Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2018
From The Eponymous Pickle
Maintaining Shopping Lists in Amazon Dash
I got a note from Amazon yesterday, indicating that one of my Amazon Dash items had been discontinued. And offered me a long list of substitutions. Have now been a 'subscriber' to Dash items almost from their beginning. The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple is Hiring Assistant Smarts
Expect to see some further rushes in this space"
Apple goes on hiring spree to improve Siri's smarts
It's determined to challenge Amazon and Google in the AI space. ...
By Jon Fingas, @jonfingas in Engadget .... "
From insideHPC
Video: The Challenge of Heterogeneous Compute & Memory Systems
Mike Ignatowski from AMD gave this talk at the Rice Oil & Gas conference. "We have reached the point where further improvements in CMOS technology and CPU architecture are producing diminishing benefits at increasing costs. Fortunately…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Location Aware Reminders and Intelligence
Always thought there should be better intelligence based on location. Here Google Home provides some capabilities. Now would like the detection to have multiple conditions, and have it able to do an implied search in between…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Practical Python Text Preprocessing
Preprocessing text often the most important and time consuming part. Here a step by step introduction in KDNuggets. Practical. With links to useful tools.
Text Data Preprocessing: A Walkthrough in Python
From insideHPC
Jobs of the Week: Software/Hardware Architects for Research Infrastructure at University of Southern Denmark
The eScience Center at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) is seeking Software/Hardware Architects for Research Infrastructure. "The eScience Center is now expanding its staff in all its core areas and expects to fill 6
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Long Now Meets Land Art
Some long ago encounters and conversations with folks that founded the Long Now Foundation reminded me again of Art in desert spaces. See also their recent advances in clock technology. Long term thinking is very rare, and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Where is the Shopping Opportunity with Voice Commerce?
Further statistics.
Shopping Opportunities for Voice Commerce by Tom Ryan in Retailwire
According to a survey from Capgemini, 40 percent of consumers predict that three years from now, they will be more likely to use a voice…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Alexa Skills Kit Console
I like the approach being used, easy to develop simple things. Though the broader AI architecture still needs expansion.
The New Alexa Skills Kit Developer Console Is Now Generally Available By Paul Cutsinger
Today, we are excited…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Market Squid in Alaskan Waters
Rising sea temperatures is causing market squid to move north into Alaskan waters. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines…
From The Eponymous Pickle
CSI Talk on Chess and AI
Yesterdays CSI Talk:
Slides All talks, slides and recordings when posted.
Talk by: Kesav VisWanadha: "AlphaZero 1 - Chess 0: How Modern AI is Reshaping Thought"
Abstract: Artificial intelligence in chess has existed for a long…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Needs Big Data
Yes, hardly needs to be stated, but good thoughts. All analytics, unless your problem is very simple, need enough data to create stable patterns, and then test them. The more data the better. If you think you have enough…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Autonomous Customer Care
Achieving Fully Autonomous Customer Care By Richard Crowe in CustomerThink
When it comes to customer care, the best customer experience is no experience at all because services just work the way the customer expects—the first…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Strategy to Beat the Odds
Back to the need to a reasonable risk analysis of strategic and operational plans.
Strategy to beat the odds
By Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, and Sven Smit in McKinsey
If you internalize the real odds of strategy, you can tame its…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning will Lead to Imagination Workers
In Think with Google: Machine Learning, Intelligence: Imagination.
" ... Marketers will be more important, not less
While machine learning and artificial intelligence hold a great deal of promise for brands, it’s understandable…
From insideHPC
Let’s Talk Exascale: Software Ecosystem for High-Performance Numerical Libraries
In this Let's Talk Exascale podcast, Lois Curfman McInnes from Argonne National Laboratory describes the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Development Kit (xSDK) for ECP, which is working toward a software ecosystem for high-performance…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hotel of the Future
We helped a major chain think about the hotel of the future. In some cases weirder than this.
The Hotel of the Future is Coming
The hotel of the future is coming, and it's a little weird
You may soon print a new toothbrush in
By…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 30th, 2018)
People who score higher on intelligence tests tend to have larger brains. Twin studies suggest the same genetic factors influence both brain size and intelligence. The effects of campaign contact and advertising on Americans’…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Context in Satellite Imagery
Nathan in Flowingdata shows a different kind of data imagery. Advanced Sat imagery handles this today, but recall doing it for forestry assets before that was common. Makes you think about context once again. Link through…
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: International Workshop on Parallel Programming Models in Oregon
The Eleventh International Workshop on Parallel Programming Models and Systems Software for High-End Computing (P2S2) has issued its Call for Papers. The event takes place in August 22 in Eugene, Oregon. "The goal of this workshop…
From insideHPC
Video: IBM Brings NVIDIA Volta to Supercharge Discoveries
In this video from GTC 2018, Adel El-Hallak from IBM describes how IBM and NVIDIA are partnering to build the largest supercomputers in the world to enable data scientists and application developers to not be limited to any device…
From insideHPC
Why the World’s Largest Telescope Relies on GPUs
Over at the NVIDIA blog, Jamie Beckett writes that the new European-Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT, will capture images 15 times sharper than the dazzling shots the Hubble telescope has beamed to Earth for the past three…
From Schneier on Security
Unlocking iPhones with Dead People's Fingerprints
It's routine for US police to unlock iPhones with the fingerprints of dead people. It seems only to work with recently dead people....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Excel Embeds the Knowledge Graph
This is the kind of thing I have been waiting for for some time. The integration of knowledge about data with the data itself. A kind of metadata. An extension of the now common idea of 'spell checking'. And using a 'knowledge…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Should you cache hash values even for trivial classes?
Hash tables are a fundamental data structure in computing, used to implement maps and sets. In software, we use hash values to determine where objects are located within hash tables. In my previous blog post, I showed that the…
From Schneier on Security
Facebook and Cambridge Analytica
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, news articles and commentators have focused on what Facebook knows about us. A lot, it turns out. It collects data from our posts, our likes, our photos, things we type and delete…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Distinguished Lecture – Hitting the Nail on the Head: Interdisciplinary Research in Computer Networking
Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Executive Council member Jennifer Rexford from Princeton University will present “Hitting the Nail on the Head: Interdisciplinary Research in Computer Networking,” part of the National Science…
From Computational Complexity
Almost Famous Quantum Polynomial Time
I have been playing with a new complexity class AFQP, defined in a yet-to-be-published manuscript by Alagna and Fleming. A language L is in AFQP if there is a polynomial-time quantum Turing machine Q such that for all inputs
…
From insideHPC
Video: NVIDIA Unveils DGX-2 Supercomputer
In this video, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang unveils the DGX-2 supercomputer. Combined with a fully optimized, updated suite of NVIDIA deep learning software, DGX-2 is purpose-built for data scientists pushing the outer limits of deep…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More on Watson Assistant
More on the announced service. This piece is interesting because it lists some specific current companies playing in the space with Watson. Chatbot style interactions in a number of business interactions rather than in the
IBM…