Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2023
From BLOG@CACM
Chat Generative Pre-trained... Testimony
Questions about testimony as a means of knowledge acquisition may apply to AI chatbots.
From Putting People First
[Book] Death Glitch
![[Book] Death Glitch](/system/assets/0000/1953/030209_Vanderbeeken_Mark_250.small_square.jpg?1476779420&1260281963)
Technology scholar Tamara Kneese examines what happens to our digital belongings when we die, and argues that tech companies need to improve how they deal with death on their platforms for the sake of all our digital posterity…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Protecting Cephalopods in Medical Research
From Nature:
Cephalopods such as octopuses and squid could soon receive the same legal protection as mice and monkeys do when they are used in research. On 7 September, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked for feedback…From insideHPC
DOE: $500M Funding Opportunity for Basic Research to Advance Science
Sept. 29, 2023 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today announced up to $500 million in funding for basic research in support of DOE’s clean energy, economic, and national security goals. The Funding Opportunity Announcement…
From insideHPC
Quantum Exponential Group Announces Copenhagen Headquarters
Sept. 29, 2023 — Quantum technology investment company Quantum Exponential Group plc (AQUIS: QBIT) announced it has established a European entity with headquarters in Copenhagen. The headquarters will be situated within Copenhagen…
From insideHPC
San Diego Supercomputer Center Names Rick Wagner CTO
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego has Rick Wagner chief technology officer. Wagner served as HPC Systems Engineer and then HPC Systems Manager at SDSC between 2010 and 2016 before joining the University…
From insideHPC
Women in HPC to Hold Annual Workshop at SC23 on Nov. 13
sEPT. 29, 2023 — Women in HPC will hold its 16th annual workshop at SC23 on Monday, Nov. 13 from 9am-5pm MT in room 710 of the Colorado Convention Center, 700 14th Street, Denver. More information can be found here. The WHPC
…
From insideHPC
NTT Research Scientific Teams Name 9 New Hires
Sunnyvale, Calif. – Sept. 26, 2023 – NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT (TYO:9432), today announced that it has named Timothée Leleu as Senior Research Scientist and a Group Head in the Physics & Informatics (PHI) Lab. It
…
From insideHPC
IonQ Announces $25.5M Quantum Deal with U.S. Air Force Research Lab
Quantum computing company IonQ announced an expanded relationship with the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) to deploy two barium-based trapped ion quantum computing systems for quantum networking research and application development…
From insideHPC
Atropos Health in Clinical Development Agreement with Janssen R&D
PALO ALTO, CA – September 27, 2023 – Data-driven healthcare company Atropos Health announced an agreement with Janssen Research & Development, LLC (Janssen), a Johnson & Johnson company, aimed at helping accelerate clinical development…
From insideHPC
Dec. 11 Nomination Deadline for DOE Distinguished Scientist Fellows
Sept. 28, 2023 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is accepting nominations from the DOE national laboratories for the department’s Distinguished Scientist Fellows Program. The deadline is 5 pm Eastern, Monday, Dec. 11, 2023…
From Computational Complexity
Half-Exponential No More
I've mentioned Kannan's proof that \(\Sigma_2^p\) does not have \(n^2\) size-circuits before. A similar proof shows that \(\Sigma_2^E = \mathrm{NTIME}^\mathrm{NP}(2^{O(n)})\) does not have polynomial-size circuits in general.…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Adriana Wilde has been appointed as the new Communications Co-chair
Please join us in welcoming Adriana Wilde as the new communications co-chair. Adriana is a Lecturer in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, where she has recently returned to, now as a member of…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
2023 NAE Meeting
With a memorial to William Wulf Anita Jones will be attending the next 2023 National Academy of Engineering’s annual meeting in Washington DC. Kathryn and I will travel there this weekend. Here is a photo of her winning the Philip…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
AFOSR Hosting a Webinar on AI for Humanity
On October 31st, 2023 from 2-3:30 PM ET the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) is hosting a webinar AI for Humanity. Led by AFOSR program officer for the Science of Information, Computation, Learning, and Fusion,…
