Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2017
From BLOG@CACM
ACM SIGIR 2017 Tokyo, Blog #1: Yokoso!
This is the first of a series of blogs on ACM SIGIR 2017 in Tokyo, Japan.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Detecting Randomness of Numbers
Early projects had us looking to determine if numbers were random or not. Signal vs noise detection. Can be very important for scrubbing data before use. Here an example of a means of detecting non-randomness. In DSC…
From Wild WebMink
Give Generously! Seven Ways To Help Open Source
Should you donate money to the open source projects you use? Or is there a better way to help?
Your business most likely depends on open source software. But are you playing your part to make sure it will still be there in…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 4th, 2017)
Lifting a lot of small weights and eating protein regularly builds muscle mass. There is no need for heavy weights and hormones matter less than you think. There is some evidence for life on Saturn’s largest Moon, Titan. If there…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Ocean Currents at NASA
A team from the NASA has developed a new visualization tool that is being used by researchers from the Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) project to study the behavior of ocean currents. The new visualization…
From insideHPC
Rescale Partners with HPC Systems in Japan
Today Rescale announced a channel partnership with HPC Systems Inc., a high-performance computing hardware integrator based in Japan, to deliver Rescale’s ScaleX big compute platform to the Japanese market beginning July 2017…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson Machine Learning Now Publicly Available
I note that this also includes 'visual' machine learning, using methods that look like the Clementine system they acquired long ago for System Modeler. Good direction. Explored some of this via their Bluemix services, but…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automated Machine Learning Tools
William Vorhies surveys some 'automated' data machine learning systems. Agree these are for professionals, but can likely decrease the effort needed to produce such models. But their emergence can only mean that these techniques…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Articles about Decision Trees
Good list from DSC of articles about decision trees, provided by Vincent Granville. We found much value in the enterprise of these methods because their output was explainable to decision makers. In addition we were able…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predictive Analytics at Linkedin
Wise Practitioner – Predictive Analytics Interview Series: Steve Weiss at LinkedIn
By: Eric Siegel, Founder, Predictive Analytics World
In anticipation of his upcoming conference presentation, The Sprint for Teaching Data Science…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Heatmap of AI Startup Deals
An insightful heatmap From CB Insights:
Artificial Intelligence DealsTracker
A look at where AI is heating up, from healthcare to entertainment
In all the chatter around AI, bots and virtual assistants get much of the attention…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple Makes a Late Move with Homekit Authentication
Been watching for Homepod related Apple announcements. Apparently some changes behind the scenes with Homekit. Apple expected Apple TV to carry the smarthome idea forward with Homekit, but unexpectedly Amazon Echo made the…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Fake News
I never imagined that there would be fake news about squid. (That website lets you write your own stories.) As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Running Analytics Experiments Systematically
Really growing to like Jason Brownlee's Machine Learning Mastery posts. He is starting to seem like a trusted adviser. Really useful stuff, the most recent example talks about the process of getting machine learning process…
From insideHPC
Beating Floating Point at its own game: Posit Arithmetic
"Dr. Gustafson has recently finished writing a book, The End of Error: Unum Computing, that presents a new approach to computer arithmetic: the unum. The universal number, or unum format, encompasses all IEEE floating-point formats…
From insideHPC
Hazel Hen Supercomputer Reaches Computational Milestone
Over at HLRS, Christopher Williams writes that the Hazel Hen supercomputer recently completed its Millionth compute job. "Leading the research behind the millionth job was Professor Bernhard Weigand, Director of the Institute…
From insideHPC
Video: HPE Powers 1 Petaflop QURIOSITY Supercomputer at BASF
"In today’s data-driven economy, high performance computing plays a pivotal role in driving advances in space exploration, biology and artificial intelligence,” said Meg Whitman, President and Chief Executive Officer, Hewlett…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Customer Journey Methods in Retail
My correspondent, among others responds: "In my experience data science and analytics teams need better ways to activate their work." Gib Bassett, Customer Success Director, Salesforce . Agree, and one way is using customer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Changing Retail: How Can Brands Connect?
In the HBR, some essential thoughts ... are old ideas but worth repeating.
How Consumer Brands Can Connect with Customers in a Changing Retail Landscape
by Robert Haslehurst, Chris Randall, Noor Abdel-Samed
When news broke earlier…
From insideHPC
CSRA Upgrades Biowulf Supercomputer at NIH
Today CSRA announced that the company has installed a second increment to the Biowulf supercomputing cluster at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Center for Information Technology. Biowulf is designed to process a large…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Crowdsourced Testing
Seeing Crowdsourcing continue to become more common.
Managing Crowdsourced Testing | by Ben Linders
Crowdsourced testing is a unique way of involving the crowd- meaning the real users/testers- into software testing under real…
From insideHPC
Artificial Intelligence: A Journey to Deep Space
Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence, especially deep learning, are set to make an impact in the field of astronomy and astrophysics. In fact, the benefits of using AI to control space-exploring robots are already being…
From Schneier on Security
Penetrating a Casino's Network through an Internet-Connected Fish Tank
Attackers used a vulnerability in an Internet-connected fish tank to successfully penetrate a casino's network. BoingBoing post....
From The Eponymous Pickle
VR Transforming the Workplace?
Niche or everywhere? Still think this will take some time before it is common in the workplace. A typical machine interface? AR more likely.
Why Virtual Reality Will Transform a Workplace Near You By Logan Kugler
Communications…
From The Eponymous Pickle
In Pursuit of Creativity
Via HBS. Full research paper at the link:
In Pursuit of Everyday Creativity by Teresa M. Amabile
OVERVIEW — This paper describes the most compelling research trends around creativity and innovation. It suggests that 1) creative…
From Putting People First
The human side of autonomous cars — with Nissan Research’s Melissa Cefkin
Reposted from Medium Beyond the engineering challenge of creating cars that drive themselves lies the social challenge. Before autonomous cars are ready to navigate our roads, they must be able to navigate the vastly more complicated…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intelligent Video Analytics
Brought to my attention for a security application.
IBM Intelligent Video Analytics
" ... Turn video into insight. Find relevant images across multiple types of video files. ... What it can do for your business
IBM Intelligent Video…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantum, Cause and Effect
Will Quantum computing be able to take advantage of the very strange nature of time in Quantum physics? Causality? At the micro level perhaps, but beyond? Introduction to the idea in Nature.
How Quantum Trickery Can Scramble…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ad Attention Research
In Think with Google:
Ad Attention Research: Effectiveness Hinges on More Than Just Reach
If a million trees fall in the forest and nobody hears them, do they make a sound? They might, but does it matter? New research from Nielsen…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Japan-US Network Opportunity 2 (JUNO2)
The Division of Computer and Network Systems (CNS) within the National Science Foundation‘s (NSF) Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) supports research and education activities that develop…