Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2017
From Putting People First
Financial Times special report on citizen empowerment through technology
The Financial Times has published People’s Technology, an excellent special report on how grassroots communities across Europe are using technologies in new ways to solve problems and empower citizens. People and communities
…
From Putting People First
Thinking about the social cost of technology
The frustration and stress caused by complex technologies that can seem unknowable — not to mention the time and mindshare that gets wasted trying to make systems work as people want them to work — doesn’t tend to get talked
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From Putting People First
Building the networked city from the ground up with citizens
How can technology lead to more participation in democratic processes? Who should own and control city data? Can cities embrace a model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation?…
From Putting People First
Google’s Director of User Experience on the power of ethnography in an era of Big Data
Elizabeth Churchill, Google’s Director of User Experience argues that there has never been a better time for an ethnographic embrace and a reconfiguration of what it means to render meaning into big and small data. We have, she…
From insideHPC
Bringing Diversity to Computational Science
"Computing is one of the least diverse science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, with an under-representation of women and minorities, including African Americans and Hispanics. Leveraging this largely
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From insideHPC
OpenHPC: Project Overview and Updates
Karl Schulz from Intel gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "There is a growing sense within the HPC community for the need to have an open community effort to more efficiently build, test, and deliver integrated HPC software…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Problems of AI ethics
This is certainly true in the short term. A presentation.
The real project of AI ethics in O'Reilly.
Joanna Bryson says AI's main threat is not that it will do anything to us, but that we'll use it to predict and manipulate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Relaunching Google Glass
A historical view of why something like Google Glass, emerged and failed, but is said to about to rise again. We folloswed it for several business applications. With new players like Amazon rumored to enter the field. Why?…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Voice Brewing Your Coffee
We were into the coffee business for a long time. Blending, roasting, brewing, marketing and selling. Even using AI to find the best blends. So the idea would have been fun and even useful in our labs to stage tests. I am…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Rival to Wikipedia?
But Elsevier is a walled garden, and this approach will not be publicly edited. The power of Wikipedia is the breadth of coverage. And as the article suggests, you can't scrape Elsevier texts to do the same thing.
Elsevier…
From The Eponymous Pickle
MIT Origami Robotics
The concept is a long time follow.
MIT Origami Robot Transforms to Become a Boat, a Glider, or a Wheel. By Luke Dormeh
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Empire Is a New Book
Regularly I receive mail from people wanting to advertise on, write for, or sponsor posts on my blog. My rule is that I say no to everyone. There is no amount of money or free stuff that will get me to write about your security…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Move Against Amazon
When I ask people about using Jet, they rarely know what it is. Interesting that Wal-Mart is trying to expand that brand. Note the essentials emphasis.
Walmart is about to debut a new initiative to bolster its defenses against…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtual Assistants and Multitasking
Thoughtful piece, needs to be considered in conversational dialog.
The Real Problem with Voice Assistants like Siri is your Brain By Robbie Gonzalez in Wired
" .... Interacting with a conversational interface might tempt you…
From insideHPC
Bright Computing Powers SingleParticle.com for cryo-EM
Today Bright Computing announced a reseller agreement with San Diego-based SingleParticle.com. The company specializes in turn-key HPC infrastructure designed for high performance and low total cost of ownership (TCO), serving…
From insideHPC
A Perspective on HPC-enabled AI
Tim Barr from Cray gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Milwaukee. "Cray’s unique history in supercomputing and analytics has given us front-line experience in pushing the limits of CPU and GPU integration, network scale,
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Unilever CMO is Guest Editor at Think with Google
The article also includes a look at a number of technology areas of prime interest to marketing.
Meet our guest editor, Keith Weed
In our ongoing effort to provide a window into what’s top-of-mind for industry game changers, we…
From insideHPC
Supermicro steps up with Optimized Systems for NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs
Today Supermicro announced support for NVIDIA Tesla V100 PCI-E and V100 SXM2 GPUs on its industry leading portfolio of GPU server platforms. With our latest innovations incorporating the new NVIDIA V100 PCI-E and V100 SXM2 GPUs…
From insideHPC
Sowing Seeds of Quantum Computation at Berkeley Lab
"Berkeley Lab’s tradition of team science, as well as its proximity to UC Berkeley and Silicon Valley, makes it an ideal place to work on quantum computing end-to-end,” says Jonathan Carter, Deputy Director of Berkeley Lab Computing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Fashionable Contactless Payment
Interesting aspect, a sort of tagging, but with fashion it seems.
Timex's new watch collection includes contactless payment straps
Barclaycard's bPay contactless chips are hiding under the leather. .... "
By Jamie Rigg, @jmerigg…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Graph Mining for AI Dialog
Google at KDD " 23rd ACM conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining ". talking graph mining. Ultimately a power idea for driving AI. How close are we to drive intelligent dialog? Its all about mining our own data…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Who Says There Is No Room for More Computer Science
People keep asking me what required course I would remove to make room for a required computer science course. So I decided to take a look at current requirements for graduation in my home of New Hampshire. This is what I found…
From Schneier on Security
Deloitte Hacked
The large accountancy firm Deloitte was hacked, losing client e-mails and files. The hackers had access inside the company's networks for months. Deloitte is doing its best to downplay the severity of this hack, but Bran Krebs…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
New NSF Program Solicitation on Cyberlearning for Work at the Human-Technology Frontier
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently released a new program solicitation on Cyberlearning for Work at the Human-Technology Frontier. The goal of the program is to support research of learning technologies for both educational…
From Schneier on Security
New Internet Explorer Bug
There's a newly discovered bug in Internet Explorer that allows any currently visited website to learn the contents of the address bar when the user hits enter. This feels important; the site I am at now has no business knowing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Candid vs Posed Photos
Podcast
So Long, Selfies: Why Candid Photos Make a Better Impression
Wharton's Jonah Berger discusses his research on posed photos vs. candid photos.
" .... In our increasingly digital society, a friend or colleague’s firstJonah…
From insideHPC
Penguin Computing Launches NVIDIA Tesla V100-based Servers
Today Penguin Computing announced strategic support for the field of artificial intelligence through availability of its servers based on the highly-advanced NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerator, powered by the NVIDIA Volta GPU
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Vans and Drones
This was new to me, quite an interesting case. Bring on the Drones.
Switzerland’s new autonomous drone network just completed its first delivery Coffee anyone? by Andrew J. Hawkins @andyjayhawk In theVerge
" ... Yesterday,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More AI Assistants
Yesterdays announcements by Amazon suggest that this statement is true:
Amazon Is All-Out to Fill Your Home With AI Assistants Before Its Competition Can. More In Technology Review. With interesting supporting information.
And…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Geospatial Services Everywhere
Continue to be amazed by the advances of geospatial capabilities. Geography must be much easier to teach these days, curiosity can be fed so easily with freely available Apps. In the Google blog, an article on the economic…