Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2020
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Contact Tracing Apps
Intriguing piece I have only scanned so far. What got me most interested is that the tracing aspect included a considerable human element, at least if you were not willing to do lots of sharing of location information that could…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Transition 2020 & Accomplishments 2017-2020
The following is a letter from CCC Chair Mark D. Hill from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hello: Tonight the Computing Community Consortium transitions leadership and members, including me stepping down as Chair. Congratulations…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Computational Support for Substance Use Disorder Prevention, Detection, Treatment, and Recovery Workshop Report Released
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce the release of the Computational Support for Substance Use Disorder Prevention, Detection, Treatment, and Recovery Workshop Report! Chaired by Lana Yarosh from…
From insideHPC
A2I POWER Processor Core Contributed to OpenPOWER Community
The IBM-led OpenPOWER Foundation announced the contribution of the IBM A2I POWER processor core design and associated FPGA environment to the open source ecosystem. The release, which took place today at the Linux Foundation
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Seeing Around the Corner
The general idea has been brought up a number of times. Bouncing radar and cooperative systems can get more data, and if we interpret it to detect dangers, we can react. Even to things around the corner. Back to the better…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Banning Facial Recognition
What I have been thinking. Specifically, not generally accountable. Even if the major players stop doing this, others quickly will.
Bans on Facial Recognition Are Naïve. Hold Law Enforcement Accountable for Its Abuse
by Osonde…
From Schneier on Security
Android Apps Stealing Facebook Credentials
Google has removed 25 Android apps from its store because they steal Facebook credentials: Before being taken down, the 25 apps were collectively downloaded more than 2.34 million times. The malicious apps were developed by the…
From insideHPC
New, Open DPC++ Extensions Complement SYCL and C++
In this guest article, our friends at Intel discuss how accelerated computing has diversified over the past several years given advances in CPU, GPU, FPGA, and AI technologies. This innovation drives the need for an open and
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Columbus Connects Everyday Vehicles
Yet another example of using more sensors and connections to build intelligent management of vehicles within large systems. Just underway.
Pilot Test Begins for Tech to Connect Everyday Vehicles
IEEE Spectrum
Sandy Ong
June 19,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantum Computers, Quantum Sensors
Sensors gather measurement data, which is crucial to learning hypothesis about complex systems. Here an introduction to the concept of a quantum sensor.
Quantum sensor technology
“From quantum sensors to quantum computers”
Fraunhofer…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Taking a Problem Down a Peg
By blowing up its objects Composite crop of src1, src2 Joshua Greene and Andrew Lobb proved last month that every smooth Jordan curve in the plane and real , there are four points on the curve that form a rectangle with sides…
From Computational Complexity
Can you name a famous living Chemist? Can anyone?
I was re-watching the Greatest-of-all-time Jeopardy championship and the following happen (I paraphrase)
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Alex Trebek: The category is Chemistry and we have a special guest reading the clues.
Darling…
From insideHPC
Thomas Sterling Eulogizes Rich Brueckner, Ann Redelfs, Steve Tuecke, Lucy Nowell: 4 Leaders Lost to the HPC Community
At his annual keynote address closing out the ISC 2020 conference, Thomas Sterling, Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering at the University of Indiana, eulogized four members of the HPC community who died over the past…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IOT Devices in the Hotel Room
Intriguing aspects of IOT in hospitality. Has been less in the area of assistants than I expected.
Shedding Light (and Sound) on Hidden IoT Devices in Your Next Hotel Room
Carnegie Mellon University Human-Computer Interaction…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Computing Researchers’ Response to NSCAI’s First Quarter Recommendations
Contributions to this post were provided by members of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Fairness, Accountability, Disinformation, and Explainability (FADE) Task Force. The National Security Commision on Artificial Intelligence…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Catalyzing Computing Podcast Episode 25 – Game-Based Learning and Photovoltaics with Erik Verlage (Part 3)
A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. This is part 3 of Khari Douglas’ interview with Dr. Erik Verlage, a research scientist at MIT who creates digital learning…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Consortium for Confidential Computing
Intriguing new effort:
The Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) brings together hardware vendors, cloud providers, and software developers to accelerate the adoption of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) technologies and standards…
From Schneier on Security
iPhone Apps Stealing Clipboard Data
iOS apps are repeatedly reading clipboard data, which can include all sorts of sensitive information. While Haj Bakry and Mysk published their research in March, the invasive apps made headlines again this week with the developer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building Brain Like Synapses
And related to the last post, some work is progressing on doing functional mimicry:
Engineers design a device that operates like a brain synapse
Ion-based technology may enable energy-efficient simulations of the brain’s learning…
From insideHPC
insideHPC Special Report: Citizens Benefit from Public/Private Partnerships – Part 3
This special report sponsored by Dell Technologies, takes a look at how now more than ever, agencies from all levels of government are teaming with private Information Technology (IT) organizations to leverage AI and HPC to create…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Artificial Neural Nets More similar to Brains than We Thought
In our earliest uses of neural methods we actually worked with some brain scientists. And they were quick to point out that neural methods, though inspired by the brain, were nothing like them. So our thoughts of biomimicry…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Honeycode: Nocode App Builder
Expect to see more NoCode and visual app building to drive more applications.
AWS Launches a No-Code Mobile and Web App Builder in Beta: Amazon Honeycode by Steef-Jan Wiggers in Infoq
Recently, AWS announced the beta release
For…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blockchains for Clinical Data
Example of blockchain use in healthcare data applications.
South Korean Government Turns to Blockchain Tech to More Reliably Store Clinical Diabetes Data
Jun 29, 2020 at 08:46 UTC in Coindesk
The South Korean government wants to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robot Disinfecting a Food Bank
Would seem to be a very efficient use of robotics. Considerable detail and video about the process at the link.
CSAIL robot disinfects Greater Boston Food Bank
Using UV-C light, the system can disinfect a warehouse floor in half…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Wants a Big Piece of Self-Driving/Hailing
Been watching the extension of the smart home to the car by Amazon, interesting, but still weakly done. Now are they really seeing 'self driving' as a means of selectively delivering the customer to the product, as opposed
Amazon…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Knowledge Management
Important thoughts, though I think it is still rarely done very well.
Lauren Trees identifies trends in enterprise knowledge sharing and collaboration, researches cutting-edge ways to improve knowledge flow, and shares the findings…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Synthetic Data to Support Research
In a much less complex sense we used a method, connected to real sensors on systems, to construct sample datasets. The resulting ML could then be used as a testbed for proposed solutions. We were not worried in this case about…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Misconceptions about the Use of RPA
NIcely put, nontechnical piece. In particular I liked the comments about its difference between BPM modeling models. All users considering its use should follow up on these modeling ideas:
Robotic Process Automation: 6 common…
From My Biased Coin
STOC Workshop on "Algorithms with Predictions"
The STOC workshop on Algorithms with Predictions was on Friday, and I thought it went really well! I can't speak for my talk, but the other 3 talks (Tim Roughgarden, Edith Cohen, Ravi Kumar) were fantastic and inspiring, and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Verified, Intentified Phone Calling is Advancing
Will we soon get the inferred reason for a phone call? Its getting a start already, in IOS I get already get 'likely spam', and who it is likely to be from, but why not inferring reasonable intent?
Really a kind of machine learning…