Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2016
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The new C standards are worth it
The C language is one of the oldest among the popular languages in use today. C is a conservative language. The good news is that the language is aging well and it has been rejuvenated by the latest standards. The C99 and C11…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Reinforcement Learning and AI
This bears some relationship to looking directly at business process and attempting to control it directly. A kind of context simulation with rewards. Thus similar to game play and process control. I will follow in a post…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Awards $25M in new projects in support of the Computer Science for All Initiative
The following is a guest blog post fromAaron Dubrow, Public Affairs Specialist for theOffice of Legislative and Public Affairs (OLPA) at theNational Science Foundation(NSF), and Gera Jochum, Communications Specialist for the…
From Computational Complexity
Academic Rankings Foster Competition
This week US News and World Report released their undergraduate rankings earlier this week. A time for schools to brag. US News and World Report used to publish an actual weekly news magazine, now they mostly just focuses onengineering…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Dot Now Being Sold in Volume
Add Alexa to any room. Only $49.99
The All-New Echo Dot uses the same farfield voice recognition as Echo and is a convenient addition to any room of the house. Directly connect Echo Dot to speakers with an audio cable or via…
From insideHPC
Nvidia Expands Deep Learning Institute
Over at the Nvidia Blog, Jamie Beckett writes that the company's is expanding its Deep Learning Institute with Microsoft and Coursera. The institute provides training to help people apply deep learning to solve challenging problems…
From insideHPC
Video: Intel Scalable System Framework
Gary Paek from Intel presented this talk at the HPC User Forum in Austin. "Traditional high performance computing is hitting a performance wall. With data volumes exploding and workloads becoming increasingly complex, the need…
From insideHPC
PRACE Awards Time on Marconi Supercomputer
PRACE has announced the winners of its 13th Call for Proposals for PRACE Project Access. Selected proposals will receive allocations to the following PRACE HPC resources: Marconi and MareNostrum.
The post PRACE Awards Time on…
From insideHPC
OnDemand 3.0 Portal to Power Owens Supercomputer at OSC
"Were currently installing the most powerful supercomputer in the history of the center, but its just a roomful of hardware without fast and easy access for our clients, said David Hudak, interim executive director of OSC. OnDemand…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Starting high school in 2016
My oldest boy started high school this year. He goes to an accessible private school nearby. We went to a parent’s meeting last night. Personal electronics is banned from the school. So no smartphone. No portable game console…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtual Assistants Adapting to Us
Ultimately we will need more of this, although it is still probably a very subtle thing. Today, like in search, we just want an answer. As the answer becomes more complicated, the conversation will have to change to teaching…
From The Noisy Channel
Seniority Considered Harmful
Technical hiring in Silicon Valley aspires to be a meritocracy, but anyone who has looked at the data knows that there is rampant…
From Schneier on Security
Organizational Doxing and Disinformation
In the past few years, the devastating effects of hackers breaking into an organization's network, stealing confidential data, and publishing everything have been made clear. It happened to the Democratic National Committee,…
From Phys.org Technology News
Turbulence not as dangerous as flyers think
You're sitting in an aeroplane, maybe reading a book or watching a movie, a tray of unopened food in front of you. Suddenly, the plane jolts and starts to bump up and down. You grab hold of the armrest, hastily tighten your seatbelt…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Columbus Ohio Wins Smart City
In the CACM:
" .. And The Winner Is...Columbus! By Gary Anthes
Rust Belt city Columbus, OH, emerged as the high-tech winner among 78 U.S. cities competing in the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Smart City Challenge. DOT…
From Schneier on Security
Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet
Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
The Low-down on Speaking at GHC
So you're speaking at GHC16. What do you need to know? How can you prepare to be the best you can be? How do you calm your nerves?!
Although I wasn't lucky enough to have any submissions accepted to this year's conference, I have…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Great Innovative Idea- Weakly Supervised Cyberbullying Detection in Social Media
The following Great Innovative Idea is fromBert Huang, Assistant Professor of Computer Science atVirginia Tech. Huang presented his poster, Weakly Supervised Cyberbullying Detection in Social Media, at the CCC Symposium on Computing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GE Smart Appliances
GE Smart Appliances are now controllable through the Amazon Alexa Commands and IFTTT. New integration of smart home and Intelligence.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Science and Cortana Intelligence
Cortana Intelligence and Machine Learning Blog
Recent Updates to the Microsoft Data Science Virtual Machine
September 13, 2016 by Cortana Intelligence and ML Blog Team
Posted by Gopi Kumar, Principal Program Manager in the Microsoft…
From insideHPC
Podcast: How PyLadies are Increasing Diversity in Coding and Data Science
In this Intel Chip Chat podcast, Dr. Julie Krugler Hollek, co-organizer of PyLadies San Francisco and Data Scientist at Twitter, joins Alyson Klein to discuss efforts to democratize participation in open source communities and…
From insideHPC
Bright Computing Announces Reseller Agreement with SGI
"SGI and Bright Computing have been working together for the last year to provide our joint customers with enterprise level clustered infrastructure management software for production supercomputing, said Gabriel Broner, vice…
From insideHPC
HPC4mfg Seeks New Proposals to Advance Energy Technologies
Today the Energy Departments Advanced Manufacturing Office announced up to $3 million in available funding for manufacturers to use high-performance computing resources at the Department's national laboratories to tackle major…
From insideHPC
DDN Appliance Speeds WOS Object Storage
"The growing number of use cases that object storage can satisfy represents a huge opportunity for DDN especially as cases like collaboration and active archive for large and 'forever' data sets are concentrated in DDN customer…
From insideHPC
Nvidia Unveils Worlds First GPU Design for Inferencing
Nvidia's GPU platforms have been widely used on the training side of the Deep Learning equation for some time now. Today the company announced a new Pascal-based GPU tailor-made for the inferencing side of Deep Learning workloads…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
FTC PrivacyCon – Call for Presentations on Privacy and Security Research
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission seeks presentation proposals on the latest research and trends related to consumer privacy and data security for its next PrivacyCon to be held January 12, 2017 in Washington, DC. The event will…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Canada Seeks Input on Emerging Cybersecurity Challenges
The Government of Canada invites public input on effective measures to strengthen cyber systems, including those used for critical infrastructures. The comments will be used to identify and advance improvements to address current…
From insideHPC
The Future of HPC Application Management in a Post Cloud World
The prevalency of cloud computing has changed the HPC landscape necessaiting HPC management tools that can manage and simplify complex enviornments in order to optimize flexibility and speed. Altairs new solution PBS Cloud Manager…
From Schneier on Security
Leaked Stingray Manuals
The Intercept has published the manuals for Harris Corporation's IMSI catcher: Stingray. It's an impressive surveillance device....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retailers Struggling with Big Data
In Retailwire:
When RSR recently asked retailers about the status of capabilities related to capturing and analyzing Big Data, we found that no capability was reported to have been implemented by up to 50 percent of retailers…