Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2023
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Get Ready for womENcourage™ 2023: Europe Gears Up to Celebrate Women in Computing
The 10th ACM Celebration of Women in Computing: womENcourage™ 2023 will be hosted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, 20-22 September 2023.This year’s theme is Computing Connecting…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Celebrating Technology Leaders Episode 13: Inspiring Women of DevOps
In episode 13 of “ACM-W Celebrating Technology Leaders,” our host, Bushra Anjum, spoke with three technologists with successful DevOps careers to learn from their experiences, both as DevOps engineers and as women in the field…
From Schneier on Security
Parmesan Anti-Forgery Protection
The Guardian is reporting about microchips in wheels of Parmesan cheese as an anti-forgery measure.
From insideHPC
VMware and NVIDIA Partner on Generative AI for Enterprises
August 22, 2023 — VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) and NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today announced the expansion of their partnership with a focus on generative AI. The companies said VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA will enable enterprises…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Solicitation – Research Security and Integrity Information Sharing Analysis Organization
The National Science Foundation (NSF), through the Office of the Chief of Research Security Strategy and Policy (OCRSSP), is seeking to establish an independent Research Security and Integrity Information Sharing Analysis Organization…
From BLOG@CACM
Face It, Self-Driving Cars Still Haven't Earned Their Stripes
Edge cases remain a serious, unsolved problem, $100 billion later.
From BLOG@CACM
What If Generative AI Turned Out to be a Dud?
Some possible economic and geopolitical implications.
From Schneier on Security
Applying AI to License Plate Surveillance
License plate scanners aren’t new. Neither is using them for bulk surveillance. What’s new is that AI is being used on the data, identifying “suspicious” vehicle behavior:
Typically, Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR)…From insideHPC
Harvard Uses Google Cloud to Clone Supercomputer for Medical Research Runs
A Harvard scientist used Google Cloud Platform compute resources to construct an HPC clone to conduct heart disease study, according to a Reuters story, “a novel move that other researchers could follow to get around a shortage…
From BLOG@CACM
Duped No More: Navigating the Maze of Social Engineering Schemes
The best way to guard against becoming a target of social engineering is to familiarize yourself with the strategies, psychological hooks, and technological means that attackers employ.
From Computational Complexity
Why I have some sympathy for the Simulation Theory (We are all characters in a video game.)
There are some people who believe that we are all characters in a video game written by Abisola (this is sometimes called The Simulation Hypothesis). I first dismissed this as nonsense. Then I read about it in the great book…
From insideHPC
Ikigai Labs Raises $25M to Bring Generative AI for Tabular Data
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 24, 2023 -- Ikigai Labs, a company focused on generative AI for tabular data, today announced $25M of new capital by Premji Invest with participation from Foundation Capital and e& capital. The capital will…
From Schneier on Security
White House Announces AI Cybersecurity Challenge
At Black Hat last week, the White House announced an AI Cyber Challenge. Gizmodo reports:
The new AI cyber challenge (which is being abbreviated “AIxCC”) will have a number of different phases. Interested would-be competitors…From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
How far can you hear? Modelling distant birdsong.
by Dan Stowell, Queen Mary University of London How do we know how many birds there are out there: in the countryside, and in the city? Usually, it’s because people have been sent out to count the birds – by sight but especially…
From BLOG@CACM
Machine Learning: the Road to Artificial Intelligence?
In the mid-1990s, data-driven, statistical, and empirical methods have taken the field of artificial intelligence (AI) by storm. In the last two decades, machine learning (ML), with its modern-day reincarnation in the form of…
From Geeking with Greg
AI letter signers not worried about doomsday AI
An article in Wired, "A Letter Prompted Talk of AI Doomsday. Many Who Signed Weren't Actually AI Doomers":
A significant number of those who signed were, it seems, primarily concerned with ... disinformation ... [or] harmful…
From Geeking with Greg
Challenges using LLMs for startups
Someone (not an AI expert) was asking me about applying large language models (LLMs, like ChatGPT) to a particular product. In case it's useful to others, here's an edited version of what I said.
When thinking about LLMs for…From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Brand Fish Sauce
Squid Brand is a Thai company that makes fish sauce:
It is part of Squid Brand’s range of “personalized healthy fish sauces” that cater to different consumer groups, which include the Mild Fish Sauce for Kids and Mild Fish Sauce…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Transcoding Latin 1 strings to UTF-8 strings at 12 GB/s using AVX-512
Though most strings online today follow the Unicode standard (e.g., using UTF-8), the Latin 1 standard is still in widespread inside some systems (such as browsers). It captures the first 256 characters from the Unicode standard…
From Schneier on Security
Bots Are Better than Humans at Solving CAPTCHAs
Interesting research: “An Empirical Study & Evaluation of Modern CAPTCHAs“:
Abstract: For nearly two decades, CAPTCHAS have been widely used as a means of protection against bots. Throughout the years, as their use grew, techniques…From insideHPC
ADLINK Announces COM-HPC Module
SAN JOSE, Aug. 15, 2023 — The ADLINK COM-HPC-cRLS Client type Size C module based on 13th Gen Intel Core processor is available for order with: o up to 13th Gen Intel Core i9 processor, 16 Performance-cores, 8 Efficient-cores…
From insideHPC
DOE Awards $16M for Particle Accelerator Research
Aug. 17, 2023 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $16 million in funding for research projects in particle accelerator science and technology. Total funding is for projects up to three years in duration, with $8.4…
From Schneier on Security
Detecting “Violations of Social Norms” in Text with AI
Researchers are trying to use AI to detect “social norms violations.” Feels a little sketchy right now, but this is the sort of thing that AIs will get better at. (Like all of these systems, anything but a very low false positive…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
How Smartphones and Watches are Revolutionizing Global Health
Previous CCC Council Member Shwetak Patel’s research was recently featured in a ZME Science article “Can we screen the world? How smartphones and watches are revolutionizing global health (and just getting started)”. A new frontier…
From Schneier on Security
UK Electoral Commission Hacked
The UK Electoral Commission discovered last year that it was hacked the year before. That’s fourteen months between the hack and the discovery. It doesn’t know who was behind the hack.
We worked with external security experts…From insideHPC
Los Alamos Reports Hardware Approach Offers New Quantum Computing Paradigm
Aug. 15, 2023 — Los Alamost National Laboratory reported today that a potentially game-changing theoretical approach to quantum computing hardware avoids some of the complexity found in quantum computers. The strategy implements…
From insideHPC
AI Startup Portkey.ai Secures $3M Funding
San Francisco – August 23, 2023: Portkey.ai is today announcing a $3m seed funding round empowering engineering teams to build and launch generative AI apps faster. The funding round was led by Lightspeed with participation from…
From insideHPC
Quantum Physicists from Quantinuum and Chubu University Team on Quantum AI and Cognition Research
Oxford and Kasugai, Japan, August 23, 2023 – Quantum computing company Quantinuum and Chubu University in Japan have announced a partnership, co-led by Professors Bob Coecke and Masanao Ozawa. Their goals is to establish an interdisciplinary…
From insideHPC
D-Wave Announces Performance of New Quantum Hybrid Solver
BURNABY, B.C., PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 22, 2023 — Quantum computing systems and software company D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) today announced an update to its Constrained Quadratic Model (CQM) hybrid solver in its Leap…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA Announces AI-Ready Servers from Dell, HPE and Lenovo for Generative AI
August 22, 2023 — NVIDIA today announced system manufacturers will deliver AI-ready servers that support VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA, announced separately today, designed to help companies customize and deploy generative…