Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2017
From The Eponymous Pickle
Task Journey Maps of the Smart Home
Robotic vacuum activity maps of the home. In Technology Review. Some fascinating views that tell you about smart home complexity, and even other applications of simple ideas. A kind of Journey to task completion mapping?…
From The Eponymous Pickle
About Google Posts
Instructive piece, In Curatti:
" ... Every now and then, something new sneaks into the marketing equation largely unnoticed. Did you know anything about Google Posts? Neither did we! So this article by John Jantsch is an important…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Walmart and Google Pushes an Online Boost
Thoughtful podcast, but I think the final para here misunderstands Wal-Mart's customers, they are more sophisticated and widespread than they think.
Will Walmart’s Partnership with Google Give It an Online Boost?
Walmart has been…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Roots of Inorganic Growth
Interesting stats, in particular how this can be driven by analytics.
The roots of organic growth By Kabir Ahuja, Liz Hilton Segel, and Jesko Perrey
There are many paths to growth, and high performers take more than one—supported…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Gamification and Teaching Computer Science
Gamification is a huge buzz word in education generally today. There are proponents and opponents of course. And both sides have good arguments behind their opinions. I’ve had mixed feelings about the whole topic for a while.…
From insideHPC
Argonne Steps up to the Exascale Computing Project
The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is working with a number of National Labs on the development of supercomputers with 50x better performance than today's systems. In this special guest feature, ECP describes how Argonne is…
From insideHPC
Ace Computers Teams with BeeGFS for HPC
Ace Computers and BeeGFS have teamed to deliver a complete parallel file system solving storage access speed issues that slow down even the fastest supercomputers. BeeGFS eliminates the gap between compute speed and the limited…
From insideHPC
Bringing Your Kids to SC17 in Denver?
"As part of its ongoing inclusivity efforts, SC17 will once again offer on-site child care during the conference. Available to registered attendees and exhibitors for a small fee, SC17 day care is available for children between…
From Mostafa Dehghani
Some Highlights of MILA Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning Summer Schools 2017
A couple weeks a go, I attended MILLA Deep Learning summer school (DLSS) from June 26th to July 1st and Reinforcement Learning summer school (RLSS) from July 3rd to 5th, 2017, organized by Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sharing your Smartphone Location
When you should and shouldn't share your location via smartphone. Some best and worst Scenarios. But the experts now say it is impossible to not infer your physical location when you use a smartphone. ... " In the NYT, full…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Video Recommendations
In the Verge: AI and Video recommendations:
How YouTube started using Google Brain's AI to improve video recommendations in 2015, which now drive 70% of videos' watch time — Google Brain gave YouTube new life — .... "
From insideHPC
TensorFlow Deep Learning Optimized for Modern Intel Architectures
Researchers at Google and Intel recently collaborated to extract the maximum performance from Intel® Xeon and Intel® Xeon Phi processors running TensorFlow*, a leading deep learning and machine learning framework. This effort…
From Computational Complexity
NOT So Powerful
A monotone circuit has only AND and OR gates, no NOT gates. Monotone circuits can only produce monotone functions like clique or perfect matching, where adding an edge only makes a clique or matching more likely. Razborov in
…
From Schneier on Security
Journalists Generally Do Not Use Secure Communication
This should come as no surprise: Alas, our findings suggest that secure communications haven't yet attracted mass adoption among journalists. We looked at 2,515 Washington journalists with permanent credentials to cover Congress…
From XRDS
Back from the Debian Conference
New blogger in XRDS! I should introduce myself before jumping in with my first post here in the XRDS blog. I am a long time Free Software enthusiast and developer, and that might be the single item that has most … Continue reading…
From Schneier on Security
A Framework for Cyber Security Insurance
New paper: "Policy measures and cyber insurance: a framework," by Daniel Woods and Andrew Simpson, Journal of Cyber Policy, 2017. Abstract: The role of the insurance industry in driving improvements in cyber security has been…
From insideHPC
Globus for Google Drive Provides Unified Interface for Collaborative Research
Today Globus.org announced general availability of Globus for Google Drive, a new capability that lets users seamlessly connect Google Drive with their existing storage ecosystem, enabling a single interface for data transfer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Culture for a Digital Age
From McKinsey. Good piece, though I think that there is value in diversity of culture as well, even outside these proclaimed boundaries.
Culture for a digital age
Risk aversion, weak customer focus, and siloed mind-sets have long…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Social Robotics
Been intrigued by social robots, attempts at making interactive and friendly devices for the home and elsewhere. Is this problem solvable before we figure out how to do intelligent conversations between humans and machines?…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Could an AI Win the Nobel Prize?
In this AI Podcast, Paul Wigley from the Australian National University describes how his team of scientists applied AI to an experiment to create a Bose-Einstein condensate. And in doing so they had a question: if we can use…
From insideHPC
Video: MVAPICH at Petascale on the Stampede System
"This talk will focus on the role MVAPICH has played at the Texas Advanced Computing Center over multiple generations of multiple technologies of interconnect, and why it has been critical not only in maximizing interconnect
…
From insideHPC
Heroes of Deep Learning: Andrew Ng interviews Ian Goodfellow from Google Brain
"There were several other ways of doing generative models that had been popular for several years before I had the idea for GANs. And after I'd been working on all those other methods throughout most of my Ph.D., I knew a lot…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa and Cortana Collaborate for the Enterprise
About the surprise collaboration announced today between Amazon and Microsoft, good thoughts about this. How much market is there for strong connections between home and enterprise? Ultimately how much competition will occur…
From Schneier on Security
Proof that HMAC-DRBG has No Back Doors
New research: "Verified Correctness and Security of mbedTLS HMAC-DRBG," by Katherine Q. Ye, Matthew Green, Naphat Sanguansin, Lennart Beringer, Adam Petcher, and Andrew W. Appel. Abstract: We have formalized the functional specification…
From Schneier on Security
The NSA's 2014 Media Engagement and Outreach Plan
Interesting post-Snowden reading, just declassified. (U) External Communication will address at least one of "fresh look" narratives: (U) NSA does not access everything. (U) NSA does not collect indiscriminately on U.S. Persons…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
A Retirement Party for Joel Seiferas
A gathering this Labor Day in Rochester Announcement source Joel Seiferas retired on December 31, 2016 and is now a professor emeritus in the University of Rochester Computer Science Department. Today Ken and I wish to talk about…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval
I was late pointed to a a number of posts from the recent Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) of the CACM. Information retrieval is the most essential aspect of any system, often forgotten in our hype driven…
From insideHPC
Embry-Riddle University Deploys Cray CS Supercomputer for Aerospace
Today Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University announced it has deployed a Cray CS400 supercomputer. The four-cabinet system will power collaborative applied research with industry partners at the University’s new research facility…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality Challenge
A look at Hololens vs ARKit
Is Augmented Reality going to be Microsoft’s next smartphone moment?
HoloLens was inspirational, but it’s ARKit and ARCore that are going to win developers.
By Peter Bright in ARsTechnica
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Adding Multiroom Audio Control
Reported in Engadget. Another trick soon to be added to the Alexa set to position it against capabilities by Google Home and Sonos, and reportedly soon to be released Siri and Cortana devices. Multi room speaker aggregation
Though…