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 Eponymous Pickle
Do we Know How the Brain Works?
Have had conversations of late with people who have said: Look at neural nets they are modeled after brains. But the answer is still, no we don't. And we are still not close. Artificial neural models are very different…
From insideHPC
Massively Parallel Computer Aided Design of Nano-Transistors: When Physics Lets You Down
"In this talk, the capabilities of a state-of-the-art quantum mechanical device simulator will be briefly reviewed, insisting on the developed multi-level parallelization scheme and highlighting the fact that physics can lead…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Framework Software Engineer at GigaIO
GigaIO is seeking an HPC Framework Software Engineer in our Job of the Week. "GigaIO is a new start-up working on the leading edge of high performance networking, compute and storage infrastructure space. We continually experiment…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Structured Signals for Model Training
Technical but interesting point about how to add structured knowledge into otherwise non transparent networks. Examining further.
Posted by Da-Cheng Juan (Senior Software Engineer) and Sujith Ravi (Senior Staff Research Scientist)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sensing and AR/VR
Good to see AR/VR linked strongly to sensing capabilities. As is suggested this is the way we construct models of the word. Whether they be virtual or real life. It also allows us to link data to those worlds and drive…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple Shows Interest in Blockchain Tech
The fact that Apple is following this is significant. Apple Pay at least could have future implementations to consider. Comments below.
Cryptocurrency Has ‘Long-Term Potential,’ Says Apple Exec
Apple is “watching cryptocurrency…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Quantum Supremacy?
Quite a tease here. Have they really reached this goal? And what was the nature and form of the problem? See much more below. And at the link.
Google researchers have reportedly achieved “quantum supremacy”
Google's quantum…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My kindergarten story
Though I was a straight-A student for most of my high school and college years, I failed kindergarten. I have told this story many times but I realize that I have never dedicated a blog post to it. I ended up with a PhD fromContinue…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How far can you scale interleaved binary searches?
The binary search is the standard, textbook, approach when searching through sorted arrays. In a previous post, I showed how you can do multiple binary searches faster if you interleave them. The core idea is that while the processor…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Piglet Squid
Another piglet squid video. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here....
From My Biased Coin
Changing Times
An old friend from college sent me an e-mail, and it got me thinking. When I was an undergraduate at Harvard some significant number of years ago, I took the graduate level algorithms course offered by Michael Rabin and the
This…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple Overton Leading to Code Automation?
Increasingly moving towards automating many aspects of coding. In fact robot assistants that 'observe' the coding process could readily insure that secure, robust and repeatable methods were used when building AI systems.
On…
From Schneier on Security
Crown Sterling Claims to Factor RSA Keylengths First Factored Twenty Years Ago
Earlier this month I made fun of a company called Crown-Sterling, for...for...for being a company that deserves being made fun of. This morning, the company announced that they "decrypted two 256-bit asymmetric public keys in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
India Planning Big Face Recognition Program
Both China and India underway. Will we regulate it away?
India Planning Huge China-style Facial Recognition Program
Bloomberg By Archana Chaudhary
India plans to deploy a massive facial recognition system similar to China's…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cubans using Cryptocurrency
An example of how cryptocurrency is getting around regulation. Laundering money.
Skirting U.S. Sanctions, Cubans Flock to Cryptocurrency to Shop Online, Send Funds By Sarah Marsh in Reuters.
HAVANA (Reuters) - Jason Sanchez,…
From insideHPC
Atos opens AI Lab in Germany
Today Atos opened its German Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory in Munich. In this innovative environment, Atos is developing for its clients business solutions using AI and other cutting-edge technologies. “Our AI Lab is…
From insideHPC
Intel Ships Stratix 10 DX FPGAs
Intel today announced shipments of new Intel Stratix 10 DX field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). "Stratix 10 DX FPGAs with the new interfaces include the option to support select Intel Optane DC persistent memory dual in-line…
From insideHPC
DDN to acquire IntelliFlash Business Unit from Western Digital
Today DDN announced that it has entered into a strategic partnership with Western Digital Corp. that includes an agreement to acquire Western Digital’s IntelliFlash business. Additionally, the companies will expand their existing…
From insideHPC
A Simulation Booster for Nanoelectronics
Researchers from ETH Zurich have developed a method that can simulate nanoelectronics devices and their properties realistically, quickly and efficiently. This offers a ray of hope for the industry and data centre operators alike…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advancing AI in the Workplace: Ambient and Voice
Not un-expected, further intrigued about how much of it will be 'ambient', that is happening in the background and alerting the employee, and how much of it will be using voice control, after the very popular systems in the home…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pitfalls of Customer Participation
Tech will continue to make this more complicated ... and increasingly in real-time. You can control employees in specific ways, but customers usually only statistically.
Avoiding the Pitfalls of Customer Participation in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Technical Look at Electric Aircraft
A somewhat technical outline view of the challenges involved:
Why don't we have electric aircraft? by Dries Verstraete, The Conversation in TechXplore
Electric cars, trains, trams and boats already exist. That logically leads…
From Schneier on Security
New Biometrics
This article discusses new types of biometrics under development, including gait, scent, heartbeat, microbiome, and butt shape (no, really)....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Deep Learning Approach to Data Compression
Worked in a related space. Good high level description of what was done, but this is by its nature technical
In Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) :
A Deep Learning Approach to Data Compression
By Friso Kingma, Sep 19, 2019
The BAIR…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Oracle Plans Voice Digital Assistant to Integrate with MS Teams
Of interest because this implies that this assistant will integrate with office features, like Microsoft Teams. Below the introduction, much more in the article. Am a user of teams so will be interested to see how this works…
From insideHPC
Atos on the Road to Exascale with new Test Lab in Angers, France
Today Atos inaugurated its new global HPC Test Lab in Angers, France. The new 2,000 square meter test center, which has the capacity to host the equivalent of approximately 48 BullSequana supercomputers, provides Atos’ HPC customers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Is Amazon Go Failing and if so Why?
Pace of adoption may note indicate longer term use. I think it will have the power of novelty if run well enough in the right context. Will continue to follow.
Is Amazon Go heading for a hard stop?
by Matthew Stern In Retailwire…
From insideHPC
Aliro to make Quantum Computing accessible to any Developer
Today Aliro Technologies emerged from stealth with the closing of its $2.7 million seed round, led by Flybridge Capital Partners. "Aliro’s vision is to commercialize new software technologies that make today’s quantum hardware…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Samsung Smart Things and Smart Home data
Been following SmartThings for some time. Here an interview about the management and securing of data on Smart Home Platforms.
Smart home data is flowing for the Samsung SmartThings platform By Mark Albertson in SiliconAngle…
From insideHPC
Liqid Partners With ScaleMP to Introduce Liqid Memory
Today ScaleMP announced that it has partnered with Liqid Inc. to enable users of in-memory workloads to break beyond the server memory limitations and expand total system memory by order of magnitude over the DRAM installed,
…