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 Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Separating Words: Decoding a Paper
A clever trick on combining automata John Robson has worked on various problems including what is still the best result on separating words—the topic we discussed the other day. Ken first knew him for his proof than checkers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Computing Power and a Quest for Intelligence
Interesting piece in MIT news today on their work with IBM and Google to receive a supercomputer, and get Google Cloud Credits, and the implications of how these will be used in a 'Quest for Intelligence'. Thoughtful points…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Including Smart Sensors in Building Design
Pointing to new studies about smart building architectural design.
Using smart sensor technology in building design in TechXplore by San Diego State University
Have lights turned on automatically when you walk into a room? Does…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Workshop Report Released: Identifying Research Challenges in Post Quantum Cryptography Migration and Cryptographic Agility
David Ott (VMware Research) and Chris Peikert (University of Michigan) provided contributions to this post. On January 31-February 1, 2019, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) held a workshop in Washington, D.C. to discuss…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Extreme Power and Cooling Efficiency at DownUnder Geosolutions
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at an interesting presentation on Power and Cooling by Stuart Midgley from DownUnder Geosolutions. Their 250 Petaflop “Bubba” supercomputer uses immersive cooling for extreme density…
From insideHPC
Call for Submissions: ISC 2020 Contributed Program
ISC 2020 has issued it Call for Submissions for its Contributed Program. The conference takes place June 21-25, 2020, in Frankfurt, Germany and will be attended by over 3,700 attendees and 160 exhibitors. The event will continue…
From insideHPC
ExaNeSt Project Successfully Builds Prototype for Exascale
In this video, researchers describe the results from the ExaNeSt project. "The prototype is now successfully built, demonstrating energy efficiency in a High-Performance Computing (HPC) testbed: the energy consumed for solving…
From insideHPC
Video: The SX Aurora TSUBASA (Vector Engine)
Deepak Pathania from NEC gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "The NEC Vector Engine Processor was developed using 16 nm FinFET process technology for extreme high performance and low power consumption. The Vecor Engine Processor…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Exposure in a Supply Chain
Interesting examination of a massive supply chain and its exposure to threats. Seems any complex supply chain should have this done, and repeated as contexts change.
Here are 3 key players in Apple’s massive supply chain
By Ethan…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Reproduce-ability Crisis
Science requires enough information to reproduce a result that is claimed. But does not mean that a result cannot be consistently useful even if not formally 'reproduced', And what then does 'reproducing' mean? It will
Notable…
From Computational Complexity
this paper from 2015 cracks Diffie-Hellman. What to tell the students?
I am teaching cryptography this semester for the second time (I taught it in Fall 2019) and will soon tell the students about the paper from 2015:
Imperfect Forward Secrecy: How Diffie-Hellman Fails in Practice. There are 14
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Wifi Standard 6 Released.
Detailed piece. Apple mentioned Wi-Fi 6 being supported in the latest phones. Claims to be faster, and be more efficient for multiple users on a single network, promising for the smart home. But you will need to get new
Faster…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Autonomous Planning in Food Retail
Advanced Planning using machine learning techniques are suggested for procurement. We always had advanced planning, its just how well you could integrate it with predictions of demand, and in particular unusual elements of
The…
From Schneier on Security
Another Side Channel in Intel Chips
Not that serious, but interesting: In late 2011, Intel introduced a performance enhancement to its line of server processors that allowed network cards and other peripherals to connect directly to a CPU's last-level cache, rather…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building Knowledge Graphs
Have been looking at means of continuously and coherently connecting company data sources to analytical and AI methods. Most recently have looked at the idea of 'Knowledge Graphs'. Of interest, an upcoming webinar by Neo4j…
From Apophenia
Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On
I was recently honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Alongside Oakland Privacy and William Gibson, I received a 2019 Barlow/Pioneer Award. I was asked to give a speech. As I reflected on what got me to this place, I…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Verizon says 5G Will be Available Everywhere Mobile is
Not fully understanding this. I assume your hardware will have to deal with it, and recent announcements by major players have not mentioned it. Implications?
Verizon will launch home 5G everywhere mobile service is available…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Certainty is Unusual
Jason Brownlee does his usual good job of explaining important concepts. Here largely non technical. And this is perhaps the most important. Often the hardest to explain to decision makers, despite the fact that they deal…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cooperation is Central Issue of Our Time
It really has been the central issue of all time. Its just now we have to cooperate with so many people/things. Or at least have the opportunity to. And we now have have to cooperate with some some new things, that threaten…
From insideHPC
Deep Learning at scale for the construction of galaxy catalogs
A team of scientists is now applying the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance supercomputers to accelerate efforts to analyze the increasingly massive datasets produced by ongoing and future cosmological…
From insideHPC
Computational Evaluation of Cloud HPC with a Global Atmospheric Model
Daniel Arevalo from DeVine Consulting gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "Prompted by DoD priorities for modernization, cost savings, and redundancy, this project compared the performance of the NAVGEM on an in-house Cray
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Coaching with AI
Late to noting this, but thought it was interesting. How might this be more broadly delivered?
2019 U.S. Open gets new 'coach' with IBM's A.I. technology in Yahoo Finance
The Coach Advisor technology is said to be a "game-changer"…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Generating Text for All
Should we delight or be worried?
The world’s most freakishly realistic text-generating A.I. just got gamified By Luke Dormehl in DigitalTrends
What would an adventure game designed by the world’s most dangerous A.I. look like…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
ACM-W Connections–September 2019
Welcome from the ACM-W Chair September marks the beginning of a new year of programming for ACM-W and this one promises to be an exciting one. Our organization is growing and changing, reaching ever more widely across the globe…
From Schneier on Security
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at University College London on September 23, 2019. I'm speaking at World's Top 50 Innovators 2019 at the Royal Society in London on September 24,…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (September 14th 2019)
Streaming music makes up 80% of the revenue of the music industry. Revenue is up 18% for the first six months of 2019. This follows a record year in 2018 when the music industry reached its highest revenues in 10 years. Though…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Speeding up independent binary searches by interleaving them
Given a long list of sorted values, how do you find the location of a particular value? A simple strategy is to first look at the middle of the list. If your value is larger than the middle value, look at the last half of the…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA Powers Rosie Supercomputer at MSOE
An NVIDIA GPU-powered supercomputer named "Rosie" is at the heart of a new computational science facility at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. "Housed in a glass-walled area within the newly constructed four-story Diercks
…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Software Developer/SLURM System Administrator at Adaptive Computing
Adaptive Computing is seeking a Software Developer/SLURM System Administrator in our Job of the Week. The position is located in the Naples, Florida. "This is an excellent opportunity to be part of the core team in a rapidly
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hardening Encryption for Quantum Computing
Our own early look at QC aimed at very highly combinatorial problems, and some believe this will also provide methods to break encryption. Now there are efforts underway to solve this problem. I note all the claims made
Companies…