Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2025
From insideHPC
Argonne Releases Aurora Exascale Supercomputer to Researchers
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has released its Aurora exascale supercomputer to researchers across the world to support computing-driven discoveries. With powerful capabilities for simulation…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
New Year, New Goals: Celebrating and Advancing Women in Computing with ACM-W
Cigdem Sengul & Adriana Wilde At the ACM-W communications committee, we are happy to share updates on our ongoing and upcoming initiatives to support, celebrate, and advocate for women in computing. Whether you’re a student,…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Becoming a Senior Member of ACM: My Journey and Why You Should Consider It Too
By Dr Adriana WildeAbout a year ago, I made a decision that turned out to be a very rewarding experience in my professional life: I applied to become a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In the words…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
All India Celebration for Women in Computing
All India Celebration for Women in Computing (AICWiC 2024) is an annual community-building conference dedicated to increasing the participation, retention, and advancement of technical women. On 30th November 2024, the ACM-W…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
A sound social venture: recognising birds
Dan Stowell was a researcher at Queen Mary University of London when he founded an early version of what is now known as a Social Venture: a company created to do social good. With Florence Wilkinson, he turned birdsong intoContinue…
From Schneier on Security
CISA Under Trump
Jen Easterly is out as the Director of CISA. Read her final interview:
There’s a lot of unfinished business. We have made an impact through our ransomware vulnerability warning pilot and our pre-ransomware notification initiative…From insideHPC
Bodo.ai Open-Sources HPC Python Compute Engine
SAN MATEO, Calif., Jan. 27, 2025 — Bodo.ai, an open source start-up focused on transformative Python, has released its high performance computing engine for Python under the Apache License. The need to process ever-larger amounts…
From Schneier on Security
New VPN Backdoor
A newly discovered VPN backdoor uses some interesting tactics to avoid detection:
When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing…From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Oh no! Not again…
What a mess. There’s flour all over the kitchen floor. A fortnight ago I opened the cupboard to get sugar for my hot chocolate. As I pulled out the sugar, it knocked against the bag of flour which was too close to the edge… Luckily…
From Computational Complexity
People who live through two square years
44*44=1936.
45*45=2025. This year!
46*46= 2116.
Since my fake birthday is Oct 1, 1960 (I do not reveal my real birthday to try to prevent ID theft), which is past 1936, and I won't live to 2116 unless Quantum-AI finds a way toSince…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Regular expressions can blow up!
Regular expressions, often abbreviated as regex, are a powerful tool for pattern matching within text. For example, the expression \d*\.?\d+ would match a positive number such as 1.1 or 12. If designed and tested with care, regular…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Beaked Whales Feed on Squid
A Travers’ beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii) washed ashore in New Zealand, and scientists conlcuded that “the prevalence of squid remains [in its stomachs] suggests that these deep-sea cephalopods form a significant part of…
From insideHPC
$200M HPC Data Center for AI in Wisconsin Launched by DPO and Billerud
NEW YORK, Jan. 23, 2025 — Digital Power Optimization, Inc. (“DPO”), a developer and operator of power-dense data centers, today announced it has secured land and a power supply to develop a $200 million high-performance computing…
From insideHPC
Pipeshift Raises $2.5M for AI Infrastructure Platform
San Francisco – January 23, 2025: Today, AI infrastructure startup Pipeshift announced their $2.5 illion seed round to address the challenge of deploying open source AI models, launching a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enables…
From Schneier on Security
Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024)
Last month, Henry Farrell and I convened the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reimagining Democracy (IWORD 2024) at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center in Washington DC. This is a small, invitational workshop on the…
From insideHPC
DigitalOcean Launches Generative AI Platform
Austin, TX – January 22, 2025 – Today, scalable cloud provider DigitalOcean (NYSE: DOCN) introduced its new GenAI Platform at the company’s biannual developer conference, Deploy, in Austin, Texas. The GenAI Platform allows customers…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for CCC Council Member Nominations
Thank you to everyone who has nominated a colleague or nominated themselves for the opportunity to be a CCC Council member for the three-year term beginning July 1, 2025 and concluding June 30, 2028. Read more here. As a reminder…
From Computational Complexity
The Fighting Temeraire
From Schneier on Security
AI Will Write Complex Laws
Artificial intelligence (AI) is writing law today. This has required no changes in legislative procedure or the rules of legislative bodies—all it takes is one legislator, or legislative assistant, to use generative AI in the…
From insideHPC
QuEra: Quantum Budgets to Grow by 20%
Boston – January 22, 2025 – Research from neutral-atom quantum coputing company QuEra Computing indicates global budgets for quantum applications projected to rise nearly 20 percent in 2025, according to the company. The findings…
From insideHPC
White House Announces $500B AI Data Center Infrastructure Build-Out
The Trump Administration ended its first full day of business with a major AI business announcement, that hundreds of billions of dollars – potentially trillions of dollars – will be invested in the build-out of AI infrastructure…
From insideHPC
Liquid Cooling: Iceotope Names New CEO, Non-Executive Chairman
San Francisco and Sheffield, UK – January 15, 2025 – Iceotope, a liquid cooling for AI systems company, today announced two leadership appointments designed to transition the company from its roots in technology R&D to mass market…
From insideHPC
Seagate Introduces Hard Drive Capacities up to 36TB
FREMONT, CA, January 21, 2025 – Seagate Technology Holdings plc (NASDAQ: STX), a maker of of mass capacity data storage, today announced shipments of Exos M hard drive samples to select customers in capacities up to 36 terabytes…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC and CRA-I Respond to NTIA Request for Comment on Ethical Guidelines for Research Using Pervasive Data
Last week, CCC, in collaboration with CRA-Industry, submitted a Response to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), Department of Commerce’s Request for Comments: Ethical Guidelines for Research…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
I wandered lonely as a mass of dejected vapour – try some AI poetry
by Jane Waite, Queen Mary University of London Ever used an online poem generator, perhaps to get started with an English assignment? They normally have a template and some word lists you can fill in, with a simple algorithmContinue…
From Schneier on Security
AI Mistakes Are Very Different from Human Mistakes
Humans make mistakes all the time. All of us do, every day, in tasks both new and routine. Some of our mistakes are minor and some are catastrophic. Mistakes can break trust with our friends, lose the confidence of our bosses…
From insideHPC
Hammerspace a Finalist in 3 Categories of theCUBE Technology Innovation Awards
SAN MATEO, Calif. — January 20, 2025 — Hammerspace, the company orchestrating the next data cycle, has been recognized as a finalist in three categories of theCUBE Technology Innovation Awards, including “Most Innovative Tech…
From Schneier on Security
Biden Signs New Cybersecurity Order
President Biden has signed a new cybersecurity order. It has a bunch of provisions, most notably using the US governments procurement power to improve cybersecurity practices industry-wide.
Some details:
The core of the executive…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Checking whether an ARM NEON register is zero
Your phone probably runs on 64-bit ARM processors. These processors are ubiquitous: they power the Nintendo Switch, they power cloud servers at both Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, they power fast laptops, and so forth. ARM processors…
From Computational Complexity
Presidential Quiz!
I made up a quiz about the American Presidents here.
It has 40 questions. In the modern electronic age you can probably look up most or even all of the answers. So what to do about that?
1) The quiz is not for money or credits…