Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2017
From The Eponymous Pickle
Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms
Just Brought to my attention, much more detail at the link.
Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA)
Overview:
Researchers from MILA have pioneered the field of deep learning and deep neural networks (both discriminative…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Sets up Joint Research Lab with MIT
No specific mention of Watson in the article. Uses the word Cognitive. IBM also seems to have stopped most mentions of Watson in major advertising they support on TV. Yet Watson is still in use, I used it successfully in…
From Computational Complexity
Statistics on my dead cat policy- is there a correlation?
When I teach a small (at most 40) students I often have the dead-cat policy for late HW:
HW is due on Tuesday. But there may be things that come up that don't quite merit a doctors note, for example your cat dying, but are legit…
From insideHPC
Announcing the New MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab
Today IBM announced a 10-year, $240 million investment to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab. "The combined MIT and IBM talent dedicated to this new effort will bring formidable power to a field with staggering potential to advance…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA Volta GPUs to Help CDDS Advance Medicine with AI
Over at the NVIDIA Blog, Abdul Hamid Halabi writes that the Center for Clinical Data Science (CCDS) today received the world’s first NVIDIA DGX systems with Volta. "Soon, Boston-area radiologists will have AI “assistants” integrated…
From insideHPC
The Internet of Things and Tuning
"Understanding how the pipeline slots are being utilized can greatly increase the performance of the application. If pipeline slots are blocked for some reason, performance will suffer. Likewise, getting an understanding of the…
From insideHPC
Vanguard Infrastructures Teams with Cray for Cybersecurity
Today announced that the Company has signed a solutions provider agreement with Vanguard Infrastructures in order for Vanguard to develop, market, and sell on premise and cloud-as-a-service cybersecurity solutions that fuse supercomputing…
From insideHPC
Video: Europe’s HPC Strategy
Leonardo Flores from the European Commission gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Milwaukee. "High-Performance Computing is a strategic resource for Europe's future as it allows researchers to study and understand complex
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Examining the Bots Landscape
A visual look at the Bots Landscape, In Linkedin
Discussion Group in Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative
By Vladimer Botsvadze
The bots landscape will transform the customer service experience and fuel conversational e-commerce…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kinetic Jewelry
MIT's new 'living' jewelry are creepy robot beetles for your clothes
Not fashion meets function yet by Dani Deahl @danideahl
Last year, MIT and Stanford debuted a new type of robot that could crawl over the surface of your…
From Schneier on Security
Research on What Motivates ISIS -- and Other -- Fighters
Interesting research from Nature Human Behaviour: "The devoted actor's will to fight and the spiritual dimension of human conflict": Abstract: Frontline investigations with fighters against the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS), combined…
From The Eponymous Pickle
China's Digital Economy
A discussion and PDF paper with considerable data and statistics.
China’s digital economy: A leading global force by McKinsey
By Jonathan Woetzel, Jeongmin Seong, Kevin Wei Wang, James Manyika, Michael Chui, and Wendy Wong
China…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Center Store Resets (Again).
We were old hands at trying to better understand the center store. It was one thing we worked on in our innovation centers. So this article struck me. What tech can be best used to make this work? Store directories? With…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What can a Drone Carry Today?
A related question came up in the retail space, what can we reasonably deliver via a Drone today? What do we need to measure to calculate this as Drones improve? This outlines a way to think about the problem:
Can a Drone…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Overview of AI and Machine Learning
From a customer perspective, what is machine learning or AI?
by Natalie Petouhoff, Ph.D.
Wondering whether you should invest in AI and Machine Learning? That’s a question that the most innovative companies are considering.
It…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ultrasonic Attacks on Voice Devices
Alexa and Siri are vulnerable to 'silent,' nefarious commands in Endgadget by S. Dent Unheard voices could direct your smartphone to malicious websites. ....
Google home as well. Commands above 20K hz, ultrasonic frequencies…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Shop Home Depot with Voice Using Google Home
Another voice based shopping example in place. I would imagine that DIY interactions could often use visual interaction as well, so assuming the Google Home will provide that?
Home Depot adds ‘voice-activated’ shopping to the…
From insideHPC
Ohio Supercomputer Center open-sources HPC Access Portal
Open OnDemand is an NSF-funded project to develop a widely shareable web portal that provides HPC centers with advanced web and graphical interface capabilities. Through OnDemand, HPC clients can upload and download files, create…
From insideHPC
EPFL Building New Particle Detector for Large Hadron Collider
EPFL’s physicists are moving forward in their efforts to solve the mysteries of the universe. A particle detector made up of 10,000 kilometers of scintillating fiber is under construction and will be added onto CERN's particle…
From insideHPC
Interview: Jeffrey Schwab on Building the World’s Fastest Network at SC17
In this guest feature, Jeffrey Schwab describes his role as SCinet Chair at SC17 and how his team of volunteers is building the fastest and most powerful volunteer-built network in the world. "I believe the main attraction for…
From insideHPC
Announcing the EuroEXA Project for Exascale
Today, 16 organizations met at the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre to mark the start of the EuroEXA project and the commencement of the execution in the next stage of EU investment towards realizing Exa-Scale computing in Europe…
From My Biased Coin
Simulated Annealing for JPEG Quantization
I have a new paper on the arxiv (web page describing results, and full version** available) with two Harvard undergrads, Max Hopkins and Sebastian Wagner-Carrena (who may both be applying for grad school, and who are both great…
From insideHPC
The Intel Scalable System: Kick-Starting the AI Revolution
Like many other HPC workloads, deep learning is a tightly coupled application that alternates between compute-intensive number-crunching and high-volume data sharing. Intel explores how the Intel Scalable System can act as a
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cisco on Meetings
From the Cisco Blog, good points made, not very new, but worth repeating. Nothing on the possible use of AI attentive methods to gather data about what has happened.
Improving the Meeting Experience, One Click at a Time Jens…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Interpreting Machine Learning
Interesting piece, somewhat wordy with embedded technical aspect. But worth the read.
Ideas on interpreting machine learning
Mix-and-match approaches for visualizing data and interpreting machine learning models and results.By…
From Schneier on Security
Security Vulnerabilities in AT&T Routers
They're actually Arris routers, sold or given away by AT&T. There are several security vulnerabilities, some of them very serious. They can be fixed, but because these are routers it takes some skill. We don't know how many routers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa will be a Concierge
Its the ultimate kind of intelligence. We called it a concierge skill. Its not what you know, its who you know, or what you have that knows, and can apply it to your need. Its the simplest and most useful kind of dialog.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Will we all be Wearing Cams Soon?
Followed this once at the request of a retail research client. Tested it in the aisle. Will it now be common?
Why you'll wear a body camera
As costs go down, quality goes up and ease of use improves, wearable cameras will become…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Does Music Remix
Google’s Inside Music makes anyone a remix artist
It separates a song’s components, allowing you to turn them off and on.
By Mallory Locklear, @mallorylocklear ...
" ... You can check out Inside Music now and Google has made its…
From Schneier on Security
Security Flaw in Estonian National ID Card
We have no idea how bad this really is: On 30 August, an international team of researchers informed the Estonian Information System Authority (RIA) of a vulnerability potentially affecting the digital use of Estonian ID cards…