Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2019
From The Eponymous Pickle
Helium: a Wireless Network for a Coin
Here is a new thing, the users pay for service with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency as token of service payment?
Helium’s trial balloon: A new peer-to-peer wireless network goes live in Austin
Napster creator Shawn Fanning’s new…
From Schneier on Security
Supply-Chain Attack against the Electron Development Platform
Electron is a cross-platform development system for many popular communications apps, including Skype, Slack, and WhatsApp. Security vulnerabilities in the update system allows someone to silently inject malicious code into applications…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction Workshop Report Released
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Research Opportunities in Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity Reduction workshop report. The CCC’s 1.5 day Sociotechnical Interventions for Health Disparity…
From insideHPC
AMD to Power Two Cray CS500 Systems at Army Research Centers
Today Cray announced that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has selected two Cray CS500 systems for its High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) annual technology procurement known as TI-18. The Army Research…
From The Noisy Channel
I can only offer high-level guidance in a comment thread.
I can only offer high-level guidance in a comment thread. But it sounds like you might benefit from collecting trigrams as well as bigrams. If mug tree stands are a product type but coffee mug trees are not, that should should…
From insideHPC
Lenovo Launches Single Socket Servers with AMD EPYC 7002 Series
Today Lenovo introduced the Lenovo ThinkSystem SR635 and SR655 server platforms, two of the industry’s most powerful single-socket servers. "Based on next-generation AMD EPYC 7002 Series processors, Lenovo’s new ThinkSystem SR635…
From The Eponymous Pickle
China Changing How the World Learns?
Will we all soon be learning via AI? Great detailed article from Technology Review with many further links. "
(Excerpt)
China has started a grand experiment in AI education. It could reshape how the world learns.
In recent years…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On the Open Source Publishing Landscape
Open Source is great, but what are the issues involved for creating and using it?
The MIT Press releases a comprehensive report on open-source publishing software
Report catalogs, analyzes available open-source publishing software…
From insideHPC
High Speed Data Capture for AI on the Fly Edge Applications
In many AI applications, transporting large amounts of data back to a remote datacenter is impractical and undesirable. With AI on the Fly, the entire AI workflow resides at the edge at the data source. One Stop Systems's Tim…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Toyota Towards Robots for the Home
Perhaps surprising direction for the automobile corp, though they have had home style robots for some time. With some plans for upcoming Olympics.
Toyota turns to AI startup to accelerate goal of robots for the home
By Kevin Buckland…
From insideHPC
GigaIO Extends Next-Generation Network to Storage Systems
Today GigaIO introduced the FabreX implementation of Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) architecture, streamlining NVMe network communication and large-scale storage sharing with industry-leading low latency and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Case Against Mission Critical Machine Learning
Good caution, like with any kind of automation.
A Case Against Mission-Critical Applications of Machine Learning
By CACM Staff Communications of the ACM, August 2019, Vol. 62 No. 8, Page 9 10.1145/3332409
In their column "Learning…
From insideHPC
ServerCool CDUs are Cooling 10-Percent of Top100 Supercomputers
Today Nortek Air Solutions’ ServerCool division that its coolant distribution unit (CDU) technology is cooling dozens of the world’s most powerful and energy efficient supercomputers, according to the 2019 TOP500 and Green500…
From Schneier on Security
AT&T Employees Took Bribes to Unlock Smartphones
This wasn't a small operation: A Pakistani man bribed AT&T call-center employees to install malware and unauthorized hardware as part of a scheme to fraudulently unlock cell phones, according to the US Department of Justice.…
From insideHPC
Now Shipping: Leadership Performance with new 2nd Generation AMD EPYC Processors
Today AMD rolled out the 2nd Generation AMD EPYC family of processors that deliver performance leadership across a broad number of enterprise, cloud and HPC workloads. 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors feature up to 64 “Zen 2” cores…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Book Review: The Creativity Code
I’ve been reading a lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI) this year. Several of them have been pretty scary. It was recommended that I take a look at “The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI” by Marcus DuSautoy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantum Quitrit Teleportation Report
Very impressive next steps. Its implications still unclear. If this works, we might be able to solve very difficult problems more quickly. Note its still no where near 'beam me down' capability as yet. Still following closely…
From insideHPC
Marvell Reduces Power Consumption with NVMe-oF Ethernet SSD Technology
Today Marvell announced an expansion of its revolutionary NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) portfolio. The breakthrough solutions include one powering the Toshiba Memory native NVMe-oF Ethernet solid state drive (SSD) with Marvell's…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sound Localization and Projection
Not an entirely new idea, we worked with a group out of MIT in the 90s which was creating focused sound environments. You could, for example create a localized sound in a store aisle that supported an advertising message,…
From Computational Complexity
Obstacles to improving Classical Factoring Algorithms
In Samuel Wagstaff's excellent book The Joy of Factoring (see here for a review) there is a discussion towards the end about why factoring algorithms have not made much progress recently. I
paraphrase it:
------------------…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
A 20-Year Community Roadmap for AI Research in the US is Released
CCC Chair Mark D. Hill, CCC Vice-Chair Liz Bradley, and CCC Director Ann Schwartz Drobnis provided significant contributions to this post. The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to release the completed Artificial…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Automating Some Medical Decisions
An example of machine learning for healthcare. Here from voice monitoring and then connected to training datasets. It does seem the amount of data involved is quite small.
Automating artificial intelligence for medical decision…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sensitivity of Binary Models
Most interesting piece, admittedly technical, of a way to model sensitivity in boolean (0/1) circuits. Also with some information about the combinatorics ( increasing number of solutions) for these kinds of problems. In this…
From Schneier on Security
Brazilian Cell Phone Hack
I know there's a lot of politics associated with this story, but concentrate on the cybersecurity aspect for a moment. The cell phones of a thousand Brazilians, including senior government officials, was hacked -- seemingly by…
From insideHPC
ISC High Performance: Fueling Innovation & Fostering Family for 33 Years
In this special guest feature, Elizabeth Leake from the STEM-Trek Nonprofit reflects on inclusivity at the recent ISC 2019 conference in Frankfurt. "A favorable experience means that attendees are more likely to return. And they…
From insideHPC
Providentia Worldwide Builds Intelligence into Summit Supercomputer Cooling
The world’s fastest supercomputer is sharing data with its cooling plant, reducing energy consumption and cost. "OLCF and technology consulting company Providentia Worldwide recently collaborated to develop an intelligence system…
From insideHPC
Announcing the 2019 ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowships
SIGHPC, in collaboration with Intel, has announced the six recipients of the ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowships for 2019. The fellowships are highly competitive, and are awarded after a rigorous merit…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Adding Concept Learning to Neural Networks
Linking logic and deep learning, a great idea. Did it in the 80s to add analytics and learning to expert systems. Still not enough support to make it work well.
Deep learning is about to get easier — and more widespread in…
From insideHPC
Moving HPC to the Cloud? Take our insideHPC Survey
How big is the move to HPC in the Cloud? "A recent report from Hyperion Research indicate that as much as 10 percent of HPC workloads are already in cloud and that 70 percent of HPC centers are running some jobs in public clouds…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Plant Breeding Towards Goals
Goes along my agriculture and botany threads. Some exiting things happening in this space. Most recently my interests have been in horticultural innovation, but the applications are broad.
Professor Thomas Bjorkman studies…