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 insideHPC
Designing Future Flash Storage Systems for HPC and Beyond
Glenn Lockwood from NERSC gave this talk at the Samsung Forum. "In this talk, we will compare the storage and I/O requirements of large-scale HPC workloads with those of the cloud and show how HPC's unique requirements have led…
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G Looks for Smarter Audiences
Good overview of the direction of my former employer. With mention of '1 billion consumer IDs to build audience segments' for more effective marketing. Some interesting detail in the article.
P&G shifts from targeting ‘generic…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 3rd 2019)
Reportedly, researchers in China are creating embryos that are part human and part monkey. Sickle cell disease is a genetic disease with no cure. In an attempt to cure the disease, a patient received gene therapy. We still do…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Phone on Your Smart Contacts: Samsung Patent
Long predicted, but how long will it take for AR glasses to not be needed? Still some details to work out here, but the drawings look impressive.
Smart Phone To Smart Contact Lenses? Samsung Wins Patent
AR glasses may soon become…
From insideHPC
Silicon Catalyst Announces Three Newly Admitted Startups to Semiconductor Incubator
Today the Silicon Catalyst announced the admission of three early-stage companies into the semiconductor industry’s highly acclaimed incubation program. "It’s with great pleasure that we welcome these three, exciting early-stage…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Programmer at Global Science & Technology
Global Science & Technology is seeking an experienced HPC Science Programmer in our Job of the Week. "The successful candidate will work with a group of scientists and software developers at the Satellite Oceanography and Climatology…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Designing Designs
Our one time connection point at MIT's Center of Bits and Atoms talks about design of designs. And as he puts it 'Learning Representation'. In the interim we can make things better by doing things faster, making more of
Morphogenesis…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI in Experimental Architecture
Fascinating approach, here we are talking physical architecture, but could the same approach for business model and process? Design in general? Whole thing is worth reading, with lots of links to related papers.
AI & Architecture…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Patterns in Recycling Waste Streams
Consider the complexity of recycling waste, a major reason it is not re-used efficiently enough is the cost of sorting it. Training data would be interesting to see.
Recycling Centers Roll Out AI-Trained Robots
The Wall Street…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Readying for 5G and Advanced Gaming
Had read that 5G will widely increase phone gaming.
Qualcomm, Tencent agree to collaborate on gaming devices, 5G
By Stephen Nellis in Reuters
(Reuters) - Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) and Tencent Holdings Ltd (0700.HK) said on Monday they…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Japan Funding in Robotics and Automation Tasks
Japan renews funding for AI, automation and robotics innovation.
Nikkei Asian Review
Minako Yamashita
July 29, 2019
The Japanese government will solicit research proposals for cyborg and other advanced technologies, with those selected…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Details of VxWorks Vulnerability Found by Armis
More on the topic mentioned recently about extensive vulnerability of common embedded OS.
200 Million Devices—Some Mission-Critical—Vulnerable to Remote Takeover
in Ars Technica
by Dan Goodin
Researchers at California-based security…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Most Everything is now Vulnerable
As part of a project, I am looking at hacking vulnerabilities, and have been following some of the security press. Another remarkable discovery. That the vulnerabilities in the VxWorks embedded OS exists in hundred of millions…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Piglet Squid Video
Really neat. 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 insideHPC
NCSA to help build world’s most powerful geospatial system
NCSA has announced a new collaboration to produce digital elevation models (DEM) of the entire Earth, among other geospatial research projects. "This is the beginning of building a long-term strategic relationship between NGA…
From Schneier on Security
More on Backdooring (or Not) WhatsApp
Yesterday, I blogged about a Facebook plan to backdoor WhatsApp by adding client-side scanning and filtering. It seems that I was wrong, and there are no such plans. The only source for that post was a Forbes essay by Kalev Leetaru…
From insideHPC
Nimbix HPC Cloud Powers US Sailing Team
Today Nimbix announced their collaboration with the US Sailing Team (USST) as the “Official Compute Partner of the US Sailing Team.” For us, it is all about providing the team with fast access to high-performance cloud computing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Avoiding Blockchain Mistakes
Nicely done set of cautions, including strong mention of 'smart contracts'. Has passed this to colleagues.
7 blockchain mistakes and how to avoid them
The blockchain industry is still something of a wild west, with many cloud
…
From insideHPC
DAOS: Scale-Out Software-Defined Storage for HPC/Big Data/AI Convergence
As an all-new parallel file system, DAOS will be a key component of the the upcoming Aurora supercomputer coming to Argonne National Laboratory in 2021. "DAOS is an open source software-defined scale-out object store that provides…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cautions when using RPA
Good piece with cautions about the use of RPA. Most notably, its about task, not process. And I agree, but process is also made out of tasks, and you have to start with tasks. But more powerful implementations consider the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Changing Science
The race is on. But how creative can this be? The problems I see still require lots of data gathered in a given exploratory context. The lots of data is one thing, but the context is harder yet. Now you could test lots
How…
From Schneier on Security
Disabling Security Cameras with Lasers
There's a really interesting video of protesters in Hong Kong using some sort of laser to disable security cameras. I know nothing more about the technologies involved....
From The Eponymous Pickle
China Quantum Drones
Exactly what this means, claims should be followed.
First 'Quantum Drone' Takes Off
IEEE Spectrum
By Charles Q. Choi
Researchers at Nanjing University in China have developed a quantum drone to serve as an airborne node in a future…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
JSON parsing: simdjson vs. JSON for Modern C++
JSON is the ubiquitous data format on the Internet. There is a lot of JSON that needs to be parsed and validated. As we just released the latest version of our fast JSON parser (simdjson), a reader of this blog asked how it compared…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
The Electoral College: Is It Good?
A old unpublished result, some new published results [ Playbill ] Alexander Hamilton was a framer of the U.S. Constitution. He wrote the bulk of the Federalist Papers (FP) defending the Constitution. Today he is best known for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dynamic Pricing with Electronic Shelf Labels
An idea we did lots of prototyping with, shelf tags that could update prices electronically and display information about product. We tested a number of ideas with consumers. Seems Kroger was about to roll out the idea
Has…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Accelerating Neural Networks
Lots of work underway in making nets faster, and extending their architecture.
DarwinAI Generative Synthesis Platform and Intel Optimizations for TensorFlow Accelerate Neural Networks in GlobalNewswire
DarwinAI-Intel Combination…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hacking the Dash Button
Tom Warren in The Verge writes about the fast approaching demise of the Amazon Dash Button. With some interesting use experience comments. Also points to some ways that their lifeless shells can be hacked to perform other tasks…
From Schneier on Security
How Privacy Laws Hurt Defendants
Rebecca Wexler has an interesting op-ed about an inadvertent harm that privacy laws can cause: while law enforcement can often access third-party data to aid in prosecution, the accused don't have the same level of access to…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
What Programming Concept Do I Use?
I’ve been programming a long time. I wrote my first computer program in 1972. I think the parents of some of my students were not even born yet. So it’s hard to remember what it is like to be a beginner. Late last school year…