Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2019
From insideHPC
DOE to Provide $45 Million for Materials Research in Quantum Information Science
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy announced plans to provide $45 million for new research in chemical and materials sciences aimed at advancing the important emerging field of Quantum Information Science (QIS). "QIS will play…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Towards Democratizing Data Science
Nice thought, though I wonder how the use/presentation of the results can spin the outcome. Note the use of Bayesian methods, which we also used extensively to provide more explainable results. Use of the Jupyter notebook
Democratizing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rolling Driverless Convenience Stores
Look forward to seeing something like this.
Stop & Shop to Test Driverless Mobile Markets in ThePacker
Stop & Shop customers in the Boston area will be able to shop directly from driverless delivery vehicles in a test set to
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger CEO Makes Predictions for Retail's Future
Kroger wants to closely follow the technical future of retail.
Kroger CEO makes predictions for retail's future in Foodnavigator
The retail of the future will look different from today, combining physical and digital shopping
…
From insideHPC
Video: Accelerating Science & Impacting the Real World
In this video from DDN booth at SC18, Thomas Anthony from the University of Alabama presents: Computing - Accelerating Science & Impacting the Real World. "As the cornerstone service of ASA's charter, we provide High Performance…
From insideHPC
Intel becomes First Corporate Champion for Women in HPC
Today the Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) organization announced that Intel Corporation has become its first Corporate Champion. WHPC’s mission is to promote best practices in workforce diversity and inclusion in HPC…
From insideHPC
Interview: HPC Thought Leaders Looking Forward to SC19 in Denver
In this special guest feature, SC19 General Chair Michela Taufer catches up with Sunita and Jack Dongarra to discuss the way forward for the November conference in Denver. "By augmenting our models and our ability to do simulation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft on How AI can Transform Business
Click through to interact. Always thinking about how businesses can usefully interact with assistance in doing their work. AI can be a part, but also things like data visualization, dashboards, Data mining, simpler analytics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Chainlink for Smart Contracts
New developments in Smart Contracts. Addressing some of the difficult issues with the concept of a smart contract. Good discussion at the link:
Blockchain Smart Contacts Finally Good for Something in the Real World In MIT…
From The Eponymous Pickle
VR in the Operating Room
Good case for VR. Complex, real time, lots of sensor data, collaboration and interaction is key. We worked on operation room simulation to make them more efficient.
Virtual Reality Gets Real in the Operating Room
Fortune By…
From The Eponymous Pickle
NVIDIA Test Robotic Kitchen
In our kitchen lab we also thought the kitchen was a key challenge for robotics, information exchange and assistance.
This Ikea kitchen is incubating the robots of the future
At Nvidia’s new robot lab in Seattle, UW professorBy…
From Schneier on Security
Evaluating the GCHQ Exceptional Access Proposal
The so-called Crypto Wars have been going on for 25 years now. Basically, the FBI -- and some of their peer agencies in the U.K., Australia, and elsewhere -- argue that the pervasive use of civilian encryption is hampering their…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mining and AI
Mining, here Geo-Mining, not cryptocurrency or Data-Mining. A complex, sensor based problem with considerable cost and potential reward, would seem to have real application of AI-style analytics. But it seems not much has…
From The Eponymous Pickle
January IFTTT
Good new stuff on the latest IFTTT newsletter, especially with regard to the support of voice assistants. Always something interesting there, and have implemented a few examples on my own. I am a fan. Still think there is…
From Computational Complexity
The Cost of Privacy
 |
| Billboard at 2019 CES |
Computer scientists tend to obsess about privacy and we've had a privacy/security debate for decades now. But now machine learning has really given us a whole new spin on what privacy protects and takes…
From insideHPC
Interview: Gary Grider from LANL on the new Efficient Mission-Centric Computing Consortium
At SC18 in Dallas, I had a chance to catch up with Gary Grider from LANL. "So we're forming a consortium to chase efficient computing. We see many of the HPC sites today seem to be headed down the path of buying machines that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Doing AI with all of your Data
Been a while since I have read the Teradata blog, some good thoughts. This is the challenge for many enterprises. And their operational data today is still relational.
Using AI on All Your Data: Building AI Models with Relational…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart to Add 200 Technologists
Further indication that high tech is steaming in retail.
Walmart to Add 2,000 to Technology Group This Year
Bloomberg By Emma Chandra; Matthew Boyle
Walmart anticipates the hiring of 2,000 technology experts this year in an effort…
From insideHPC
Metal or Plastic Liquid Cooling Connectors? What You Should Consider
With recent advances, high-performance thermoplastic now offers performance that rivals, and in some cases, surpasses their metal counterparts. Design engineers have to take several factors into consideration when trying to choose…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Comments on Emerging Tech
Good podcasts excerpts at the link, with connections to the full thing.
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on Emerging Technology: Blockchain, Wearables and Virtual Reality in InfoQ
In a recent a16z Podcast, a16z Venture Capital…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Participant, Customer Storytellling
How much of this can we hand off to the customer, and how well does that work? Can customers plot their own journey?
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch Is an Experiment on Us
Independent (London) By David Streitfeld
The Netflix series…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advantage of Talking to Customers Directly
Related to a number of projects we did, including having customers do tours of our retail lab store with our CEO. Now a project is looking at how to automate parts of consumer survey interaction.
Customers Surveys Are No Substitute…
From Schneier on Security
Prices for Zero-Day Exploits Are Rising
Companies are willing to pay ever-increasing amounts for good zero-day exploits against hard-to-break computers and applications: On Monday, market-leading exploit broker Zerodium said it would pay up to $2 million for zero-click…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Improves her Reading Style.
I had previously experimented with Alexa voice ability to reasonably read arbitrary English text, for possible business applications. The result was rocky. Now she has come out with a means to better pronounce text, emphasizing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ontologies vs Knowledge Graphs
Challenging thoughts, which we examined for some time in the enterprise. Not solved there either, or what it would take to construct, use and maintain this from either direction. Ultimately it's the most important idea…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ahold Giant Foods to Roll out Robots
Note the planned use for operational process. But also being in the store and interacting to some degree with customers?
NRF: Roving robots report for work at all Giant Foods’ stores By Tom Ryan in Retailwire
At the NRF Big Show…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Whats the Dark Web?
The below definition question came up in a recent meeting, was surprised at the considerable variance in answers. Well it is dark, so might we expect the answer to be unclear, but order the below to get the answer from
10…
From insideHPC
Penguin Computing builds Caviness Cluster for Machine Learning at the University of Delaware
Penguin Computing has deployed a new HPC cluster at the University of Delaware. The Caviness cluster is named in honor of Jane Caviness, former director of Academic Computing Services at the University. "It is great to have our…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM, Ford and LG Link for Blockchain Cobalt Tracing
What appears to be a good example for the legitimate use of Blockchain models. A sharable supply chain authentication/governance model.
Ford and IBM among quartet in Congo cobalt blockchain project in Reuters, with more good…
From insideHPC
Call for Presentations: GlobusWorld 2019 in Chicago
GlobusWorld 2019 has issued its Call for Presentations. The event takes place May 1-2 in Chicago. The event centers around Globus, a secure, reliable research data management service that enables researchers to move, share, publish…