Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2020
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Decoding Emotions?
A problem we spent much time on, depends on what you expect from such a classification. Much like: could you hire a human 'expert' to do this? Training and background? Implications and risk of error? What sensors are…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
What Role Can Computing Play in Battling the COVID-19 Pandemic?
How can computing technology impact global health, particularly with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic? Shwetak Patel, 2018 ACM Prize in Computing winner and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, addressed this…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
What Role Can Computing Play in Battling the COVID-19 Pandemic?
How can computing technology impact global health, particularly with regards to the COVID-19 pandemic? Shwetak Patel, 2018 ACM Prize in Computing winner and Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member, addressed this…
From insideHPC
Get Your HPC Cluster Productive Faster
In this sponsored post from our friends over at Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), we see that by simplifying the deployment process from weeks or longer to days and preparing pre-built software packages, organizations can become…
From Computational Complexity
Remembering 2000
FOCS 2000 took place in Redondo Beach, just south of Los Angeles, November 12-14. Certainly some great results such as the Reingold-Vadhan-Wigderson Zig-Zag Graph Product Expander construction that would lead to Omer Reingold's…
From insideHPC
Fujitsu to Ship 649 TFLOPS System with Fugaku Technology to Canon for ‘No-prototype’ Product Development
Technology from the world’s No. 1 supercomputer, Fugaku, located at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Japan, is making its way into the commercial sphere. Fujitsu Ltd. today announced that Canon, Inc., has ordered…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bouncing Balls and Quantum Computing
Of interest:
Bouncing Balls and Quantum Computing: A lighthearted method for calculating π is analogous to a fundamental algorithm for quantum computing.
By Don Monroe in Communications of the ACM, Oct 2020 p 10-12
Full article…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How expensive is integer-overflow trapping in C++?
Integers in programming languages have a valid range but arithmetic operations can result in values that exceed such ranges. For example, adding two large integers can result in an integer that cannot be represented in the integer…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Architecture Innovation Accelerates Artificial Intelligence
As part of the first day of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) David A. Patterson, who won the 2017 ACM A.M Turing Award “for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Architecture Innovation Accelerates Artificial Intelligence
As part of the first day of the Virtual Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) David A. Patterson, who won the 2017 ACM A.M Turing Award “for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Participation Washing?
ManyMona…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Double Episode, Including: IBM Power10 Chip
We’re finally starting to cut into our product backlog and, as a first, we’re presenting our special road trip double episode where Jessi and Dan traveled to the House of Henry, buried deeply in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We visit…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advances in Splitting Water into Hydrogen/Oxygen efficiently
This could be a very big deal, considerable details at the link. Had a job in a chem lab long ago that looked at this problem.
Researchers develop a solar tech that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen with record efficiency…From insideHPC
MemVerge Says Memory Machine Offers Big Memory That’s DRAM-Fast and Highly Available
Big Memory software specialist MemVerge today announced GA of Memory Machine software that, used with Intel Optane persistent memory, “fundamentally changes in-memory computing infrastructure,” according to the company. MemVerge…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Security Risk Analytics from IBM
Rarely carefully done in the enterprise, glad to see IBM doing this. Historically we worked with IBM on large scale problems, and don't remember them bringing this up often, so this is a good direction. Note the connection…
From insideHPC
NCMAS 2021 Call for Australia Supercomputer Access Open Until Oct. 26
The call for time on Australia’s largest supercomputers opens today and will remain open until 26 October 2020. The National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS) is the allocation scheme for access to Australian national…
From insideHPC
Granulate Says gCenter Panel Platform Boosts Server Power, Cuts Costs
Tel Aviv, Israel – Sept. 23, 2020 – Today, Granulate announced for the first time the general availability of what the company said is a real-time continuous optimization solution for server workload performance and gCenter panel…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mimicking the Sense of Touch
We examined how consumers interacted with product in retail.
Glove-Like Device Mimics Sense of Touch University of New South Wales Sydney Newsroom, Caroline Tang
A soft wearable device developed by engineers at the University…From The Eponymous Pickle
Research Teaches AI How People Move with Internet Videos
New ideas continuing to emerge. Here in how video can be enhanced, utilized.
Research Teaches AI How People Move with Internet VideosThe Michigan Engineer News Center
The project enables neural networks to model how people are…From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Puzzle Reviews by a Puzzle Writer
Not puzzling reviews Princeton University Press page Jason Rosenhouse is professor in the Department of Mathematics at James Madison University. His research focuses on algebraic graph theory and analytic number theory involving…
From insideHPC
Quantum: UChicago Researchers Show Qubits Retaining Information for Hours or Longer — ‘An Eternity’
Touting major potential implications for quantum computing, researchers at the University of Chicago have released a study in which they demonstrated control of “quantum memories of silicon carbide,” the ability to control individual…
From Schneier on Security
Documented Death from a Ransomware Attack
A Dusseldorf woman died when a ransomware attack against a hospital forced her to be taken to a different hospital in another city.
I think this is the first documented case of a cyberattack causing a fatality. UK hospitals had…From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Licenses OpenAI’s GPT-3 Language Model
Exclusively. Now this is very good and somewhat unexpected. Thinking of ways it might be used within the context of work needs in Teams. Say for example constructing documents that describe the agreements made a meeting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More on Endpoint Security
More on this topic by Cisco, see the other parts of this pointed to. Note its particular relevance for remote work.
Why Endpoint Security Matters in Protecting Remote Workers – Part 2 By Pat Correia
As attack surfaces expand…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Work by Microsoft Teams
Nice to see Microsoft Teams expanding their capabilities. Have now used Teams now many times, like it. Now lets see more assistance built in.
Microsoft aims to enable the future of work with new Teams features and devices By…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Europeans Would Consider Augmentation
Depends on what you mean by augmentation, we already pay for lots of it already. Health vs intelligence, vs requested assistance? Inevitable if properly demonstrated.
Majority of Europeans Would Consider Human Augmentation…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
A General-Audience Talk: How Computing May Change Our World
While the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) works to catalyze the computing community for the public good, we have rarely prepare talks suitable for the non-computer-scientist public. Fortunately…
From insideHPC
Graphcore Launches Global Partner Program
BRISTOL, England, Sept. 22, 2020 — Graphcore has announced the launch of its Elite Partner Program, a global network of channel partners helping to fulfil customer demand for the company’s AI compute platform, the IPU-M2000 and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
When Bots Negotiate, Will Human's Deceive?
Interesting piece that approaches the meaning of 'cooperation'.
When bots do the negotiating, humans more likely to engage in deceptive techniques by University of Southern California
Recently computer scientists at USC Institute…
From Schneier on Security
On Executive Order 12333
Mark Jaycox has written a long article on the US Executive Order 12333: “No Oversight, No Limits, No Worries: A Primer on Presidential Spying and Executive Order 12,333“:
Abstract: Executive Order 12,333 (“EO 12333”) is a 1980s…