Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2017
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
An Online Forum for Computer Science Educators
Stack Exchange is one of a number of online forums being used by the computer science community to ask and answer questions. While most of these are targeted at the professional or would be professional developer there is aforum…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neural Compute Stick
Would like to understand what 'plug and play' means here. Acceleration likely. Intriguing thing at this level. wrote about Movidius previously. They were acquired by Intel in 2016, a natural idea. More details at the link…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Science, Engineering, and Public Policy
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Convergence of Data and Computing Task Force responded to the National Science Foundation (NSF) Dear Colleague Letter: Request for Information on Future Needs for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure…
From Schneier on Security
Robot Safecracking
Robots can crack safes faster than humans -- and differently: So Seidle started looking for shortcuts. First he found that, like many safes, his SentrySafe had some tolerance for error. If the combination includes a 12, for instance…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Tries Mobile Flash Sales
Amazon has no intention of trying innovative sales ideas. I am imagining the Echos, soon to be announcing sales on your very street. Will this further link Amazon yet closer to the consumer? Called Treasure Trucks. Reminds…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Learning by Thinking
Can we make machines work this way? In a sense we do. we train and re-train. And test against reality. But is the semantic language or architecture correct to make this work efficiently? Not yet.
In the Edge:
Learning By
A…
From insideHPC
WINS Program Sponsors Six Women to Help Build SCinet at SC17
SC17 has chosen six women from IT departments around the United States to participate in the Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program, helping to build and operate SCinet, the very high capacity SC conference network. "Now…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Introducing Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and Intel Select Solutions
In this Chip Chat podcast, Lisa Spelman, Manager of Intel Xeon Products and Data Center Marketing, discusses the launch of two pivotal advances for the data center. "Intel Select Solutions are workload-optimized data center solutions…
From insideHPC
AMD Showcases 1 Petaflop “Project 47” Rack at Siggraph
"Project 47 boasts 1 PetaFLOPS of compute power at full 32-bit precision delivering a stunning 30 GigaFLOPS/W, demonstrating dramatic compute efficiency. It boasts more cores, threads, compute units, IO lanes and memory channels…
From insideHPC
Video: Building a GPU-enabled OpenStack Cloud for HPC
Blair Bethwaite and Lance Wilson from Monash University gave this talk at OpenStack Australia. "M3 is the latest generation system of the MASSIVE project, an HPC facility specializing in characterization science (imaging and
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Is Web Scraping Illegal?
A common practice under fire again. If something is clearly publicly delivered, is it open to turn into another form called data? A challenge to data democratization?
LinkedIn: It’s illegal to scrape our website without permission…
From Computational Complexity
Harvard punishes some social organizations. Why?
Over at the blog Bits and Pieces my adviser Harry Lewis (is he still my adviser 32 years after I got my PhD? Yes) has written many posts about Harvard's decision to ban people who belong to same-sex organizations from being
…
From Schneier on Security
Measuring Vulnerability Rediscovery
New paper: "Taking Stock: Estimating Vulnerability Rediscovery," by Trey Herr, Bruce Schneier, and Christopher Morris: Abstract: How often do multiple, independent, parties discover the same vulnerability? There are ample models…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Conversational Commerce
Another look at conversational commerce. Though beyond what we think of as messaging. Including memory of previous interactions and leveraging what is known about the correspondents. Positioned as a service with value. Examples…
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G Cuts $100 Million in Digital Ads
P&G Cuts More Than $100 Million in ‘Largely Ineffective’ Digital Ads
Consumer product giant steers clear of ‘bot’ traffic and objectionable content ...
Almost all of the consumer product giant’s advertising cuts in the period came…
From insideHPC
One Stop Systems Named One of San Diego’s Fastest Growing Companies
Not all HPC vendors are experiencing a slump. In fact, One Stop Systems was recently named one of San Diego’s 100 fastest growing privately-held companies by the San Diego Business Journal. "One Stop Systems continues to provide…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Needs to be Much Smarter
Have now been testing the Google Home, Amazon Echo, Cortana and Siri since their inception. All of these devices and services do some clever things, but none are 'intelligent' in even a broad sense of the word. The intelligence…
From insideHPC
Video: Scalable Deep Learning with Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK)
"Microsoft AI researchers are striving to create intelligent machines that complement human reasoning and enrich human experiences and capabilities. At the core, is the ability to harness the explosion of digital data and computational…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Fewer Assistants in China
Attended a meeting this week at Columbia featuring proposed uses of virtual assistants, excellent ideas, many by Chinese students. Impressive. So I see some evidence to the contrary.
This Is Why China Hasn't Jumped on the …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Knowing the Data
I like the idea of 'thinking with data', not just solving a particular problem but knowing important process data and manipulating it for ongoing value. Knowing the data as well as you know the analytic methods.
thinking with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mobile Neural Networks
This kind of work is going on elsewhere, like at Google, to try to put the intelligence and learning on the 'edge' of a network.
MIT Research Could Make Neural Networks Portable
By Ryan Whitwam
Computers aren’t just getting faster…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Research Scientist at LLNL
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is seeking a Research Scientist in our Job of the Week. "For more than 60 years, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has applied science and technology to make the world a
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI is not Smart Enough Yet
Gets back to the definition of AI. Sets of algorithms, machine learning, rules are still not AI (Artificial Intelligence) , they are new kinds of data processing that will augment people, just like all computing does. It…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Towards an Intelligent Automation Continuum
I like the broad idea. We seem to be doing very well these days in picking off specific narrow problem domains, but less so in constructing general solutions to things like conversations, which are ultimately the way our intelligence…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New in Analytics, AI and Automation
From Putting People First
“Where the social sciences and business come together” – Alexandra Mack on ethnography
In this episode of the Change Management Review Podcast, Theresa Moulton interviews Alexandra Mack. Alexandra is a senior fellow at Pitney Bowes, the e-commerce services provider, and a Board Member of Ethnographic Praxis in …
From Putting People First
Data ethnographer: the most crucial design job of the future
Data inside of algorithms is incredibly symbiotic with the algorithm itself. In product design, the data fed to algorithms determines the characteristics of a product. This implies radical transparency and giving consumers access…
From Putting People First
Australian Government Digital Transformation Agency says no to surveys and focus groups
Leisa Reichelt, the Agency’s Service Design Lead, gives the four reasons, here summarised but we recommend you to read the entire post: You can’t get authentic, actionable insights in a few clicks Surveys and other analytics
…
From Putting People First
Nesta as an innovation move for Turin, Italy
A few months back we wrote about the ongoing negotiations between Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation, and the [Italian Foundation] Compagnia di San Paolo to set up a Nesta Italia in Turin. These negotiations have now finished…
From insideHPC
DDN Announces Trade-Up Program for Seagate Customers
DataDirect Networks has announced a trade-up program designed to offer Seagate customers a smooth transition to industry-leading DDN solutions. “It is a sad day when an industry built on long-term commitments is left in disarray…