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 Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Power Circuits
Not anything to do with electrical engineering Alexei Miasnikov, Alexander Ushakov, and Dong Wook Won are the authors of a brilliant paper, “Power Circuits, Exponential Algebra, and Time Complexity.” It and several followup papers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Oracle Outsources GraphPipe
Had not heard of this kind of work out of Oracle. By its description of value to improved process. Following up and will report on this.
Oracle Open-Sources Graphpipe to Make It Easier to Deploy Machine Learning Models
Via …
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Programming FUNdamentals Books
Most programming textbooks just are not what I am looking for. They are too long. They are too dull. And they are written for teachers to use not for students to reference. Last winter I decided to write some thing for my students…
From The Eponymous Pickle
RPA and Test Automation
Been intrigued by uses of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Here from the Gartner Blog, perhaps an obvious one, Test automation. A brief post follows, but sets the stage for further work. This lends itself to better linking…
From insideHPC
Video: Exploring the Universe with Blue Waters
Brian O'Shea from Michigan State University gave this talk at the Blue Waters Summit. "Astronomy, astrophysics, and space sciences are fields that are inundated with data, and involve physical phenomena that are complex and cannot…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Research Scientist at Intel
Intel is seeking a Research Scientist for their Extreme Scale Computing team in Oregon in our Job of the Week. "In this position, you will be responsible for conceiving, researching, and prototyping new parallel and distributed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What Microsoft is Doing About Quantum Computing
How do we train programmers to use non intuitive methods? Beyond Scifi.
With Q#, Microsoft is throwing programmers the keys to quantum in DigitalTrends
Computers are about to get weird.
After decades as theory, the first quantum…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bixby's Intelligence
Been following the assistant Bixby for some time, its being touted for some major appliances, but have not tested it there. Some friends have it on their phones now, so will ask. What minimal intelligence do we want? For what…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Eight Hardest Startup Problems
Interesting thoughts.
MIT's Mind-Blowing Solutions to the 9 Hardest Startup Problems
Deciding how big you want the company to be and change its strategy, organization, and processes while sustaining the culture. ...
By Peter Cohan…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Firefly Squid Museum
The Hotaruika Museum is a museum devoted to firefly squid in Toyama, Japan. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
2018-2019 Celebrations
View the list of ACM-W celebrations of 2018-2019. Conference Area Date Languages RusCWiC Russia September, 2018 Russian womENcourage Belgrade, Serbia October 3 – 5, 2018 English Chilewic, una Celebración ACM Valparaiso, Chile…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google to Deliver Assistant with a Screen
Google is bringing forward a speaker with a display capability to compete with Echo Show. Google has the advantage of having the huge content supply called Youtube, while Amazon only have much lesser content to display without…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Democratizing Data Access
Note enough is done to link such data with your own, in particular as metadata to support, clarify and validate decisions. Why not? Often because the data's existence is not known.
How Data.World Wants to Unify the Data World…
From insideHPC
Video: Introduction to OpenACC
Vasileios Karakasis from CSCS gave this talk at the the Directive Based GPU Programming Workshop. "Directives-based programming facilitates the task of parallelizing your application by letting you focus on its parallel logic…
From insideHPC
Tachyum Touts Benefits of Universal Processor at HOT CHIPS
This week at the Hot Chips conference, Tachyum CEO Dr. Radoslav Danilak described how the company's its Prodigy Universal Processor Chip combines the best attributes of CPU, GPU and TPU architectures to overcome HPC challenges…
From insideHPC
Women in HPC Launches Chapters and Affiliates Pilot Program
Today the Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) group announced the launch of a Chapters and Affiliates Program to bring its vision and mission to the worldwide community and assist those passionate about diversity and inclusion…
From The Noisy Channel
I can’t share those details, but I can say that geography certainly impact latency when you’re…
I can’t share those details, but I can say that geography certainly impact latency when you’re serving from the cloud, especially when you are doing query processing. Fortunately, the public clouds have decent global coverage…
From insideHPC
Video: Accelerated Any-Scale Ai Solutions from DDN
In this video from the DDN User Group at ISC 2018, James Coomer from DDN presents: A3I - Accelerated Any-Scale Solutions from DDN. "Engineered from the ground up for the AI-enabled data center, DDN’s A3I solutions are fully optimized…
From The Noisy Channel
Search: Should You Build, Buy, or Borrow?
Search: Should You Build, Buy, Or Borrow?
A challenge that many companies face is deciding whether to build, buy, or borrow their core search technology. As with most technology decisions, there’s no single right answer. But it…From The Eponymous Pickle
Streaming Low Power Video on IOT
The ideahas been being talked for some time, low power will likely be important.
Researchers’ low-power video streaming breakthrough could boost the IoT By Maria Deutscher in SiliconAngle
University of Washington researchers
To…
From Schneier on Security
New Ways to Track Internet Browsing
Interesting research on web tracking: "Who Left Open the Cookie Jar? A Comprehensive Evaluation of Third-Party Cookie Policies: Abstract: Nowadays, cookies are the most prominent mechanism to identify and authenticate users on…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ethics via Science Fiction
A way to stretch thinking beyond the realm of current science and into its evolution.
How to Teach Computer Ethics through Science Fiction
By Emanuelle Burton, Judy Goldsmith, Nicholas Mattei
Communications of the ACM, August 2018…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Scientists Favorite Algorithms
Have never thought of algorithms this way ... but we all have favorites. What we learned first, is easiest to use, is most useful, has the fewest cautions. Course that is also a bias. So the fact that a scientist has one is…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Winner Of 2018 Knuth Prize Is:
A great choice Cropped from 2016 KTH grant news source Johan Håstad is the winner of the 2018 Donald E. Knuth Prize. We were going to keep you in suspense, but one of our “blog invariants” is to lead with the name(s) of those…
From Computational Complexity
How valuable is a Fields Medal?
(Johan Hastad won the Knuth Prize! The below post was written before I knew that but has a mild connection to it. See here for more info on the Hastad winning it, or see Lance's tweet, or see Boaz's blog post here. There will…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Soars, Plus Big Online Jump
The online move is a big deal.
Walmart soars with fastest sales growth in a decade, big online jump By Marianne Wilson in CSA
Walmart showed its might in the second quarter, with earnings and sales that topped the Street amid…
From Schneier on Security
Speculation Attack Against Intel's SGX
Another speculative-execution attack against Intel's SGX. At a high level, SGX is a new feature in modern Intel CPUs which allows computers to protect users' data even if the entire system falls under the attacker's control.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger Rolls out Autonomous Delivery Test
From insideHPC
Podcast: From Here to Ai with Jack Wells from Oak Ridge
In this Conversations with Dez podcast, Dez Blanchfield sits down with Jack Wells from ORNL to talk about about his personal & professional life journey, his role at Oak Ridge National Lab, how Artificial Intelligence is being…
From insideHPC
SC18 Preview: Steve Furber on Brain-Inspired Massively-Parallel Computing
SC18 continues its series of Invited Talk previews with this quick look at "Brain-Inspired Massively-Parallel Computing” by Stephen Furber. "The SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) platform is an example of a highly…