Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2021
From insideHPC
Los Alamos Names 3 Athena Engineering Scholars
The Athena Engineering Scholars Program is designed to inspire women to achieve their full potential as future leaders in engineering. The Athena Program is open to all LANL women, students and staff who are interested in pursuing…
From insideHPC
AMD to Showcase New EPYC and Instinct Data Center Chips at Nov. 8 Virtual Event
AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) will host its Accelerated Data Center premiere on Monday, Nov. 8 at 11 am ET, showcasing the company’s upcoming EPYC CPU processors and Instinct GPU accelerators. While AMD declined comment, it’s assumed the…
From My Biased Coin
How to send a real number using a single bit (and some shared randomness)
In this post, we'll look at the natural problem of how to communicate an estimate of a real value in [0,1], using just 1 bit. The post is based on this paper (by Ran Ben-Basat of UCL and Shay Vargaftik of VMware Research and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Partners with Wolfram for Data
Just noted this, a good direction. Can see this as useful, especially in filling analyses with meta or test data. Which we often integrated. I just also started to use Wolfram Alpha data as part of the Siri assistant.
Wolfram…From The Eponymous Pickle
AI and Robotics for Eldercare
We worked with researchers in Japan on related efforts.
Collaborators Launch AI-Robotics Initiative to Aid Older Adults in Daily Care By University of Massachusetts Lowell
University of Massachusetts Lowell researchers are among…From The Eponymous Pickle
Making Pseudo Coffee
I did technical analysis work for one of the world's largest coffee companies. So this was interesting. But I disagree that the environmental issues here are paramount. They are minor. Coffee can be grown with considerable…
From The Noisy Channel
Thoughts on Search Result Diversity
Regular readers know that search is about much more than ranking. If you’re new here, you might want to read this post about ranking vs. relevance.
But a topic I’ve neglected is search result diversity. I’ll remedy that in this…From The Eponymous Pickle
From CIS: Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law
Very good piece from Stanford Law on technology. Below intro and beyond.
From: The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies…From The Eponymous Pickle
MFA is Phishable
Multi factor authentication (MFA) is seen as a strong means of security, but can be less so, here some reasons why.
Why Is the Majority of Our MFA So Phishable?
Published on October 20, 2021
By Roger Grimes in Linkedin, Data-Driven…From The Eponymous Pickle
Watch Who You Talk to
More details about the approach at the link
Twitter accounts linked to cyberattacks against security researchers suspended
North Korean hackers are luring professionals with "zero-day vulnerability hype." By Charlie Osborne for…From Computational Complexity
Squaring the circle is mentioned in a Gilbert and Sullivan comic Opera.
The problem of squaring the circle: Given a circle, construct (with ruler and compass) a square with the same area. While browsing the web for more information on this problem (for the blog entry on problems that might be similar…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Is AI Re-Inventing Computers?
Very interesting piece. Anything can become a computer?
Three key ways artificial intelligence is changing what it means to compute.
By Will Douglas Heaven, October 22, 2021 in TechnologyReview
Fall 2021: the season of pumpkins…From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft: Orbit Database of Objects
Microsoft Announces a teachable database of objects.
Published October 19, 2021
By Daniela Massiceti , Senior Researcher Cecily…From The Eponymous Pickle
Moscow Implements Metro Facial Recognition
Expect parts of the world without these 'fears' to quickly implement many kinds of such recognition systems, for greater efficiency.
Privacy Fears as Moscow Metro Rolls Out Facial Recognition Pay System By The Guardian (U.K…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (October 23rd 2021)
Apple announced new processors for its computers. Here is a table with the transistor count of some recent Apple processors: processor release year transistors Apple A7 2013 1 billions Apple A8 2014 2 billions Apple A9 2015 2…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Putting Living Cells on Chips
Linking biological responses to Computer Chips
By University of Nebraska-Lincoln, October 21, 2021
University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Abhijeet Prasad, Distinguished Professor Ravi Saraf, and Aashish Subedi…From Putting People First
UX Theatre, or the rise of UX design without users
UX Theatre is "the application of any sort of design methodology without including a single user in the process, or including users but merely for show."
From Putting People First
An anthropologist on Facebook’s new “Ray-Ban Stories” glasses
With this product, writes anthropologist Sally Applin in MIT's Technology Review, "Facebook is claiming the face as real estate for its own technology."
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Training Proof for Quantum AI
Technical finding regarding CNN and the ability to train. Applicability to discovering new materials.
Breakthrough Proof Clears Path for Quantum AI
Los Alamos National Laboratory News, October 15, 2021
Scientists at the U.S…From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
An Annoying Problem
It’s the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers — Cory Doctorow ACM Turing Award source Robert Tarjan is well known to most—a Turing award winner in 1986 with John Hopcroft. Bob is a professor…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Recent AI books are Described in CACM
Some good recent books brought to my attention, intro below.
Three books offer varied perspectives on the ascendancy of artificial intelligence.
Devdatt Dubhashi , Pages 30-31
"AlphaZero crushes chess…From insideHPC
LLNL Joins Human Vaccines Project
Oct. 21, 2021 — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has joined the international Human Vaccines Project (HVP), bringing lab research and computing resources to the consortium to aid development of a universal coronavirus…
From The Eponymous Pickle
MIT Media Lab RFusion Finds Hidden, Missing Things
A classic problem for mapping, decluttering the Smart Home
52.9K subscribers
This video presents a new robot from MIT called RFusion, which can find and retrieve hidden objects. The robot fuses RF (Radio Frequency)…From insideHPC
Overcoming Bandwidth and Capacity Bottlenecks in the Exascale Era
[SPONSORED POST] Join us for the Advanced Memory Architectures to Overcome Bandwidth Bottlenecks for the Exascale Era of Computing webinar on November 10 at 9:00 am PT. During this webinar, leading industry experts will discuss…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Regulators Want more Details of Payment Systems
To be expected, how can the details of this be used to improve security?
Regulators demand more info about tech payment systems in TheVerge
Query orders sent out to Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Paypal, and Square
By Russell…From The Eponymous Pickle
Did IBM Lose the Cloud?
Did IBM Lose the Cloud and was Emphasis on Watson to Blame? Interacted with them during the early Watson days and there was quite an investment in that.
How IBM lost the cloud in Protocol
Insiders say that marketing missteps…From insideHPC
Argonne Names 5 New Distinguished Fellows
Argonne National Laboratory has named for 2021 five new Argonne Distinguished Fellows, the lab’s highest title: Pete Beckman, Lois Curfman McInnes and Rick Stevens from the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences (CELS) directorate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retail Hyperautomation?
My friend Gib Basset authors this piece in Retailwire, including further discussion:
Will ‘hyperautomation’ determine retailing success from this point forward? by Gib Bassett in Retailwire
There is no doubt 2021 is shaping up…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Converting binary floating-point numbers to integers
You are given a floating-point number, e.g. a double type in Java or C++. You would like to convert it to an integer type… but only if the conversion is exact. In other words, you want to convert the floating-point number toContinue…
From My Biased Coin
Networking+Theory Postdoc at Harvard
The last couple of years one aspect of research I've greatly enjoyed is getting back into networking, which is really due to my excellent (and patient) collaborators Ran Ben Basat (now at UCL, was a postdoc at Harvard) and Minlan…