Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2019
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Artificial Intelligence and the Challenge of Modeling the Brain’s Behavior
Yesterday morning at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) laureates Yoshua Bengio (2018 Turing Award), Edvard Moser (2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine), and Leslie G. Valiant (1986 Nevanlinna Prize and 2010 Turing Award)…
From Putting People First
Better care in the age of automation
Doteveryone, a UK charity focused on how technology is changing society, has published a report “Better care in the age of automation” that sets out how technology can support a sustainable, effective and fair social care system…
From Schneier on Security
Russians Hack FBI Comms System
Yahoo News reported that the Russians have successfully targeted an FBI communications system: American officials discovered that the Russians had dramatically improved their ability to decrypt certain types of secure communications…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robot Record Sales
Expect to see robotics in many new places.
World Record Sales for Robots as Sector Reaches $16.5 Billion in Investment in ZDNet By Greg Nichols
The International Federation of Robotics' (IFR) World Robotics Report found that…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Margaret Martonosi Selected as the New AD for CISE!
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is delighted National Science Foundation (NSF) Director France Córdova has selected Margaret Martonosi as the next head of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The AI Work of the Future Report
Having been seeing the AI hype of late, and getting questions from colleagues and clients as to that tt really means. This piece from MIT, pointed to by O'Reilly, is refreshing in that addresses what still cannot be done, needs…
From insideHPC
CSC Deploys Puhti Supercomputer from Atos
Finnish scientific computing took a big step recently with the launch of Puhti, a new Atos supercomputer at CSC's Kajaani Data Center. "With these new acquisitions, we are looking to the future and aiming to meet the needs of…
From insideHPC
AWS Launches EC2 G4 Instances powered by NVIDIA GPUs
Today AWS announced the general availability of G4 instances, a new GPU-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance designed to help accelerate machine learning inference and graphics-intensive workloads, both
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tracking Drugs with Blockchain
Another example of blockchain use for secure tracking and thus tracing. The regulation implied is not to specifically use blockchain, but to ensure secure tracking.
How pharma will soon use blockchain to track your drugs in…
From insideHPC
Podcast: The Dos and Don’ts of RFP Benchmarks
In this podcast, reviews a presentation on Benchmarks in HPC Procurement Tenders by Tricia Balle of Cray. She gave the talk at the recent Perth HPC Conference. "We discuss how benchmarks should and shouldn’t be used in RFPs,
…
From insideHPC
Video: Moore’s Law is Not Dead
Jim Keller from Intel gave this talk at the EECS Colloquium. "While it is true that certain vectors like transistor performance and power are showing diminishing returns, other vectors like transistor architecture, microprocessor…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Snorkel for Building Data for ML
This was new to me. But handling and selecting the data is the most important aspect of machine learning projects. In a recent project it included over 75% of the resource effort. And likely to be much more of the ongoing
Introducing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Company Building Brands to Sell only on Amazon
A direction we may see more of.
How one company is building brands to sell only on Amazon By Cale Guthrie Weissman in ModernRetail
Many digital brands are allergic to Amazon. Some, however, welcome it with open arms.
A growing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Optimal Neural Architecture
Thoughtful and useful piece. Though I don't seen how this is necessarily universally optimal, which is usually a broad claim. Link to full and technical paper below.
How to Construct the Optimal Neural Architecture for Your…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Material Holes Create Amazing Properties
An interesting discovery of the use of 'holes'. Consider all the advantages we have gotten from material science.
Researchers catalog defects that give 2-D materials amazing properties
Theoretical analysis distinguishes observed…
From Computational Complexity
Applicants to Grad School are too good. Here is why this might be a problem.
Sitting around with three faculty we had the following conversation
ALICE: When I applied to grad school in 1980 they saw a strong math major (that is, I had good grades in hard math courses) but very little programming or any…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Self-Flying Cargo Drones
Emergence of such capabilities will change transport.
Bell's New, Self-Flying Cargo Drone Hauls a Heavy Load in Wired
The all-electric APT 70 can tote up to 70 pounds, cruise at 75 mph, and cover 35 miles with a fully charged battery…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
HLF 2019 Kicks Off with a Q&A with ACM President Cherri Pancake (plus La La Lab and the Science of Music)
The 7th annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) has officially begun! Yesterday (September 21st) was the opening ceremony, which included a “science slam” on the history and founding of HLF from Andreas Reuter, Scientific Chairperson…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Podcast Intervew with Hilary Mason on GigaOM
Another AI practitioner talks about the advances and future of AI:
Voices in AI – Bonus: A Conversation with Hilary Mason By Byron Reese
On this Episode of Voices in AI features Byron speaking with Hilary Mason, an acclaimed
Listen…
From Schneier on Security
A Feminist Take on Information Privacy
Maria Farrell has a really interesting framing of information/device privacy: What our smartphones and relationship abusers share is that they both exert power over us in a world shaped to tip the balance in their favour, and…
From Schneier on Security
France Outlines Its Approach to Cyberwar
In a document published earlier this month (in French), France described the legal framework in which it will conduct cyberwar operations. Lukasz Olejnik explains what it means, and it's worth reading....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advances in AI Earthquake Prediction
We attended some early neural net applications meeting where this was proposed, and added some of our own thoughts. Nice to see this is evolving. Are there shaking patterns in the earth that reliably predict earthquakes? …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Skills for Productivity
Still, I think not good enough to really make me have a standard device on my desk at work. What can be done to really make it essential?
Review: 18 Alexa skills for productivity, collaboration and more in Computerworld
You can…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Learning and Revealing Private Data
Been looking at past articles of the Berkeley AI Group, and found an interesting aspect of data privacy examined. Can a neural network, while being trained, inadvertently learn and thus reveal pieces of data that happen to
Evaluating…
From insideHPC
HPE takes lead in Global Server Market
Today HPE announced it gained 1.5 percentage points in global market share, and attained a tie for the number one position in the server market during the second quarter of 2019, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server…
From The Eponymous Pickle
5G Coverage for IOT
Was recently asked to give an opinion of 5G use in the Cincinnati area for potential IOT applications, with mobility implications, and was pointed to this map. Which can be used US country wide. This particular map gives
…
From insideHPC
Video: AI for Science
Rick Stevens from Argonne gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "Argonne has launched an “AI for Science” initiative aimed at accelerating the development and adoption of AI approaches in scientific and engineering domains with…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
2019-2020 Celebrations
View the list of ACM-W celebrations of 2019-2020 Conference Area Date Languages ACM-W UK Inspire 2019 Kent, UK September 9, 2019 English womENcourage 2019 Rome, Italy September 16-18, 2019 English Chilewic Chile October 18, 2019…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Information Latency Study for DOD
I suggest that there are important latency conditions in many parts of large networked systems. For example in supply chains it can greatly change costs, effective responses, contract and goal compliance, risk analysis, decision…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (September 21st 2019)
Amputees suffer from lack of sensory feedback from the missing limbs. Researchers found it beneficial to provide artificial sensory feedback. More economically equal societies favor people with better genes, something referred…