Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2020
From Computational Complexity
Robin Thomas
From The Eponymous Pickle
Low-Code Taking Over
Ultimately this will take over for most coding.
Low Code And No Code: A Looming Trend In Mobile App Development By Nitin Nimbalkar -
Today’s businesses are implementing enriching their operations with capabilities little by
At…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Research Scientist at the University of Wyoming
The Center of Innovation for Flow through Porous media (COIFPM) at the University of Wyoming has multiple openings for highly motivated research scientists to join its computational research branch. The focus of the modeling
…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teaching From Home–Day 10A –I'm One of the Lucky Ones
There has been a lot in the news about schools being closed and how schools are dealing with it. There seems to be everything for regular online synchronous teaching like my school is doing to no school at all. A range in between…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The COVID-19 Virus and What the Recommendations Mean
Very nicely done, just eight minutes plus animated video about the topic. For the whole family to understand. By the German Kurzgesagt animation studio.
Kurzgesagt Animation Studio (with other language translations)
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Can Edit Their Own Genome
Amazing: Revealing yet another super-power in the skillful squid, scientists have discovered that squid massively edit their own genetic instructions not only within the nucleus of their neurons, but also within the axon -- the…
From insideHPC
Intersect360 Research Lowers 2020 HPC Market Forecast for COVID-19
Intersect360 Research has released a new report guiding its clients that the market for HPC products and services will fall significantly short of its previous 2020 forecast, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The newly-revised…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watermarking Control Data for Safety from Hackers
Thoughtful and apparently simple idea.
Approach Could Protect Control Systems From Hackers
IEEE Spectrum
Michelle Hampson
March 26, 2020
Researchers at Siemens and Croatia’s University of Zagreb have developed a technique to more
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Linden Labs Gives up on VR Spin off
Note our examination of virtual world retail, mentioned here earlier. This piece gives us a look at the current status of world tech with current supporting tech like VR. Last I looked SL was not heavily used.
Why 'Second Life'…
From insideHPC
Exascale Computing Project Releases Milestone Report
The US Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has published a milestone report that summarizes the status of all thirty ECP Application Development (AD) subprojects at the end of fiscal year 2019. "This report…
From insideHPC
WekaIO Receives Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award
Today WekaIO announced that The Business Intelligence Group has named Weka a winner in its Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program. “the WekaFS file system can deliver 80 GB/sec of bandwidth to a single GPU server,
…
From insideHPC
New Intel oneAPI DevCloud makes it easier for coders working from home
Today Intel introduced the oneAPI DevCloud to make it easier and more productive for coders currently working from home. "Developing code at home requires access to compute cycles, the latest software development tools, access…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tesla Autopilot Detecting Traffic Lights
From insideHPC
Manufacturing Engineers can turn to Cloud HPC for Work from Home
In this special guest feature, Wolfgang Gentzsch from the UberCloud describes how engineers can perform work from home in the same way they do at their offices, while maintaining or even increasing productivity. "In our short…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Novel Risks in the Enterprise
Something we studied in some detail, solution was to have sufficient knowledge and resources, internal and access to external to be able to address the context of such problems. Making them less 'Novel'. Not sure how well…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning
On the safety of Reinforcement Learning. Considerable,largely technical piece.
Physically Realistic Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning Bair Berkeley By Adam Gleave
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved superhuman…
From insideHPC
LLNL Researchers aid COVID-19 response in anti-viral research
Backed by five high performance computing (HPC) clusters and years of expertise in vaccine and countermeasure development, a COVID-19 response team of LLNL researchers from various disciplines has used modeling & simulation,
…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teaching From Home–Day 10–When Remote is Really Remote
For the last several years I have had international students in some of my classes. Most from China but also South Korea, Viet Nam, and Cambodia. This year I have had two from China who have gone home already because of COVID…
From Schneier on Security
Story of Gus Weiss
This is a long and fascinating article about Gus Weiss, who masterminded a long campaign to feed technical disinformation to the Soviet Union, which may or may not have caused a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Joins Hyperledger
Wal-Mart's early looks at this seem to be identification and tracking related supply chain applications. Is this an indication of further dives into the space?
Walmart Joins Hyperledger Alongside 7 Other Companies By Samuel…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Welcomes Maddy Hunter!
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is delighted to welcome Maddy Hunter! The Computing Research Association (CRA) recently hired Maddy as a Program Associate for the CCC subcommittee. In this role, she provides support…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Positive Tools for Challenging Times
I see that long-time correspondent Sunnie Southern of ViableSynergy has a newsletter about 'Positive Tools for Challenging Times'. Check it out:
Positive Tools for Challenging Times
This is the second in a series of emails with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Tracks Virus 'Weather'
A nicely done Covid-19 tracking app is part of the IBM 'Weather Channel' App. Shows location and trends continually updated, based on your location. Nicely shown on the bottom of the App with a red button to click. With other…
From insideHPC
DARPA Grant to Foster Practical Quantum Computing with Rigetti
Today Rigetti Computing announced the company has been awarded up to $8.6 million from DARPA to develop a full-stack system with proven quantum advantage for solving real world problems. “We believe strongly in an integrated
…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teaching From Home–Day 9–Students Backchanneling
My good friend and peer teacher, Tom Indelicato and I share a morning homeroom. It’s online now of course but we join early and stay late to touch base with each other. We’re both teaching sections of our school’s freshmen computer…
From insideHPC
New AI Solutions from Dell Technologies
In this special guest feature, Dave Frattura from Dell Technologies writes that the company is helping customers simplify and drive data science and AI initiatives that can deliver valuable insights, automation and intelligence…
From insideHPC
Fast Track your AI Workflows
In this special guest feature, our friends over at Inspur write that for new workloads that are highly compute intensive, accelerators are often required. Accelerators can speed up the computation and allow for AI and ML algorithms…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neural Networks Search for New Materials
Mentioned previously here. Novel use of 'creativity' to search among possible solutions.
Neural networks facilitate optimization in the search for new materials
by David L. Chandler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
An iterative…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Analytics
For now not replacing but rather augmenting people. Unlike the article I would say this has been around for a long time.
Augmented Analytics Drives Next Wave of AI, Machine Learning, BI
Business intelligence will move beyond…
From Schneier on Security
On Cyber Warranties
Interesting article discussing cyber-warranties, and whether they are an effective way to transfer risk (as envisioned by Ackerlof's "market for lemons") or a marketing trick. The conclusion: Warranties must transfer non-negligible…