Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2018
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Great Innovative Idea: A Villain’s Guide To Social Media And Web Science
The following Great Innovative Idea is from Mark Bernstein, the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, Inc and Clare Hooper, an Independent Scholar in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Mark and Clare were winners at the recent Computing Community…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lenseless Camera Acting as a Sensor
I recall this being discussed previously, makes much sense. A camera is already a sensor, in Astronomy this has been used for some time with CCDs.
Lensless Camera Functions as Sensor by University of Utah
In the future, your…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Albertsons Testing Go Style No Checkout
The idea continues to spread. Will we ultimately be keeping our chard cards in our pockets?
Albertsons to Pilot Amazon Go-Style Technology in Stores, at Gas Pumps
Albertsons Cos. could be the next U.S. food retailer to roll out…
From insideHPC
HPC Elder James Cuff Joins Witnix Startup
In today's Startup news, HPC elder James Cuff has joined a new company called Witnix. Most recently at The Next Platform, James spent most of his career at the HPC center at Harvard before he retired a couple of times. Just ask…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Unilever Taps JD.com
Mor own agent models tried to understand the difference between rural and urban markets in China. Here this is likely much closer to the problem.
Unilever taps JD.com network to reach rural Chinese markets
Unilever has created…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Lisa Spelman on Intel Data-Centric Solutions
In this Chip Chat podcast, Lisa Spelman from Intel summarizes the recent Intel Data Centric Innovation Summit. In this interview, Spelman discusses Intel's view of data-centric computing and how our broad portfolio of silicon…
From insideHPC
Interview: Dan Jacobson from ORNL on Why PASC19 will be The Show to Attend Next Year
In this video from PASC18, Dan Jacobson from ORNL describes the highlights from the conference and why scientists and engineers should consider attending PASC19 in Zurich. "Next year, PASC19 happens the week before the ISC 2019…
From insideHPC
How Dell EMC Powers HPC for the Oil & Gas industry
In this video from the Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting, Robert Dildy from Dell EMC describes how the company powers HPC for the Oil & Gas industry. "The Dell EMC Isilon OneFS operating system provides the intelligence behind all…
From Schneier on Security
"Two Stage" BMW Theft Attempt
Modern cars have alarm systems that automatically connect to a remote call center. This makes cars harder to steal, since tripping the alarm causes a quick response. This article describes a theft attempt that tried to neutralize…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Happy Anniversary, DARPA!
The following is a letter from Dr. Valarie Browning, the Office Director in the Defense Science Office (DSO) at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). See the full summer 2018 newsletter here. Earlier this year, on February…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP Pilot Tracks the SupplyChain
Note the use of open source Hyperledger. Probably the simplest application idea in blockchain. Mostly food companies participating, which indicates sourcing and quality assurance driven goals.
SAP pilots blockchain-based supply…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Making Dumb Things Smarter with LiveTags
Have now seen several inexpensive IOT add-ons being suggested along this same direction.
LiveTag Is Out to Make Dumb Objects Smart In New Atlas By Ben Coxworth
University of California, San Diego researchers are developing…
From BLOG@CACM
Irrational Exuberance and the 'FATE' of Technology
Questions of verification, safety, and trust must be central when we embody intelligence in physical systems.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Performance of ranged accesses into arrays: modulo, multiply-shift and masks
Suppose that you wish to access values in an array of size n, but instead of having indexes in [0,n), you have arbitrary non-negative integers. This sort of problems happen when you build a hash table or other array-backed data…
From insideHPC
CoolIT Systems Teams with STULZ for Liquid Cooling Down Under
Today CoolIT Systems announced it has appointed STULZ ANZ as its master distributor for Rack DCLC products in the Australasian region. "As a business who prides itself on our innovations and future gazing approach, partnering…
From insideHPC
Slidecast: Technology Trends Driving HPC
In this slidecast, Trish Damkroger from Intel presents: Technology Trends Driving HPC. "HPC is now critical for more use cases, complex workloads, and data-intensive computing than ever before. From AI and visualization to simulation…
From The Noisy Channel
Real Talk About Synonyms and Search
When I talk to software engineers and product managers about improving their search engines, the conversation often leads to query expansion, and specifically synonyms. A lot of folks who work on search believe that their biggest…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at NREL’s new Eagle Supercomputer
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new Eagle supercomputing under construction at NREL. "The new machine from HPE will run more detailed models that simulate complex processes, systems, and phenomena to advance…
From insideHPC
Exploring the Convergence of AI, HPC & More
This fall, the Intel Extreme Performance Users Group (IXPUG) will host a free conference focused on key high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing topics.This guest post from Intel explores how AI…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Avoiding Hyper Personalization
Mostly we don't notice this until its pointed out to us.
Brands are using AI to drive hyper-personalization, but can it also help them avoid being hyper creepy? By Vince Jeffs in Customer Think
Apparently, I have 8 seconds to…
From Schneier on Security
James Mickens on the Current State of Computer Security
James Mickens gave an excellent keynote at the USENIX Security Conference last week, talking about the social aspects of security -- racism, sexism, etc. -- and the problems with machine learning and the Internet. Worth watching…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Case for Competition
Providing results are fairly measured, goals are clear.
The Case for Competition in Strategy+Business
When team members face off, it’s the whole organization that wins.
by Charles Donkor, Gretchen Anderson, and Varun Bhatnagar…
From Computational Complexity
Fractional Problems: 2.1-colorable, 2.8-SAT
Some graphs are 2-colorable, some graphs are 3-colorable, some graphs are...Does it make sense to say that a graph is 2.1-colorable? It does!(Source_ Factional Graph Theory by Schneinerman and Ullman-- I saw a talk on this by…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 19th, 2018)
Publishing your ideas is a central component of science and scholarship. To make it easier to publish, some companies and organizations have begun to offer pay-to-publish journals and conferences where pretty much anything can…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Seeking Co-Creativity
Well of course, a kind of creativity augmentation. But as the article suggests, Co-creativity takes it yet beyond. Who/What initiates, develops, delivers? Fascinating view of this. Part of the intelligence included has
Evaluating…
From insideHPC
Visual Genomes Foundation Looks to Exascale for Ai
A new effort from the Visual Genomes Foundation (VGF) looks to move visual artificial intelligence forward in big way. The first step: learn and record exabytes of visual DNA features from millions of images in a collaborative…
From insideHPC
Containers: Shifter and Singularity on Blue Waters
In this video from the Blue Waters 2018 Symposium, Maxim Belkin presents a tutorial on Containers: Shifter and Singularity on Blue Waters. "Container solutions are a great way to seamlessly execute code on a variety of platforms…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rethinking Social Networks
How can we use this idea to think about the evolution of social networks over time, and how they are influenced.? We talked the implications of networks with SFI very early on, and did substantial experiments as a result.
Rethinking…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robots Get Uncannily Realistic, but Why?
Perhaps to engage, sell, enforce or to just prove it can be done. Replace humans? Mimic humans? Put them in situations where humans should be present, but are too expensive. Even without claiming any intelligence as we see…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Remarkable Accessibility and Assistant tech
Remarkable assisting technology is surveyed in DigitalTrends:
From translating hearing aids to sign-language gloves, amazing assistive tech
Think that assistive technology for the deaf and hard of hearing community is all about…