Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2016
From The Eponymous Pickle
Curriculum for Cognitive Science
Fascinating new discussion I am participating in is underway. Follow along. Will pass along excerpts here.A New “Science of Cognitive Computing” CurriculumPosted by Jim Spohrer ...Currently, I am working on a new “scienceDouglas…
From XRDS
My Diary on the “The Hour of Code”
So what is Hour of Code? The Hour of Code is a global movement with an one-hour introduction to computer science, designed to demystify code, showing that anybody can learn the basics! Anyone anywhere can organize an Hour ofContinue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Giving your Assistant a Personality
How much personality does a virtual assistant need to get acceptance from the public? At what point is it entertainment, engagement .. even trust? Usually in a given context. Shades of the MS Paperclip, which was thought…
From Schneier on Security
The Fallibility of DNA Evidence
This is a good summary article on the fallibility of DNA evidence. Most interesting to me are the parts on the proprietary algorithms used in DNA matching: William Thompson points out that Perlin has declined to make public the…
From insideHPC
Agenda Posted for Exacom 2016 – Communication Architectures at Extreme Scale
The International Workshop on Communication Architectures at Extreme Scale has published its Advance Agenda. Now in its second year, Exacom 2016 will be held in conjunction with ISC 2016 in Frankfurt, the day-long event takes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Will A Robot Be Your Boss?
Inevitably. Maybe not your next boss. But soon. Also depends upon the definition of boss and robot ... but machine learning systems will be tracking what is done and needed, and some system will suggest what should be done…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIH Frontiers Lecture: World-Scale Personalized Learning Through Crowdsourcing and Algorithms
The Office of the Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institute of Health (NIH) invites you to attend World-Scale Personalized Learning Through Crowdsourcing and Algorithms on Wednesday, June 1, 2016, 3:30pm (EST)…
From The Noisy Channel
False positives suck, of course.
If you ignore the bigrams, then most of your results are irrelevant. Boost bigram matches a little bit? Then you still have a lot of…
From insideHPC
Call for Papers: International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing
The 13th IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing has issued its Call for Papers. The NPC 2016 event takes place October 28-29 in Xi'an, China.
The post Call for Papers: International Conference on Network…From insideHPC
Video: Lorena Barba Keynote at PYCON 2016
In this video from PYCON 2016 in Portland, Lorena Barba from George Washinton University presents: Beyond Learning to Program, Education, Open Source Culture, Structured Collaboration, and Language. "PyCon is the largest annual…
From insideHPC
Univa Grid Engine Adds Support for Docker Containers & Knights Landing
Today Univa announced the general availably of its Grid Engine 8.4.0 product. Enterprises can now automatically dispatch and run jobs in Docker containers, from a user specified Docker image, on a Univa Grid Engine cluster. This…
From insideHPC
Lustre and ZFS to Power New Parallel File System at LLNL
Today RAID Inc. announced a contract to provide Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) a custom parallel file system solution for its unclassified computing environment. RAID will deliver a 17PB file system able to sustain…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Beacons Doubling
Have seen and been asked about a number of applications. Our environment is becoming more aware, attentive to needs and requests. This is a form of location aware bots.Beacons Double This Year, On Way To 400 Million In Market…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Samsung Adds Ads to the Smarts
Have been a user of Samsung Smart TVs for some time now. Have noticed that updates to the OS have started to add more advertising oriented capabilities. Geeting closer to malware. We are not asked about these updates. Other…
From The Noisy Channel
Let Bigrams be Bigrams
I’ve spent most of my career advocating for the use of query understanding to improve search relevance. It’s not that I don’t value search…
From insideHPC
Do you like Water? Do you like Pumps?
The HPC industry is ever facing more and more challenges on various topics and especially a significant increase in cooling requirements. To meet those requirements, liquid cooling looks like the solution. But there is an alternative…
From Schneier on Security
Arresting People for Walking Away from Airport Security
A proposed law in Albany, NY, would make it a crime to walk away from airport screening. Aside from wondering why county lawmakers are getting involved with what should be national policy, you have to ask: what are these people…
From My Biased Coin
Class Evaluations, Again
I've not been blogging much, but I have an excuse now that class evaluations have arrived. By posting about the evaluations, the students know I read them. And perhaps if any future students see this it will inspire them to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Flashback for Mobile VR
In VRFocus: Microsoft’s FlashBack Aims to Redefine Mobile VRReal time rendering could be a thing of the past with this new concept ... Microsoft, well-known for its development of the augmented reality (AR) head-mounted display…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What the IOT will Disrupt
In SiliconAngle. This is fairly obvious, would like the suggestions presented a lower level, but it is still a good overview that is worth a scan. A look at the Bain & Company report previously mentioned here. With instructuve…
From insideHPC
Video: Neuromorphic Computing – Extreme Approaches to Weak and Strong Scaling
"Computer simulations of complex systems provide an opportunity to study their time evolution under user control. Simulations of neural circuits are an established tool in computational neuroscience. Through systematic simplification…
From insideHPC
Cavium Rolls Out ThunderX2 ARM Processor
Today Cavium announced ThunderX2, its second generation of Workload-Optimized ARM server SoCs. ThunderX2 targets high performance volume servers deployed by Public/Private Cloud and Telco data centers and high performance computing…
From Schneier on Security
Identifying People from their Driving Patterns
People can be identified from their "driver fingerprint": ...a group of researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California at San Diego found that they could "fingerprint" drivers based only on data…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Enough with the bogus medical studies!
Every week, we hear about how eating such and such food gives cancer, or how working out can save you from a heart attack. If you have been reading these studies with attention and changing your life to follow their recommendations……
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Monetizing Data
Some useful but very general thoughts. Some sort of direct monetary value and risk attribution under a given context would be most useful. We already have some idea of the value of particular cases of cleansed data, can that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Creative Titles Energizing Workers
I recall a few cases where people have revealed their non traditional and unusual business title, and I am more likely to remember them. In the HBR.
From Phys.org Technology News
Beijing tracks the elderly as they take buses, go shopping
These days, when people over 80 in Beijing take a bus, see a doctor or spend money, their activities are digitally tracked by the government, as part of an effort to improve services for the country's rapidly growing elderly…
From Computational Complexity
New Ramsey Result that will be hard to verify but Ronald Graham things its right which is good enough for me.
If you finitely color the natural numbers there will be a monochromatic solution to x+2y+3z - 5w = 0 There is a finite coloring of the natural numbers such that there is NO monochromatic solution to x+2y+3z - 7w = 0 More…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mapping Entrepreneurs
From insideHPC
Video: Climate Change, Chaos, and Inexact Computing
In this video from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Dr. Tim Palmer from the University of Oxford presents: Climate Change, Chaos, and Inexact Computing. "How well can we predict the climate future? …