Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2014
From The Eponymous Pickle
Senior Sensors
The need seems to be generating lots of solutions. Eldercare was pioneered by the Japanese, due to an aging population, we saw a number of examples at Fujitsu labs in a visit a decade ago. The CACM describes system examples…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retail Game Design from IKEA.
In ReadWrite Web: When I saw the mention I immediately thought. A retail maze as game. But it is also probably the main reason I have at times avoided going there. I see this piece quotesAlan Penn, at the UCL, and Space…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Risk for Sustainable Innovation
In Innovation Excellence:" ... Of the ten imperatives to Roberts Rules of Innovation, “No Risk… No Innovation” is arguably one of the most important. There are many possible roads to innovation, and unfortunately many of them…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microservices for an Enterprise
Had not thought about the concept, but InfoQ takes a critical look. Admit I needed a definition, which is embedded. A technical consideration of design, which in the past might have been called Widgets, and now might be called…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Simple Open Source Data Visualization
In GigaOM: Overview of a simple data visualization tool called Charted, with limited options that might be handy to visualize data from a URL. I have been analyzing some Windows analytics data monthly for some time. Excel…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Data Journalism Handbook
Have not yet looked at this, so cannot measure this free online source. But I have seen some very bad data visualization recently in USA Today being syndicated to local metro papers. This is just confusing the knowledge in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dawn of the Smart, Connected Home
The Smart Home was an early development area for our innovation centers. So we we followed what it meant to be connected, and the implications for commerce and marketing. For a long time the cost of building such homes made…
From The Eponymous Pickle
EU Right to be Forgotten Guidelines
The concept continues to intrigue. The EU delivers guidelines. Of course the very act of wiping yourself clean from popular searches draws attention to you. The WP provides a good outline of the idea and how it has been implemented…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach
Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach (Site) (Third edition) by Stuart Russell and Peter NorvigThe leading textbook in Artificial Intelligence. Used in over 1200 universities in over 100 countries. The 22nd most cited computer…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Bikes
Squid Bikes is a California brand. Article from Velo News. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning Blog on Technet
Introduced rather late to this. Looks to be a good resource. Most recently: " ... Microsoft’s Machine Learning technology got a bit of press coverage in the past week – here’s a quick round up of the major stories: 1. Internet…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Executives Understanding Emerging Technogy
I spent years explaining emerging technology to the C-Suite. So this article in CIO Insight reminded me of the complexity involved. We also worked this during the emergence of the commercial Internet, which started with executive…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lufthansa Outsources to IBM
In Reuters: Pointing to a $1.25 Billion agreement. With some mention of including some Watson based efforts.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Considering 'The Box'
In Innovation Excellence: Working inside the box. I like the idea. When we build models there are always constraints that specify 'a box' we operate in. You cannot ignore them. Just need to consider when and where we…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Process Models
Was recently reminded of some acronym based processes. Which are easy to remember, but also a little too cute. Notable and used in design is ADDIE: Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation. (Too wordy I think)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G Back to Product Sampling
A long time emphasis, being renewed. Trial is a powerful method." ... Procter & Gamble – the world’s biggest advertiser – is placing a renewed focus on product sampling, according to a report in Advertising Age. Dubbing the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Communicating with Brands
Just how do consumers want to communicate with brands? " ... Some brand communication practices — such as sending useful information or tailored emails based on past purchases — resonate well with consumers, but other proactive…
From Schneier on Security
Economic Failures of HTTPS Encryption
Interesting paper: "Security Collapse of the HTTPS Market." From the conclusion: Recent breaches at CAs have exposed several systemic vulnerabilities and market failures inherent in the current HTTPS authentication model: the…
From Schneier on Security
"Cooperating with the Future"
This is an interesting paper -- the full version is behind a paywall -- about how we as humans can motivate people to cooperate with future generations. Abstract: Overexploitation of renewable resources today has a high cost…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Shopping with Large Scale Touch Screens
E-Bay and so called 'Magic Mirror' systems in retail. We tested the idea extensively. Technology has continued to improve. See the tag shelf virtualization for related technology and applications, for both in store sales and…
From Putting People First
Why the world needs anthropologists – an update
Why the world needs anthropologists – Coming out of the ivory tower Location: Padua, Italy, Centro Culturale Altinate/San Gaetano Date and time: Friday, 5 December 2014, 13:00 – 18:00 Padua, Italy, 5 December 2014 – The second…
From Putting People First
Deep dive into drinking occasions
Five years into his role as head of strategic insights at Heineken UK, Mick Doran believes that the brewing industry is learning valuable lessons from other FMCG sectors in becoming more consumer inspired and brand led. “Since…
From Putting People First
Are we viewing consumers as humans?
Underneath all the shopping, online searching, and purchasing is a human being who takes a particular action for very personal reasons, writes Jure Klepic in The Huffington Post. Those reasons maybe based on a response to advertising…
From Putting People First
Intel, Tony Salvador, and design anthropology
Why would Intel need to conduct a tremendous amount of ethnographic research if all they are manufacturing are microchips? This short essay by Ioanis Hristodoulou eexamines Intel’s role in design anthropology on a worldwide context…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Cornell CS at 50
Plus a long-promised discussion on diagonalization TRUST security source Dexter Kozen has been on the faculty of computer science at Cornell for almost 30 of the department’s 50 years. He first came to Cornell 40 years ago as…
From Schneier on Security
New Snowden Documents Show GCHQ Paying Cable & Wireless for Access
A new story based on the Snowden documents and published in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung shows how the GCHQ worked with Cable & Wireless -- acquired by Vodafone in 2012 -- to eavesdrop on Internet and telecommunications…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Causality for Policy Assessment and Impact Analysis
From BayesiaLab. Nicely done live recorded lecture. To get the full extensive tutorial you need to register. The video is open without registration.New Video Lecture: Causality for Policy Assessment and Impact AnalysisPresenters…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Seeking More Humane Computing
IBM’s Brad Becker, chief design officer for Watson on the ‘More Humane’ Promise of Cognitive Computing, in a very thought provoking interview with Knowledge@Wharton. We always thought of cognitive systems as specialized, engineering…
From The Eponymous Pickle
API Innovation from McCormick
More innovation from the spice giant. " ... the company introduced FlavorPrint, a service that allows customers to create a personal profile and enter information on a Website and receive relevant ideas and recipes throughMore…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Preparation for Cloudification
Good short piece on the topic by Pearl Zhu.Cloudification is a journey to reinvent IT via modernization, classification, integration and optimization. ... More and more organizations are pushing their cloud envelop and migrate…