Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2023
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Four and More Colors of Mathematics
A memorial to Wolfgang Haken (1928–2022) and more in the AMS Notices This month’s Notices of the American Mathematical Society for October 2023 has just been mailed to me. This issue is special in several ways: It is large and…
From insideHPC
$100M Series B for Generative AI Platform Writer
SAN FRANCISCO — Writer, a generative AI platform for enterprises, announced its Series B funding round of $100 million today. The round is being led by ICONIQ Growth with participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital and Insight…
From Putting People First
Digital border governance: a human rights based approach
This collaborative study, conducted by the UN Human Rights Office and the University of Essex, analyses the human rights implications of specific border technologies. It provides recommendations for States and stakeholders on…
From Schneier on Security
Using Hacked LastPass Keys to Steal Cryptocurrency
Remember last November, when hackers broke into the network for LastPass—a password database—and stole password vaults with both encrypted and plaintext data for over 25 million users?
Well, they’re now using that data break …From Putting People First
[Report] How green is household behaviour?
How Green is Household Behaviour? presents an overview of results from the 2022 OECD Survey on Environmental Policies and Individual Behaviour Change. The survey investigates household attitudes and behaviour with respect to…
From insideHPC
HPC News Bytes 20230918: New AMD CPUs, Intel FPGAs; Arm IPO and Strategic Pivot; AI for Science
A happy mid-September morning to you. Here's a hop (4:54) through recent HPC news, including: AMD launches new EPYC 8004 CPUs for energy- and space-constrained workloads; Intel announces new FPGAs going into its Innovation 2023…
From Computational Complexity
ACM to go paper-free! Good? Bad?
The ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) will soon stop having print versions of most its publications. Rather than list which ones are going paper free, I list all those that are not going paper free:Communications of the…
From Putting People First
UX needs a sense of urgency about AI
"UX professionals must seize the AI career imperative or become irrelevant", writes Jakob Nielsen in his blog UX Tigers, particularly with current AI-driven tools being "far from user-friendly with their clunky, prompt-driven…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Cleaning Squid
Two links on how to properly clean squid.
I learned a few years ago, in Spain, and got pretty good at it.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Readhere…From Schneier on Security
LLM Summary of My Book Beyond Fear
Claude (Anthropic’s LLM) was given this prompt: Please summarize the themes and arguments of Bruce Schneier’s book Beyond Fear. I’m particularly interested in a taxonomy of his ethical arguments—please expand on that. Then lay…
From insideHPC
TSMC Moves Its Renewable Energy Target Forward to 2040
HSINCHU, Taiwan, R.O.C., Sep. 15, 2023 – TSMC (TWSE: 2330, NYSE: TSM) today announced an acceleration of its RE100 sustainability timetable, moving its target for 100 percent renewable energy consumption for all global operations…
From Schneier on Security
On Technologies for Automatic Facial Recognition
Interesting article on technologies that will automatically identify people:
With technology like that on Mr. Leyvand’s head, Facebook could prevent users from ever forgetting a colleague’s name, give a reminder at a cocktail…From insideHPC
ISC 2024: Call for Presentations Is Open
Hamburg – Call for presentations at ISC 2024 is now open for scientists and engineers from academia, industry and government to contribute discussions of their work and discoveries. "The ISC conference and exhibition attracts…
From insideHPC
QuEra and Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology Partner on Quantum in Sejong City, South Korea
BOSTON and SEJONG CITY, South Korea and DAEJEON, South Korea – September 14, 2023 – Neutral-atom quantum comuting company QuEra Computing, the Sejong Special Autonomous City, and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology…
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 swampUP 2023 in San Jose, California, on September 13, 2023 at 11:35 AM PT.
The list is maintained on this page.
From Computational Complexity
Mr. Jaeger and The Scroll
There were three major influencers in my educational journey: Mike Sipser, my PhD advisor at Berkeley and MIT, Juris Hartmanis who founded the field of computational complexity and led me to it at Cornell, and Philip Jaeger,
From Schneier on Security
Fake Signal and Telegram Apps in the Google Play Store
Google removed fake Signal and Telegram apps from its Play store.
An app with the name Signal Plus Messenger was available on Play for nine months and had been downloaded from Play roughly 100 times before Google took it down…From insideHPC
NSF Invests $76M in 4 Physics Frontiers Centers – with an Accent on Quantum
Exploring, understanding and harnessing mysterious phenomena at the frontiers of physics are the aims of four research centers to be backed by $76 million in funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation through its Physics…
From insideHPC
Code Intelligence Launches LLM-Powered AI-Assistant for Software Security
Bonn, Germany, September 13th, 2023 – Code Intelligence today announced CI Spark, an LLM-powered AI-assistant for software security testing. CI Spark automatically identifies attack surfaces and suggests test code for them,
…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Final Reminder to Submit Challenge Problems Requiring AI/OR Collaboration
This is a final reminder to please submit your Challenge Problems which require collaboration between the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) disciplines by this Friday, September 15th at 11:59 pm ET. You…
From insideHPC
Quantum Corp. Announces Pre-Configured ActiveScale Cold Storage Bundles
SAN JOSE, Sept. 13, 2023 – Quantum Corporation (NASDAQ: QMCO), an unstructured data storage company, today announced pre-configured bundles designed to simplify purchasing and deploying Quantum ActiveScale Cold Storage, an S3…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Transcoding Unicode strings at crazy speeds with AVX-512
In software, we store strings of text as arrays of bytes in memory using one of the Unicode Transformation Formats (UTF), the most popular being UTF-8 and UTF-16. Windows, Java, C# and other systems common languages and systems…
From Schneier on Security
Zero-Click Exploit in iPhones
Make sure you update your iPhones:
Citizen Lab says two zero-days fixed by Apple today in emergency security updates were actively abused as part of a zero-click exploit chain (dubbed BLASTPASS) to deploy NSO Group’s Pegasus…From insideHPC
D-Wave Demonstrates Quantum Coherence Results with Fluxonium Qubits
PALO ALTO, Calif., BURNABY, B.C., — September 13, 2023 — Quantum computing company D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) announced progress in its development of high coherence qubits, with results expected to have a significant
…
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
New Testing Shows Progress and Opportunities for Improvement in Support of Chinese IDNs
By the China UA Local Initiative (CDNI) The number of Internet users in China recently surpassed 1 billion and China now accounts for about one-fifth of all Internet users worldwide. Given this significant milestone, it was an…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
2023 NAE Meeting
One of the new members they will welcome Telle Whitney has just been selected to be a new member of the National Academy of Engineering. I will see her at the next 2023 National Academy of Engineering’s annual meeting—where she…
From insideHPC
SiMa.ai Debuts Palette Edgematic for Edge ML Applications
SAN JOSE, Sept. 12, 2023 — SiMa.ai, an embedded edge machine learning company, today launched Palette Edgematic, a free visual development environment designed for organizations to get started with ML at the edge. With Palette…
From BLOG@CACM
The Life-or-Death Importance of Medical Device Security
Cybersecurity was not always top of mind when these devices were being created.
From Yoshua Bengio
Proposal for a Multilateral Network of Public Good AI Research Labs to Protect Democracy and Humanity
I have been thinking about this question for several months: what if AI continues to progress towards and beyond our abilities in areas where it…
L’article Proposal for a Multilateral Network of Public Good AI Research Labs to…From insideHPC
Quantinuum Announces Quantum Monte Carlo Integration Engine
CAMBRIDGE, UK, Sept. 12, 2023 – Quantum computing company Quantinuum said it has published details of their Quantum Monte Carlo Integration (QMCI) engine. The company said QMCI applies to problems that have no analytic solution…