Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2015
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sifting Your Big Ideas
Colleague Bob Herbold from his blog: " ..... Is Your Big Idea Really Big? Really? .... Beware, when searching for the big idea and finding that to be difficult, it is very easy to convince yourself that a very modest idea…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Docs Dictate and Translate
In Time: Google Docs is said to now have both voice to text dictation, and translation to over 40 languages. Together these are quite an interesting combination. A Babel fish kind of combination on a phone. But how well?…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Unintended Consequence Algorithms
This is not uncommon. And things are getting more and more complex. Many more variables. Black boxes are out there. But be ready to explain how your box works, or show its track record compared to the current process, toIn…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Generation Z is Coming
I am not a fan of generational labels. I have seen too much variance within them to trust them much. But still, you have to know the definitions to follow what is said about this large scale age-based segmentation. Quite an…
From Schneier on Security
Spoofing Fitness Trackers
The website Unfitbits.com has a series of instructional videos on how to spoof fitness trackers, using such things as a metronome, pendulum, or power drill. With insurance companies like John Hancock offering discounts to people…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson Personality Insights for Shoppers
A demonstration of Watson's personality services capability for shopping. " ... The Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Social Computing Workshop
The following is a special contribution to this blog by Jenn Wortman Vaughan, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. Social computing encompasses the mechanisms through which people interact with computational systems like…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at Highlights from Fall 2015 HPC Conferences
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team goes over a Trip Report from Rich Brueckner from insideHPC, who's been on the road at a series of HPC conferences. We captured more that 50 talks in the past month, and we have them all…
From Schneier on Security
Volkswagen and Cheating Software
For the past six years, Volkswagen has been cheating on the emissions testing for its diesel cars. The cars' computers were able to detect when they were being tested, and temporarily alter how their engines worked so they looked…
From insideHPC
PRACE Opens 12th Call for Proposals
Today the PRACE Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe issued their 12th Call for Proposals. By providing access to some of the fastest supercomputer in Europe, the Call for Proposals targets large-scale, computationally…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Low Cost 3D Printing Driving Massive Sales
In CWorld: Apparently many people think they need 3D printing. Have seen the store demos, saw it used in the enterprise for packaging prototype development. Intriguing, but finding it hard to justify this for home or current…
From insideHPC
Video: NVLink Interconnect for GPUs
"NVLink enables fast data exchange between CPU and GPU, thereby improving data throughput through the computing system and overcoming a key bottleneck for accelerated computing today. NVLink makes it easier for developers to …
From insideHPC
Mellanox to Acquire EZchip AKA Tilera
Today Mellanox announced a definitive agreement to acquire EZchip, a leader in high-performance processing solutions for carrier and data center networks. You may recognize EZchip from their recent Tilera acquisition, makers …
From insideHPC
Developing a Plan for Cloud Based GPU Processing
For some applications, cloud based clusters may be limited due to communication and/or storage latency and speeds. With GPUs, however, these issue are not present because application running on cloud GPUs perform exactly the …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Lakes and Accuracy
Silicon Angle discusses a side effect of the concept of data lakes. Governance is easier to apply." ..... Progressing into the “total customer experience,” one of EMC’s key initiatives is the “Business Data Lake.” The idea is…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
But I’ve Always Done It This Way
I’ve had my students working on a little exercise this week. It’s simple and I know that a lot of teachers use similar projects. The idea is to build a triangle or in this case two of them. You can see what I am looking for on…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smarter Automotive Systems
Very good overview piece in the CACM, as I see more automotive examples, this is the crux of it, at least before we go self-driving. " .... "There is a huge challenge associated with providing a driver with the right amount of…
From insideHPC
Kyoto University to Install Cray XC40 Supercomputer
Today Cray announced the Company has been awarded a contract to provide a Cray XC40 supercomputer to the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP) at Kyoto University in Japan. The two-cabinet Cray XC40 system will provide…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Online Communities are Why I'm Excited for GHC15
I've attended almost every Grace Hopper since 2008. The one exception was 2011, when I was too pregnant to fly. I found an old blog post about enjoying the conference from afar, where I reflected about being sad to be missing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson and Creativity
Upcoming talk of particular interest: Thu Oct 1, 2015, 10:30am – 11am (EDT) " .... Our scheduled speaker is Bryan Wiltgen from Georgia Tech, who will be presenting "Using Watson for Enhancing Human-Computer Co-Creativity."…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Industry Collaborative Robotics: Rethink's Sawyer
In IEEE Spectrum: How collaborative? How autonomous? Rethink Robotics' Sawyer Goes on Sale, Rodney Brooks Says 'There May Be More Robots' By Erico Guizzo ...." .... Rethink introduced Sawyer, the company’s second robot,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Trillion Devices at Hand
What so we expect to do with so many devices, and many more connections? Over many more slices of time and location? In CWorld: " ... Forget thinking about the Internet of Things where your coffee maker and refrigerator are…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Silo Organizations
Book review in the NYT. ‘The Silo Effect,’ by Gillian Tett . On my reading list. Silos of value and attention are very common and often destructive in the enterprise.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rebel Statistics
Good view of the topic by Granville at DSC. A challenge to relevance?" .... any of those who call themselves statisticians just won't admit that data science heavily relies on and uses (heretical, rule-breaking) statistical…
From insideHPC
Communication Frameworks for HPC and Big Data
In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference, DK Panda from Ohio State University presents: Communication Frameworks for HPC and Big Data.
The post Communication Frameworks for HPC and Big Data appeared firstinsideHPC…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
How the Internet works Video Series from code.org
Code.org announced a set of videos about “How the Internet works.” today. This set of short (6-7 minutes long) videos explain many of the key concepts that make the Internet work. Lots of graphics and narration by engineers from…
From Putting People First
[Experientia book] Ethnography on elderly health and wellness
![[Experientia book] Ethnography on elderly health and wellness](/system/assets/0000/1953/030209_Vanderbeeken_Mark_250.small_square.jpg?1476779420&1260281963)
As we age, we increasingly depend on public services and the community for support. Well-designed public services can greatly affect the lives of the elderly and their experiences of healthcare. Experientia collaborated with …
From insideHPC
NVIDIA GRID 2.0 comes to Microsoft Azure
"Our vision is to deliver accelerated graphics and high performance computing to any connected device, regardless of location," said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "We are excited to collaborate with Microsoft …
From insideHPC
EU/European HPC Plans for the Next Decade
Bob Sorensen from IDC presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. In a recent study, IDC assessed the EU's progress towards their 2012 action plan and made recommendations for funding exascale systems and fostering industrual …
From insideHPC
German Supercomputing Sites Become Centers of Excellence for Horizon 2020
Today the European Commission announced HLRS, JSC, and LRZ have been named “Centers of Excellence for computing applications. Funded by the EC and the Horizon 2020 program, the new Centers of Excellence will provide their petascale…