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 insideHPC
Training Generative Adversarial Models over Distributed Computing Systems
Gul Rukh Khattak from CERN gave this talk at PASC18. "We use a dataset composed of the energy deposition from electron, photons, charged and neutral hadrons in a fine grained digital calorimeter. The training of these models
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Books only Physical Media with Growing Sales
Found this remarkable since I have been radically downsizing my own physical library.
PwC's Entertainment and Media Outlook in Strategy+Business
Why books are the only form of physical media whose sales are growing.
The media and…
From Schneier on Security
Google Tracks its Users Even if They Opt-Out of Tracking
Google is tracking you, even if you turn off tracking: Google says that will prevent the company from remembering where you've been. Google's support page on the subject states: "You can turn off Location History at any time.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtualitics
I had previously mentioned Virtualitics here. Currently examining. Here is a new short presentation:
Fintech Innovation Lab NY Presents: Virtualitics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Modeling User Journeys
Have had a few explorations into 'User Journey's. Its a trace of how people travel through coded interaction. From where they begin, what choices they make and where they end up. Ideally measuring how much the journey results…
From Schneier on Security
Identifying Programmers by their Coding Style
Fascinating research de-anonymizing code -- from either source code or compiled code: Rachel Greenstadt, an associate professor of computer science at Drexel University, and Aylin Caliskan, Greenstadt's former PhD student and…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The dangers of AVX-512 throttling: myth or reality?
Modern processors use many tricks to go faster. They are superscalar which means that they can execute many instructions at once. They are multicore, which means that each CPU is made of several baby processors that are partially…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Thermodynamic Computing Workshop- Call for White Papers
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) will hold a workshop from January 3rd to 5th, 2019 in Hawaii to create a vision for thermodynamic computing, a statement of research needs, and a summary of the current state of understanding…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Health Wristband
Have heard of a number of related applications, gets back to the applications that run on these to provide value. Most notable recent Apple monitors via a watch interface. The picture included made this one look primitive…
From insideHPC
Fast.AI Achieves Record ImageNet performance with NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs
The NVIDIA blog points us to this story on how Fast.ai just completed a new deep learning benchmark milestone. Using NVIDIA V100 GPUs on AWS with PyTorch, the company now has the ability to train ImageNet to 93% accuracy in just…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Animating Sprites
We worked with very early versions of this idea to animate prototypes of advertisements.
AI-driven animations will make your digital avatars come to life
You've never seen sprites move like this.
Andrew Tarantola, @terrortola
Even…
From insideHPC
PASC18 Panel Discussion Big Data vs. Fast Computation
"The panelists will discuss the critical challenges facing key HPC application areas in the next 5-10 years, based on a mix of knowledge and speculation. They will explore whether we need to make radical changes to our practices…
From insideHPC
Ubercloud Posts 2018 Compendium of HPC Cloud Case Studies
Our friends at the UberCloud have published their 2018 Compendium of HPC Cloud Case Studies. "The Annual UberCloud Compendium of Case Studies is out! This is the 5th edition of this set of case studies relating to the world of…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at China’s Exascale System Prototypes
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at China’s new ARM-based Exascale supercomputer prototype. "The Sunway exascale computer prototype is very much like a concept car that can run on road,”said Yang Meihong, director…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More on Ford Exoskeletons
Not only that we will use Robots, but that we will become robots.
Exoskeletons Debut at Ford Factories
in ZDNet By Charlie Osborne
Ford plans to offer exoskeleton technology to its factory employees worldwide. The EksoVest exoskeleton…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intelligent Automation Starting Simply
ts not general intelligence, its intelligence that augments and automates business process. Including the design of that process. RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is a useful start. It may include advanced machine learning…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Research on Sound in Shopping
We researched the idea of how sound changed shopping behavior, in laboratory and real store environments. Ambient background music can create mood. Focused multidimensional sound can influence interest in specific areas of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Survey: Understanding the Agile Workplace
McKinsey Survey. Definitions and Organzations.
The agile manager By Aaron De Smet in McKinsey
Who manages in an agile organization? And what exactly do they do?
The agile workplace is becoming increasingly common. In a McKinsey…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The IOT and Smart Factories
Notes on IOT, AI and Smart Factories - Franz
Draft Outline for an upcoming presentation to a global company ....
In the earliest days of AI our management come to us and asked: How will these methods allow us to manufacture…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Cardiac Arrhythmias
A team of researchers led by Mark Potse from Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest research centre are using high performance computing to study heart arrhythmias. It is hoped that this research will lead to better treatment and diagnosis…
From insideHPC
Video: Recent Results and Open Problems for Resilience at Scale
In this video from PASC18, Yves Robert from École normale supérieure de Lyon in France presents: Recent Results and Open Problems for Resilience at Scale. "The talk will address the following three questions: (i) fail-stop errors…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Replacing Apps with Neural Nets
Well perhaps some of them. We wrote neural nets from the ground up before they existed in conveniently usable libraries, and they are good for some things, but not others. I don't see how the straight logic coding, also a…
From Writing
The 10:1 rule of writing and programming
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
— Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
From The Eponymous Pickle
What is Machine Learning?
Straightforward introduction.
How to Think About Machine Learning by Jason Brownlee
Machine learning is a large and interdisciplinary field of study.
You can achieve impressive results with machine learning and find solutions…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Leveraging Social Determinants of Heath
As I understand this, the high ROI comes from decreasing unnecessary costs. Which shows sometimes simple data analysis can provide value. Just make sure to continue to measure these results.
What Montefiore's 300% ROI from…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson and Healthcare
IBM responds to recent suggestions that they have not made enough progress on Watson for Healthcare. And that the bet on Watson has not been successful. Interesting information and links to more:
Watson Health: Setting the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data as Capital Asset
Looked at this in some depth, with an aim to measure it. And consider also its element of risk.
Data will be a ‘capital asset’ in the future; companies must monetize, capitalize now By Teryn O'Brien in SiliconAngle.
As the economy…
From insideHPC
Toronto Startup Launches HPCBOX- An Elastic HPC Cloud Platform
Today Toronto startup Drizti announced the availability of HPCBOX, a desktop-centric, intelligent workflow cloud HPC platform for automating and executing application pipelines. "HPCBOX introduces an innovative method of plugging…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Architecture and Performance Engineer at LBNL
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is seeking an HPC Architecture and Performance Engineer in our Job of the Week. "Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has an opening for a Computer Systems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmenting Humans with Exoskeletons
Course we have been augmenting people with tools for ages. But the idea of more directly augmenting the body with exoskeletons is interesting too. Ford is now doing this more generally, which will be interesting to watch, will…