Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2018
From Putting People First
[Book] Left to Our Own Devices
![[Book] Left to Our Own Devices](/system/assets/0000/1953/030209_Vanderbeeken_Mark_250.small_square.jpg?1476779420&1260281963)
Left to Our Own Devices: Outsmarting Smart Technology to Reclaim Our Relationships, Health, and Focus By Margaret E. Morris MIT Press, November 2018, 192 pages Unexpected ways that individuals adapt technology to reclaim what…
From Putting People First
[Book] Smarter Homes
Smarter Homes: How Technology Will Change Your Home Life by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino Apress, 2018, 168 pages Examine the history of smart homes, how technology shapes our lives, and ways you can think about the home when developing…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Quickly identifying a sequence of digits in a string of characters
Suppose that you want to quickly determine a sequence of eight characters are made of digits (e.g., ‘9434324134’). How fast can you go? In software, characters are mapped to integer values called the code points. The ASCII and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Turns 20
Nice selection and useful description of key events of the last 20 years. I was user-involved for all of them, as a public and/or enterprise user and manager. Remember many of these, but not all. Could not have predicted…
From insideHPC
Why Rich Brueckner @insideHPC is Making a Documentary about Dogs and the People Who Love Them
I would like to interrupt whatever it is that normally happens here to make an announcement about a personal project that does not involve HPC. "I, Richard Brueckner, am making a film and I want to share the details with all
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Judea Pearl on Causality Tools and Machine Learning
Causality scientist Judea Pearl looks at causality and some of the limitations of machine learning systems. Technical paper, but useful scan for practitioners.
The seven tools of causal inference with reflections on machine…
From The Eponymous Pickle
DARPA Underground Challenge
Saw this announced and at least at first did not understand it. Clearer now, quite interesting regarding the environments involved. Have a friend who is connected, will ask for more as it progresses. From disasters to
Three…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (September 30th, 2018)
Oculus is launching a new standalone virtual-reality headset next year, the Oculus Quest. It is the price of a console like the Nintendo Switch, and might have comparable computational power. It does not need to be tethered to…
From insideHPC
New Paper: Survey of FPGAs for Convolutional Neural Networks
Sparsh Mittal has just published a new paper on the use of FPGAs for Convolutional Neural Networks. "Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently shown very high accuracy in a wide range of cognitive tasks and due
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Working New Cortana Skills Set
Been disappointed by the capabilities of Cortana skills in relation to Google and Amazon, especially supporting supporting their office capabilities. Now new enterprise skill Devs Skill set is announced. Mary Jo Foley writes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Considering Interpretability
Good look at what interpretability is. My view is that to interpret means to understand what it means in developed context, and in future. The context I usually have to most closely deal with is how is it interpreted by decision…
From BLOG@CACM
Tech User Responsibility
User support presents serious challenges that are aggravated by indeterminate client responsibility.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Berners-Lee Says we can Control our Data, and Need to do it Now
But ow will this influence the economics of the Web in the last decade? Will the economics be there to continue to drive its development? Or will it go back to an excellent academic system? Reading more. Excellent description…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Training AI Agents in Virtual Worlds
Had heard of similar methods in VR for training before, tried it for retail examples, how do we know training will be complete for the proper later context of use? Examining
Google’s DeepMind partners with Unity to train AI…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Using Confirmation Bias for Advantage
As someone with an engineering rather than a marketing background, I always thought confirmation bias was a bad thing. But not necessarily. Perhaps obvious , I see it my own post purchase behavior, and its useful! And commonly…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Book Review: Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
Always worth keeping in mind.
In Experimentia:
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
MIT Press, 248 pages ....
A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology…
From insideHPC
SIGHPC Group to Host Students for Computing4Change Competition at SC18
Today the well-meaning SIGHPC group from ACM announced that their Computing4Change competition has received an unprecedented number of applications. As an effort to bring Bright Young Minds into the HPC community, the competition…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC Systems Administrator at Corvid Technologies
Corvid Technologies in North Carolina is seeking an HPC System Administrator in our Job of the Week. "Corvid Technologies seeks qualified candidates for a full-time HPC System Administrator that will support a high volume of
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of 3D Displays
Another areas we looked into for retail engagement. Seen many test examples but each had considerable limitations. Are we finally approaching clear possibilities for high resolution and interaction and screen orientation? …
From Putting People First
[Book] Artificial unintelligence
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard MIT Press, 248 pages April 17, 2018 A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture
The 2017 Turing Award winner, Dave Patterson, from the University of California, Berkeley, presented on Thursday morning of the HLF a talk called “The Past is Prologue: A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture.” He went through…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Protein Used in Variable Thermal Conductivity Material
This is really neat. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here....
From Schneier on Security
Major Tech Companies Finally Endorse Federal Privacy Regulation
The major tech companies, scared that states like California might impose actual privacy regulations, have now decided that they can better lobby the federal government for much weaker national legislation that will preempt any…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Says Unified Search will be Coming in 2019
Announced at Ignite, details at below. Good idea to make search be a service that operates uniformly among multiple MS business services. Also among multiple sources, such as combining Intranet and Internet resources. Could…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI, Brains and Smell
A favorite topic because we were very involved in how to sell in context influenced smell (and aroma) neural interaction that led to purchase. Here some new understanding, not directly useful yet, but there are some aspects…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open source Monitoring with Prometheus
Open source monitoring, good detail at the link. The word monitoring by itself always attracts me, it means we can understand things in operation, and better understand how to improve that. First I had heard of this example…
From insideHPC
SC18 Preview: “A Quantum Future of Computation” by Microsoft’s Matthias Troyer
SC18 is continuing its series of session previews this week with a look at an Invited Talk on Quantum Computing by Matthias Troyer from Microsoft Research. "Attempting to bring clarity to the fast growing field of quantum computing…
From insideHPC
Lustre User Group coming to China and Japan in October
The Lustre User Group is coming to China and Japan in October. Sponsored by DDN and OpenSFS, the events offer a valuable opportunity for contributors and users to meet together and exchange information and get the latest information…
From insideHPC
Argonne is Supercomputing Big Data from the Large Hadron Collider
Over at Argonne, Madeleine O’Keefe writes that the Lab is supporting CERN researchers working to interpret Big Data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator. The LHC is expected to output…
From insideHPC
European Commission to Boost Investments in Ai
Earlier this week, the European Commission outlined a three-pronged approach to increase public and private investment in AI, prepare for socio-economic changes, and ensure an appropriate ethical and legal framework. "Ai presents…