before, today’s consumers have more options about what to buy and where to buy it. With each interaction, they choose which retailers they support with time, attention, personal data, dollars…
From Putting People First
New book on how corporate anthropology can help businesses grow
On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights by Andi Simon PhD Greenleaf Book Group Press July 2016, 184 pages Abstract Innovation has become such a ubiquitous value, it’s in danger of becoming cliché. Companies…
From insideHPC
Post K Supercomputer Delayed in Japan
Nikkei in Japan writes that the Post K supercomputer is facing 1-2 year delay for deployment as part of the Flagship2020 project. Originally targeted for completion in 2020, the ARM-based Post K supercomputer has a performance…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart and Jet
Podcast on Knowledge@Wharton:" .... Wal-Mart this week brought more muscle to its competition with Amazon by buying online shopping site Jet.com. Wal-Mart Stores will pay $3.3 billion for the two-year-old Hoboken-based firm.Opinions…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AWS IoT Button
Had heard of this recently, but just started to take a look. Like the Dash buttons I still have in test for retail. Consider it for the simple acquisition of data for analytics.Post by Mihai Corbuleac:The AWS IoT button provides…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Flow
On the arrival of Microsoft's IFTTT competitior, Flow. Note the connection to Slack. Examining. "... Flow works much the same way as IFTTT but focuses more heavily on integrating Microsoft's own products like Office 365 with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Still Looking for Full Featured Smart Mirrors
We featured the idea, and saw it at other consumer innovation labs a decade ago. Mostly it dealt with using the mirror for cosmetics options and delivering basic 'news and weather' information in the morning. That alone is fairly…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Not Killing New Zealand Sea Lions
Experts are blaming bacteria, not squid nets....
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at HPE’s Pending Acquisition of SGI
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks HPE's pending acquisition of SGI. "Will the acquisition be good for SGI and HP customers? Our RFHPC team is in unprecedented agreement that indeed it will. The key, however, to HPE's…
From Phys.org Technology News
California may beef up electric vehicle mandate
A California lawmaker told The Associated Press on Friday that she's introducing legislation to require that 15 percent of new vehicles be emission-free in less than a decade, a significant escalation in the state's efforts to…
From Schneier on Security
Cyberattacks via Submarine
Some minimal information about the NSA's abilities to hack networks via submarine....
From The Eponymous Pickle
User Friendly and Visual Simulation Langauge
In the MIT News, Faster and friendlier ... and thus more easily testable and maintainable, is always of interest. Note the direct link to the visualization of the model. Technical here, but I look forward to an applicable…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retailers and Brands Leverage Omnishopping
Makes sense, brand can leverage product value and other marketing. Link may require free registration. Why retailers, brands should team up in the omnishopping eraTechnology has made today's consumers "omnishoppers" who are…
From insideHPC
New Report Looks at European Exascale Projects
"Between 2011 and 2016, eight projects, with a total budget of more than €50 Million, were selected for this first push in the direction of the next- generation supercomputer: CRESTA, DEEP and DEEP-ER, EPiGRAM, EXA2CT, Mont- …
From insideHPC
Video: The Impact of the Computing and Data Revolution on Science an Society
Ed Seidel from NCSA presented this talk at The Digital Future conference in Berlin. "The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a hub of transdisciplinary research and digital scholarship where University of…
From insideHPC
Nvidia Expands GTC to Eight Global Events
Nvidia is expanding its popular GPU Technology Conference to eight cities worldwide. "We’re broadening the reach of GTC with a series of conferences in eight cities across four continents, bringing the latest industry trends …
From Schneier on Security
Hacking Electronic Safes
Nice attack against electronic safes: Plore used side-channel attacks to pull it off. These are ways of exploiting physical indicators from a cryptographic system to get around its protections. Here, all Plore had to do was monitor…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Build a Chat Bot in 10 Minutes
Though this is not quite the depth of conversation and language that I implied in my previous thoughts, it does represent some aspects of conversation like flow, intent and knowledge that are important. This takes you through…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What is AI?
Good piece in O'Reilly. Non technical, speculative, good thoughts.What is Artificial Intelligence?Mike Loukides and Ben Lorica examine factors that have made AI a hot topic in recent years, today's successful AI systems, and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
R Connects to Watson for Decision Improvement
Every successful Cognitive/AI project I have been involved in since the 80s has also used machine learning analytics techniques now readily available in R. Machine learning data science can be seen as a way to add intelligence…
From insideHPC
Hewlett Packard Enterprise to Acquire SGI
Today SGI announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for $7.75 per share in cash, a transaction valued at approximately $275 million, net of cash and debt. "At HPE, …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Hololens is Public
Hololens pushes availability and commercial applications. Always interested in new practical applications. Here engineering application area.".. At Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, PGA Golf and Tagtile showcased the…
From Schneier on Security
Hacking Your Computer Monitor
Here's an interesting hack against a computer's monitor: A group of researchers has found a way to hack directly into the tiny computer that controls your monitor without getting into your actual computer, and both see the pixels…