Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2012
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mining Unstructured Data
Information Management on: How to Mine Unstructured data. Good, fairly non technical view. We started doing this with external consumer comment data.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cloud Outage Risks
Another Amazon cloud outage makes you wonder about the real risks involved with using cloud services. Should you have a backup cloud for these kinds of events?
From My Biased Coin
Anniversary
Today I get to celebrate that I'm two years done with my three year stint as "Area Dean for Computer Science" (chair). Whoever the new person is, they're supposed to start July 1, 2013. I've already starting encouraging the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Manifest Destiny of AI
Walter Riker sends along a link to a thoughtful American Scientist article which asks a good question: " ... Will AI create mindlike machines, or will it show how much a mindless machine can do? ... " Our enterprise attempted…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Your Books are now Reading You
In the WSJ: Excellent piece on how book reading is now less than a solitary activity with e-books. The new books are also reading you and gathering and leveraging deep analytics about this activity." ... In the past, publishers…
From Wild WebMink
Solving NP-Complete Problems?
In preparing for the interview with the Java-based Drools Planner on FLOSS Weekly, my attention was grabbed by the claim it can solve NP-complete problems. You’ll need to watch the show to see how that worked out!
From The Eponymous Pickle
Capturing the Timing of Public Statements
I am doing a deeper study of time domain search engine Recorded Future for its potential use by a client. A recent blog entry opened additional thoughts about how it could be used. Now link that with quant data related to the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Assessing Networks
Thoughtful piece in the HBR blogs on assessing your network. Thinking of this as interesting " ... They came up with three components that would make members valuable to any network: They were part pack rat, part librarian…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Another Giant Squid Found
A dead 13-foot-long giant squid has been found off the coast of New South Wales.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.
From Schneier on Security
FireDogLake Book Salon for <i>Liars and Outliers</i>
Here's the permalink.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Labs Streams Live
The ACM Bulletin Announces:" ... For the first time, Microsoft Research will present its Faculty Summit in a virtual forum freely accessible by the public. On July 16 and 17, 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST)…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CSTB Releases Study on
The National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) released this morning a new report –
From Computational Complexity
Instance Compression
Some announcements: FOCS Accepts, ITCS Call and ToC Special Issue for Rajeev Motwani I'd like to highlight one of the new FOCS papers, New Limits to Classical and Quantum Instance Compression by MIT student Andrew Drucker which…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Strategy and Innovation
In Innovation Excellence: A good discussion of the difference between strategy and innovation. Obvious, perhaps, but innovation should be included to some degree in any strategy, to make sure you keep up with the changing…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
If Digital, Then Tracking: Big Data Analytics in Practice
Yesterday we
From Wild WebMink
Red Hat
Not every project hits the headlines. As I’ve been co-hosting FLOSS Weekly over the last few months, I’ve noticed a surprising number of projects showing up that handle cloud computing in useful ways and are staff by Red Hat…
From Schneier on Security
On Securing Potentially Dangerous Virology Research
Abstract: The problem of securing biological research data is a difficult and complicated one. Our ability to secure data on computers is not robust enough to ensure the security of existing data sets. Lessons from cryptography…
From Putting People First
Low2No smart services and informatics workbook published
The Helsinki Low2No project team just released a smart services and informatics workbook that was developed by ARUP and Experientia. Low2No is a broad project, initiated in collaboration with the Finnish innovation agency Sitra…
From BLOG@CACM
'Girls Can't Program in Their Heads': Gender and Games in the Computing Classroom
An overview discussion of the probems surrounding computing education in UK schools, particularly lack of participation in CS by girls. It is partly based on empirical data over several years, and partly my own speculation.
From The Noisy Channel
RecSys 2012 Industry Track
I’m proud to be co-organizing the RecSys 2012 Industry Track with Yehuda Koren. Check out the line-up: Ronny Kohavi (Microsoft), Keynote Online Controlled Experiments: Introduction, Learnings, and Humbling Statistics Ralf Herbrich…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Self Checkout Here to Stay
Correspondent Kevin Judd sends along an article making the case that the self-checkout is here to stay. I agree, the decrease in labor requirements in retail are too tempting to ignore. We examined the cost and training requirements…
From The Eponymous Pickle
MiniTel to go Dark on June 30
Ars Technica reports on the closure of Minitel, the popular French precursor to the Internet, on June 30. Apparently it is still is profitable to French Telecom. There were copies of Minitel-like services in a number of other…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Area 51
Complexity Theory Conspiracy Theories Graham Steel is a member of Team Prosecco at INRIA Paris-Roquencourt in France. He along with Romain Bardou of the related SECSI team at INRIA, and Riccardo Focardi, Yusuke Kawamoto, Lorenzo…
From Schneier on Security
Nuclear Fears
Interesting review -- by David Roepik -- of The Rise of Nuclear Fear, by Spencer Weart:
Along with contributing to the birth of the environmental movement, Weart shows how fear of radiation began to undermine society's faith…From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Reinventing Itself
Suggestion that Microsoft is in the midst of reinventing itself, with Windows 8 and more. In particular the fact that smartphones will increasingly become our platforms of daily interaction. So MS will need to be strongly involved…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Inserting Your Thoughts Anywhere in 3D
In FastCompany: This general idea has been around for some time, but it has never been implemented well. Consider the advertising implications." ... Itching to spray a wall with graffiti but not down with the whole civil disobedience…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
On Wednesday afternoon, before a standing-room-only audience in downtown DC, IBM Corp. held a briefing titled “Big Data: The New Natural Resource.”
From Putting People First
Dr Paul Bernal on the right to be forgotten
What is the right to be forgotten? How could it work
From Putting People First
Ethnographic research in a world of big data
In her final piece on ethnographic research in a world of big data (see earlier posts), Jenna Burrell, sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, seeks to answer a few remaining questions…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Surveying the Marketing Industry
In Analytics Magazine from Informs: IBM surveys the marketing industry, providing some interesting statistics about the relationship of IT and marketing needs. " ... finds that chief marketing officers and chief information…