Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2018
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Vectorized shifts: are immediates faster?
Our processors are all equipped with vector instructions also called SIMD (single instruction multiple data). One common instruction is the “shift”. Roughly speaking, a shift is either a multiplication by a power of two or aContinue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Invades Advertising
Podcast and text. How will this change their assistants?
Amazon Has Officially Invaded The Advertising Industry
By Collin Colburn, Analyst, Forrester
Retailers and security: perception versus reality
Forrester Analysts Brendan…
From insideHPC
Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov Joins Buck Institute to fight Aging with AI
“The Buck has been at the forefront of asking the most important questions in the field. Now, with the latest in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence, and with the involvement of world-class experts like Dr. Zhavoronkov…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Does a Slack Alternative
Been using Slack for some time on a project by project basis. Does I think promote focus. Email can be very fragmented among the noise. Are the new Hangouts better?
Google's Slack alternative is available starting today
Despite…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Product Management Competencies
Nicely done. Take it beyond to process management understanding and competencies. And their interaction with Products.
Product Management Is Key to Digital Business Success
by Deacon D.K. Wan in Gartner
A growing number of firms…
From insideHPC
Alibaba Cloud launches ECS Baremetal Instances in Europe
Infrastructure and security will continue to be crucial as the foundation and fundamental consideration for enterprises undertaking cloud migration. In view of this, Alibaba Cloud will launch ECS Baremetal Instance, a new high…
From insideHPC
HPCG Benchmark offers a alternative way to rank Top Computers
“The LINPACK program used to represent a broad spectrum of the core computations that needed to be performed, but things have changed,” said Sandia researcher Mike Heroux, who created and developed the HPCG program. “The LINPACK…
From insideHPC
Announcing the 2018 HPC-AI Competition in APAC
Today the HPC AI Advisory Council announced the 2018 APAC HPC-AI Competition. Co-sponsored by National Supercomputing Centre in Singapore, the 2018 APAC HPC-AI Competition will start on March 27, 2018 and continue until August…
From insideHPC
NSF Sponsors EPiQC ‘expedition’ for Practical Quantum Computing
University of Chicago computer scientists will lead a $10 million “expedition” into the burgeoning field of quantum computing, bringing applications of the nascent technology for computer science, physics, chemistry, and other…
From Schneier on Security
Apple to Store Encryption Keys in China
Apple is bowing to pressure from the Chinese government and storing encryption keys in China. While I would prefer it if it would take a stand against China, I really can't blame it for putting its business model ahead of its…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Watson Does Assistance
Akin to smart home assistants now all around us?
IBM Watson is heading to space in an 11-pound smiling orb called CIMON by Duncan Riley in SiliconAngle.
IBM Corp.’s Watson is heading to space, specifically the International Space…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talk: Artificial Intelligence - How Developers Benefit Today
Our latest talk from Cognitive Science Institute, join us!
Thursday Mar 1, 2018 10:30am – 11:30am (EST) via Larry Clevenger IBM
Zoom meeting Link: https://zoom.us/j/7371462221
Zoom Callin: (415) 762-9988 or (646) 568-7788 Meeting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon to Acquire Ring Doorbell
Somewhat unusual, Amazon acquiring a third party smart home capability. Link to in-home delivery approaches? Could lead to better compatibility between systems. My Ring won't talk to my Amazon video enabled devices.
Amazon…
From The Eponymous Pickle
HAMR Microbots
Took early looks at very small and collaborative robotics. And don't forget the very small is likely also disposable. And is a sensor whose goals can be multi-tasked.
You Can't Touch Harvard's New Ambulatory MicroRobot Evan…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Should Bots Lie?
What does it mean when any kind of agent in a collaboration lies? Room for risk analyses here.
Should AI bots lie? Hard truths about artificial intelligence in ZDNet
AI will revolutionize the world, or so sayeth Silicon Valley…
From insideHPC
New Intel Movidius AI Program Enables Developers to Go To Market
Today Intel unveiled “AI: In Production,” a new program that makes it easier for developers to bring their artificial intelligence prototypes to market. Since its introduction last July, the Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick…
From insideHPC
Mid-career Women help build SCinet with WINS Apprenticeship at SC17
In this special guest feature, Alisa Alering from ScienceNode writes that a team of women engineers helped build SCinet as part of the WINS program at SC17. “A lot of these women come from small schools, and they may not normally…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Inverse Reinforcement Learning
This was generally new to me. But seems like it could be very useful, in understanding the behavioral reaction of consumers to advertising or marketing. Note relationship to reinforcement learning.
Inverse Reinforcement Learning…
From insideHPC
The Mont-Blanc project: Updates from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Filippo Mantovani from BSC gave this talk at the GoingARM workshop at SC17. "Since 2011, Mont-Blanc has pushed the adoption of Arm technology in High Performance Computing, deploying Arm-based prototypes, enhancing system software…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Having Meaningful Conversations
I recently tried the Alexa Chatbot 'winner', and was not impressed overall. The piece below addresses this. Real, meaningful (not just tricking someone into thinking its a person) conversation remains hard. It is a holy
Amazon…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF/VMware Partnership on Edge Data Computing Infrastructure
Contributions to this blog were provided by Gera Jochum, Communications Specialist, in the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the National Science Foundation and CCC Vice Chair Mark D. Hill…
From insideHPC
How Spectre and Meltdown Could Affect Future Processors
In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Adrian Giordani reports on recent vulnerabilities found in many modern CPUs. "These problems are here for the long term until the next generation of silicon processors…
From insideHPC
High Availability HPC: Microservice Architectures for Supercomputing
Ryan Quick from Providentia Worldwide gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Microservices power cloud-native applications to scale thousands of times larger than single deployments. We introduce the notion of microservices…
From Schneier on Security
Cellebrite Unlocks iPhones for the US Government
Forbes reports that the Israeli company Cellebrite can probably unlock all iPhone models: Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that's become the U.S. government's company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smelling Moth Brains are Smarter
It's not news that biological neural networks are very different from those used in artificial neural networks (ANN) we still don't know how the former work. The odor/aroma aspects were of interest when we looked at mechanisms…
From BLOG@CACM
Why Code Comments Still Matter
Some believe that commenting code is bad, but comments still matter in our programs.
From Schneier on Security
E-Mail Leaves an Evidence Trail
If you're going to commit an illegal act, it's best not to discuss it in e-mail. It's also best to Google tech instructions rather than asking someone else to do it: One new detail from the indictment, however, points to just…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Recreating Seen Images
A long term goal, and have seen many such claims as to the precision to which this might be possible. Looked at it for product recognition at one time, but was then very inadequate. The use of EEG in particular is interesting…
From insideHPC
HPC Carpentry Learning Portal Offers an Intro to HPC
The good folks at HPC Carpentry have posted a new set of teaching materials designed to help new users take advantage of high-performance computing systems. No prior computational experience is required - these lessons are ideal…
From insideHPC
Video: Intel Ships Stratix 10 TX FPGAs for Multi-Terabit Network Infrastructure
Today Intel announced it has begun shipping its Intel Stratix 10 TX FPGAs, the industry’s only field programmable gate array (FPGA) with 58G PAM4 transceiver technology. "In this smart and connected world, billions of devices…