From insideHPC
Argonne Preps Aurora for Exascale Simulations of Nuclear Reactors
Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory are preparing to use Aurora, the laboratory’s upcoming exascale supercomputer, to delve into the inner mechanics of a variety of nuclear reactor models. These simulations promise an
…
From insideHPC
LESSENGERS in Volume Production of 800G Active Optical Cables and Transceivers for AI/ML Clusters
SEOUL / GLASGOW – September 27, 2023 — LESSENGERS Inc., a provider of optical components based on its patented “direct optical wiring” (DOW) technology, today announced that its new 800G transceiver product (800G OSFP SR8), will…
From insideHPC
DOE Funds $30M for Research to Accelerate Scientific Advances at National Labs
Sept. 27, 2023 — Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $30 million in funding for three projects to increase scientific productivity and discoveries across DOE light source, neutron source, and high-performance…
From insideHPC
IonQ Announces Rack-Mounted Quantum Systems for Data Center Environments
COLLEGE PARK, Md., Sept. 27, 2023 — Quantum computing company IonQ today unveiled the Forte Enterprise and Tempo, rack-mounted systems the company said are can be integrated within existing data center infrastructures, enabling…
From Schneier on Security
Critical Vulnerability in libwebp Library
Both Apple and Google have recently reported critical vulnerabilities in their systems—iOS and Chrome, respectively—that are ultimately the result of the same vulnerability in the libwebp library:
On Thursday, researchers from…From Apophenia
The Screens are the Symptom.
I decided to re-read Fahrenheit 451 with my eldest this last week. I don’t think that I have read this classic Bradbury text since high school. What I had remembered about the book was that it described a world in which books…
From insideHPC
HPC User Forum 2023: How AI is Overturning the Legal Industry
“Lawyers who use AI will replace lawyers who don’t.” That was the coda of a presentation given at the recent HPC User Forum in Tucson by Arizona State University law professor Gary Marchant, a graduate of Harvard Law School and…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA-Powered CoreWeave and VAST Data Partner on Public Cloud for GenAI, HPC
Sept. 26, 2023 — VAST Data and CoreWeave today announced a partnership to build an NVIDIA GPU-powered computing cloud for generative AI, high performance computing and visual effects workloads. Startup CoreWeave is a GPU cloud…
From Schneier on Security
Signal Will Leave the UK Rather Than Add a Backdoor
Totally expected, but still good to hear:
Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave…From insideHPC
Quantum Computing Integrator ParTec AG Raises €5M
Munich — Modular supercomputing company ParTec AG has announced that as a result of its years of work in the field of quantum computing, it is positioning itself as a complete integrator of quantum computers. ParTec offers a …
From insideHPC
MIT: Qubit Architecture Achieves Progress on Quantum Error Correction
MIT researchers report they have demonstrated a novel superconducting qubit architecture that can perform operations between qubits with greater accuracy, addressing a roadblock to commercial use of quantum computers: error
…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Kick-off to the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum
Today marks the first official day of the 10th Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Heidelberg, Germany. The Computing Community Consortium has attended and covered the HLF conference every year since 2018, with the exception of…
From insideHPC
Exascale Early Adopter Series Webinar Sept. 27: Optimizing SYCL Workloads on Aurora and Sunspot
On Wednesday, Sept. 27 at 11 am Central Time, Varsha Madananth, an applications engineer at Intel, will lead an online webinar on optimizing SYCL workloads for PVC on the Aurora exascale system and the Sunspot testbed system.…
From Putting People First
Using psychology to bolster cybersecurity
In an article for Communications of the ACM, David Geer explains how the U.S. Defense Department uses cyberpsychology to get into the minds of attackers to better understand how they think and act.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Parsing integers quickly with AVX-512
If I give a programmer a string such as "9223372036854775808" and I ask them to convert it to an integer, they might do the following in C++: std::string s = .... uint64_t val; auto [ptr, ec] = std::from_chars(s.data(), s.data…