Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2017
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
ACM Public Policy Groups Release Guidance on Internet of Things Privacy and Security
The ACM U.S. Public Policy Council and the ACM Europe Council Policy Committee jointly released a Statement on Internet of Things Privacy and Security addressing existing and expected privacy and security concerns in the Internet…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Global Technology Policy Newsletter June 2017
ACM PUBLIC POLICY HIGHLIGHTS ACM provides independent, nonpartisan, and technology-neutral research and resources to policy leaders, stakeholders, and the public about public policy issues, as drawn from the deep technical expertise…
From BLOG@CACM
The Ethical Problem of Software Neglect
We call the problem of mediocre sofware "neglect," and we pitch it in ethical terms by noting that it illustrates a failure of the ethics of care.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Closing the Loop
From the Edge Foundation. A Conversation with Chris Anderson. I have worked with process control systems that are closed loop, and designed to be ... We have many in our lives, but many are hidden, from the lowly thermostat…
From Putting People First
Putting human thought behind chatbots
Business anthropologist Martha Bird’s specialty is designing technologies that work for people, creating conversational user interfaces and chatbots that can serve different professional audiences across different geographies…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tracking those Tracking You
Quite an interesting and detailed article. You wonder if the tracking efforts will change their systems to get around this. I recall reading about the number of 'flashlight' apps on smartphones, and it was long known that these…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIST Special Publication Draft- Securing Wireless Infusion Pumps in Healthcare Delivery Organizations
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the release of a draft Special Publication (SP) on Securing Wireless Infusion Pumps in Healthcare Delivery Organizations, which is now available for public comment…
From insideHPC
Jack Dongarra on ECP-funded Software Projects for Exascale
In this special guest post, Professor Jack Dongarra sits down with Mike Bernhardt from ECP to discuss the role of Dongarra’s team as they tackle several ECP-funded software development projects. "What we’re planning with ECP
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Teaching Robots Tasks
In Futurism: " ... artificial intelligence non-profit OpenAI just announced it has created an AI system that can learn to complete a task in reality after watching just one demonstration of that task in a simulated environment…
From insideHPC
NCSA Blue Waters Report Shows Economic Benefits of HPC
The importance of supercomputing on local and national economic prosperity has been highlighted by a recent study which reported that its Blue Waters project to be worth more than $1.08 billion for the Illinois’ economy. The
…
From The Noisy Channel
Prithiviraj, thanks for the kind words.
Prithiviraj, thanks for the kind words. As for NER systems for English text only recognizing named entities in title case, that’s usually a function of how they are trained. If they’re trained on sentences from grammatical long…
From Putting People First
IoT seeks to remake the fundamentals of our everyday lives
Murray Goulden writes in The Conversation that smart homes, wearables and the Internet of Things are indicative of the development of an entire class of technologies seeking to remake the fundamentals of our everyday lives. These…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Avoiding Left Turns
An example of a simple rule for a much more complex task. How many of these rules are there, and how many sub tasks exist?
Teaching a Driverless Car to Turn Left
The Boston Globe, Hiawatha Bray
Getting driverless cars to make…
From insideHPC
Horst Simon to be Program Chair for ISC 2018
ISC 2017 may be just around the corner, but the conference team is already busy planning the show for next year. Today they announced that Prof Horst Simon will be the ISC 2018 program chair. "ISC 2018 topics will embrace a range…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Safety via Understanding Patient Experience
Interesting example in the HBR. How can it be translated to other goals in other industries?
How U.S. Health Care Got Safer by Focusing on the Patient Experience
Thomas H. Lee, MD ... "
From insideHPC
Video: Optimizing HPC Service Delivery at Boeing
Jim Glidewell from Boeing presented this talk at the PBS Works User Group. "There are multiple elements to providing an effective and efficient HPC service. This presentation will share some of our strategies for extracting maximal…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
News Flash! School and Industry Are NOT The Same
Computer Science cheating has been a discussion lately. Not just in the NY Times article I referenced the other day (Cheating In Computer Science Class) but on Facebook, on Twitter, and other social media. One sort of rebuttal…
From insideHPC
HPC as a Service for High Performance Video Rendering
In the past 5 years, GPUs have gotten even more powerful so rendering tasks can be completed even faster than before. Katie (Garrison) Rivera, of One Stop Systems, explains how HPC can act as a service for high performance video…
From Putting People First
A cultural approach to wearables (and the design opportunities it provides)
In January of this year, Sakari Tamminen and Elisabet Holmgren of the Finnish/USA innovation agency Gemic, published a paper on EPIC entitled “The Anthropology of Wearables: The Self, The Social, and the Autobiographical“. A
…
From Putting People First
Intervista a Todd Harple di Intel sul tech-fashion
Il mondo del fashion sta diventando sempre di più digitale — e non si tratta solo di dispositivi da indossare, ma anche e soprattutto di abbigliamento, realizzato con tessuti in cui sono effettivamente integrati dei sensori in…
From Schneier on Security
Post-Quantum RSA
Interesting research on a version of RSA that is secure against a quantum computer: Post-quantum RSA Daniel J. Bernstein, Nadia Heninger, Paul Lou, and Luke Valenta Abstract: This paper proposes RSA parameters for which (1) key…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
On Becoming a Better Computer Science Teacher
Andy Ko, Associate Professor at the University of Washington iSchool and Chief Scientist & Co-Founder @answerdash has posted a blog and slide presentation from a talk he gave called How to be a great (CS) teacher. It’s the best…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building Compassionate Conversational Systems
Dear Professors, Students, IBMers and others,
This a reminder about our Cognitive Systems Institute Speaker Series, on Thursday, June 1, 2016 at 10:30 am ET US (7:30 am PT). Our speaker is Rama Akkiraju, IBM Research”, who will…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Patents Drone Delivery with Blockchains
Proposals for Drone delivery are not new. But Wal-Mart adds lock-box delivery and blockchains for tracking and identification. Showing their moves in combining advanced technologies.
Walmart submits patent for blockchain-based…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Goldilocks Principle And P vs. NP
The rule of three Wikimedia Commons source Robert Southey was the Poet Laureate of Britain from 1813 until his death in 1843. He published, anonymously, “The Story of the Three Bears” in 1837. Today Ken and I want to talk about…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Going AI First
All the indications are there, the data, especially dynamic data, is broad and deep. What should business reactions be?
Just Leaked: Google Preps to Invest Boldly in Artificial Intelligence
As Google goes AI-first, here's the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple's Neural Engine Plan
Bottom line, its all about the data. And its Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook that have the data. Lots of data. And all of these companies are expanding their machine learning to leverage the data. Looks like…
From Schneier on Security
Inmates Secretly Build and Network Computers while in Prison
This is kind of amazing: Inmates at a medium-security Ohio prison secretly assembled two functioning computers, hid them in the ceiling, and connected them to the Marion Correctional Institution's network. The hard drives were…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Essential Home as an Ambient OS
I like the term Ambient Computing or Ambient OS. It listens, answers, performs, adapts. A virtual assistant too. A more private, more home oriented device? Centralizing smart home actions. IFTTT like? Display too. Not…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pricing Models, Uber and Beyond
Some of our earliest analytics were to understand how products and services should be priced. Not to set prices, but to understand the overall pricing effect. Fixed, Dynamic, Demand-based? So the data science of this
Uber…