Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2020
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC: Is Amazon’s Graviton2 Ready for Prime (Time)?
The show starts on a high note, with Henry’s audio being amazingly echo free. Usually we hear a lot of echo as Henry talks, which is due to the rammed earth walls of his new abode, plus the fact that there isn’t any carpeting…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Rhode Island's State Appetizer Is Calamari
Rhode Island has an official state appetizer, and it's calamari. Who knew? 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
KDD 2020 Data Mining Conference Goes Virtual Aug. 23-27
The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM SIGKDD) will hold its flagship annual conference, KDD 2020, virtually, August 23-27. The KDD conference series, started…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Considering, Designing the Quantum Internet
Most interesting upcoming ACM talk. An area we are now exploring. Register at the link.
Title: Quantum Networks: From a Physics Experiment to a Quantum Network System
Date: Tuesday, September 01, 2020 Duration: 1 hour
Time…
From insideHPC
Arm and DARPA Announce 3-Year Development Agreement
Arm and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have announced a three-year partnership agreement to “enable the research community that supports DARPA’s programs to quickly and easily take advantage of Arm…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Hits Quantum Volume of 64 in Deployed System
How useful is this for real problems in context? Looking for some write up on that and will report here. Statement of volume metric below is useful. Note this is a 6 Cubit system.
IBM hits new quantum computing milestone
The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart is Growing
Though I rarely use them online, their stores are more impressive these days. Apparently adjusted well to Covid.
Walmart keeps growing and growing and … in Retailwire
by George Anderson in Retailwire, with expert discussion.
Walmart…
From Putting People First
You are not your data but your data is still you
New worlds need new language. TOne of those things to name is what is happening to ourselves and our data proxies. Expanding our language from privacy to personhood enables us to have conversations that enable us to see that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Scientists Build Ultra-High-Speed Terahertz Wireless Chip
More chips to support high speed AI applications.
Nanyang Technological University (Singapore)
August 5, 2020
Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and Japan's Osaka University have constructed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Search Algorithm Fairness Adjustments
In particular looking at search results.
Algorithm Improves Fairness of Search Results
Cornell Chronicle
Melanie Lefkowitz
August 17, 2020
Cornell University researchers have developed an algorithm to improve the fairness of online…
From Schneier on Security
Yet Another Biometric: Bioacoustic Signatures
Sound waves through the body are unique enough to be a biometric: "Modeling allowed us to infer what structures or material features of the human body actually differentiated people," explains Joo Yong Sim, one of the ETRI researchers…
From Putting People First
UX designer breaks down the “malicious” design of Trump’s campaign website
While UX designers are trained to be on the side of the user, there are ways that the user experience can be manipulated to be in favor of the "product" — in this case, a candidate. UX designer Mary Formanek broke down how this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cars Hands Free Very soon?
This suggests only lane keeping approaches. Though they see to be seriously on the way. Seems to be less regulatory interference.
Hands-Free Driving Could Be on U.K. Roads by Spring
BBC News
August 19, 2020
The U.K. government
…
From Putting People First
[Book] AI and UX: Why Artificial Intelligence Needs User Experience
The book explores the future of artificial intelligence (AI) through interviews with AI experts and explores AI history, product examples and failures, and proposes a UX framework to help make AI successful.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Scaling Quantum Chips
Implications of this as it matures? Scaling up the process of making real quantum processors
Scaling up the quantum chip
MIT engineers develop a hybrid process that connects photonics with “artificial atoms,” to produce the largest…
From insideHPC
Veteran Argonne Supercomputers Help Convert CO2 into Ethanol
By supercomputing standards, Argonne National Lab’s Bebop (1.75 terflops, stood up in 2017, bumped off the Top500 list after the June 2019 ranking) and Blues (stood up in 2012, ranked only that year) are somewhat anachronistic…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quiet Ornithopter Drones
Clear surveillance will take a different angle soon. Their use of 'biomimicry' uses birds to some degree. Differences are interesting, they can point to changes that would be useful. Biomimicry for emergent tech is often
High…
From Putting People First
Why computing belongs within the social sciences
This article argues [that] the well-publicized social ills of computing will not go away simply by integrating ethics instruction or codes of conduct into computing curricula. The remedy to these ills instead lies less in philosophy…
From Putting People First
[Book] The Anthropology of Epidemics
Published before global movement drew largely to a halt, before the majority of the earth’s human population was shut indoors and before words like ‘virus’ and ‘pandemic’ proliferated, this curated collection is today far more…
From insideHPC
I Really Don’t Care About TCO … It’s RCO I am Worried About
In this sponsored post by Adam Marko, Director of Life Science Solutions – Panasas, Inc., we look at what we are calling Research Cost of Ownership (RCO) and the effect of HPC storage downtime and reduced productivity on the
…
From Schneier on Security
Copying a Key by Listening to It in Action
Researchers are using recordings of keys being used in locks to create copies. Once they have a key-insertion audio file, SpiKey's inference software gets to work filtering the signal to reveal the strong, metallic clicks as…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Problems from Data Intensive Science
Quite interesting thoughts. Basically managing data for many needs, motivations, coming from many directions. And please, consider too the metadata, brought us to our knees many times!
Thorny Problems in Data (-Intensive) Science…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Loss of Jobs by Robotics, AI in the Pandemic
Can be expected as the virus drags on. More companies testing the ideas, and implementing them. Considerable piece based on surveys.
Millions of Americans Have Lost Jobs in the Pandemic—And Robots and AI Are Replacing Them Faster…
From insideHPC
Let’s Talk Exascale Podcast – ECP Leadership Discusses Highlights, Challenges, Impact
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is tasked with guiding the U.S. effort to build a “capable exascale ecosystem” by the early to mid-2020s and is part of the Exascale Computing Initiative, a partnership…
From insideHPC
UNC, RENCI Part of NSF Grant for Cloud Testbed
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and its Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) are part of a research team that has secured a $10 million grant to extend the cloud computing testbed project called Chameleon. The four…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automating Coding: MSIM
Automatic coding should be here. This provides a simple approach, but where will it work best? Where the context and intent can be well determined.
Automated Coding Could Mean Big Changes for Software Developers
By ZDNet in…
From insideHPC
Intel and Accenture Support Neuromorphic Research Project for Wheelchair-Bound Pediatric Patients
Intel and Accenture today announced support for an Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC) project led by the Neuro-Biomorphic Engineering Lab at the Open University of Israel in collaboration with ALYN Hospital. Using funding…
From insideHPC
UCSD’s Dr. Larry Smarr Named Tech Evangelist at Kazuhm
August 19, 2020—Kazuhm, a developer of technology and tools for maximizing IT efficiency, today announced that Dr. Larry Smarr will provide support to the Kazuhm leadership team as Technology Evangelist. With over 40 years of…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
What is the right information architecture for digital contact tracing?
The following is a guest blog from John Langford (Microsoft Research) and Stefano Tessaro (University of Washington) on finding the right information architecture for digital contact tracing. The information architecture of a…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Polinode and Microsoft Teams
Just informed of this and taking a closer look. Polinode and its advances have been mentioned here many times. For more about Polinode, see here.
Polinode Connects with MS Teams and Slack
Announcing Integrations with Microsoft…