Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2014
From Computational Complexity
Richard Lipton Wins Knuth Prize
Georgia Tech professor and fellow blogger Richard Lipton will receive the 2014 Knuth Prize at the upcoming FOCS conference in Philadelphia. The Knuth Prize is given jointly by the ACM SIGACT and the IEEE TC-MFCS for major research…
From Schneier on Security
Two New Snowden Stories
New Zealand is spying on its citizens. Edward Snowden weighs in personally. The NSA and GCHQ are mapping the entire Internet, including hacking into Deutsche Telekom....
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Research on History of Cognitive Assistants in Business
A number of past blog posts here, over a number of years, have been mentioned in Jim Spohrer's Paper: "More Research on the History of Cognitive Assistants in Business" in his service science archive. This indexes some of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Communities Work Better than Networks
We observed this too, just watching your network grow does not buy you anything. You also need a community with purpose, alerts and measures. Says the HBR. I will add to that, the communities can also have little value if…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Cities as Big Opportunity
In the Cisco Blog. A pretty common thought. Consider a city as an internet of many things. What can be done to improve, enhance and monetize the resulting mega network? First I have seen numbers to support the effort. Useful…
From Apophenia
Am I a Blogger?
On July 25th, I was asked to address thousands of women (and some men) at the 10th annual Blogher conference. I was asked to reflect on what it meant to be a blogger and so I did. You can watch it here: Or you can read an edited…
From The Eponymous Pickle
MIT CSAIL
Had a reminder of MIT work with AI. They influenced us, especially in manufacturing and sensor based applications of data AI. And more about their history and projects underway.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Computational Thinking and Beyond
Since Jeannette Wing described computational thinking (CT) in her 2006 Communications of the ACM article, it has gone beyond computer science and now become a “hot topic” within educational technology communities of practice.…
From Schneier on Security
Security of the SHA Family of Hash Functions
Good article on the insecurity of SHA-1 and the need to replace it sooner rather than later....
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 15 September 2014
Overshadowed, at least in the US, by the anniversary of the attack by terrorists on New York and the Pentagon, last week also included Programmers Day. Apparently started in Russia when Dmitry Medvedev issued an executive order…
From My Biased Coin
Simultaneous Enrollment
The Crimson has an op-ed on simultaneous enrollment, that I agree with.Harvard does not like simultaneous enrollment, which means a student taking two classes that meet at the same time -- any time overlap counts (whether the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mayo Clinic Trials and Watson
In CIO: The use of Watson for clinical trials. Note the use of natural language interaction. Key for what IBM is seeing as cognitive advisory applications. " ... Mayo clinicians will leverage Watson's natural language processing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Three Vs vs Decision Process in Analytics
Three big Data Vs. I agree with the premise, the decision process is more important than labels. " .... Tony Cosentino, vice president and research director at research and advisory services firm Ventana Research, sees unanticipated…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smell Maps in the City
Interesting work in FastCompany. With a geographic visualization. We looked at a similar idea in retail, to influence shopping behavior. But we did not get anywhere as far as this. " ... “Smellmaps” Chart City Odors…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Getting Organized
Most years I have had a rough plan of what I wanted to teach. I use the term “plan” loosely there. My granularity tended to be a week rather than a day. I knew the topics and the order of the topics but day by day plans tended…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Some Strange Math Facts
Things we did not know Ulam holding a strange device Stanislaw Ulam was a Polish-American mathematician whose work spanned many areas of both continuous and discrete mathematics. He did pioneering research in chaos theory and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cool DARPA Projects
Good overview, interesting ideas. Often, as it says, addressing important real-world, civilian issues." ... The experimental projects of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) often bring to mind the tech found…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bio Inspired Design for Cognitive Assistants
By Jim Spohrer: In a piece about articles relevant to the topic, he writes: " ... Third, this article made me think more about the question – what is the difference between a “good tool” and a cognitive assistant? CAD systems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Disappearance of Software Patents
In the US at least. Software patents are rapidly disappearing as it is understood that software is not patentable. Interesting view and comments too. I sent this on to people that should be in the know to determine if this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SRI Cognitive Agents
Cognitive Agents that Learn and Organize" ... SRI has dubbed its new project CALO, for Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes. The name was inspired by the Latin word "calonis", which means "soldiers servant". The goal of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digitizing the Customer Decision Journey
From McKinsey: A Thoughtful piece. " ... In a world where physical and virtual environments are rapidly converging, companies need to meet customer needs anytime, anywhere. Here’s how.Many of the executives we speak with in…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: 200-Pound Squid Found in Gulf of Mexico
A 200-pound dead giant squid was found near the coast of Matagorda, Texas. This is only the third giant squid ever found in the Gulf of Mexico. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kellogg Consumer Centric Data Case Study
An Ad from Aimia." ... Transforming CPG Loyalty With Consumer Centric Data It is an exciting time for the CPG industry. Building loyalty with consumers is no longer limited to retailers, airlines and hotels. CPG's also have…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Data and C Level Value
In CIO. Lots of stories to tell here. Not too much different than it has always been when translating any kinds of analytics to executives. But now the promise of value and its scale may be greater. Also, many execs are…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NYC ASCENT Postdoc Best Practices Program Launched
Below is a Press Release from the Columbia University School of Engineering, published September 11, 2014 about the NYC ASCENT Kick Off. Many of New York City’s most promising engineering postdocs joined leading representatives…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A View of the Future of Analytics
Short post from IBM's AnalyticsZone Blog on The current state of analytics and visualization. There you can sign up for the Watson Analytics beta. But it just asks for an email address to get back to you later, which is what…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIST Global City Challenge Kick-Off
As a follow-on to the Smart America Challenge, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in partnership with US Ignite, is launching the Global City Teams Challenge to advance the deployment of Internet of Things…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP Improves its Visualization, Analytics
Good to finally see this. It seems they had fallen behind for some time. " ... SAP has made a series of updates to its InfiniteInsight predictive modeling software and Lumira data-visualization tool in a bid to shore up its…
From Schneier on Security
The Concerted Effort to Remove Data Collection Restrictions
Since the beginning, data privacy regulation focused on collection, storage, and use. You can see it in the OECD Privacy Framework from 1980 (see also this proposed update). Recently, there has been concerted effort to focus…
From Putting People First
[Video] Digital Amnesia (VPRO, 2014)
![[Video] Digital Amnesia (VPRO, 2014)](/system/assets/0000/1953/030209_Vanderbeeken_Mark_250.small_square.jpg?1476779420&1260281963)
Our memory is dissipating. Hard drives only last five years, a webpage is forever changing and there’s no machine left that can read 15-year old floppy disks. Digital data is vulnerable. Yet entire libraries are shredded and…