Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2018
From The Eponymous Pickle
NASA Using Smart Contracts
Been examining applications of smart contracts in general, and also as implemented by Blockchain architectures. Here something new from work by NASA. NASA has previously done quite a bit of work using autonomous navigation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Real Time Data, Real Time Decisions
Useful introduction. Note the usefulness in many domains, from supply chain to manufacturing to finance. There were some also some recent suggestions that this might be neeed because data cannot be held because of regulatory…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What is AI Anyway?
A definition we also struggled with. Back then it was rule bases and much simpler learning analytics and updating. Much has improved, but the expectations are still very high. And that does, as he suggests, distract us.
Artificial…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: HPC System Administrator at D.E. Shaw Research
D.E. Shaw Research is seeking an HPC System Administrator in our Job of the Week. "Our research effort is aimed at achieving major scientific advances in the field of biochemistry and fundamentally transforming the process of…
From insideHPC
Using the Titan Supercomputer to Develop 50,000 Years of Flood Risk Scenarios
Dag Lohmann from KatRisk gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Tucson. "In 2012, a small Berkeley, California, startup called KatRisk set out to improve the quality of worldwide flood risk maps. The team wanted to create large…
From Putting People First
[Book] An Introduction to Service Design
![[Book] An Introduction to Service Design](/system/assets/0000/1953/030209_Vanderbeeken_Mark_250.small_square.jpg?1476779420&1260281963)
An Introduction to Service Design: Designing the Invisible By Lara Penin Bloomsbury Visual Arts, May 2018 344 pages A comprehensive introduction to designing services according to the needs of the customer or participants, this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Twins for Personalized Medicine.
Reminds me in the human sense of agent based models. And their use to address group behavior. Interesting, but not necessarily predictive. The article quotes George Box, who said 'All Models are wrong, some are useful'. …
From The Eponymous Pickle
What Machine Learning Engineers Need to Know
Useful piece.
What machine learning engineers need to know
The O’Reilly Data Show Podcast: Jesse Anderson and Paco Nathan on organizing data teams and next-generation messaging with Apache Pulsar. By Ben Lorica.
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Prices Rise as Catch Decreases
In Japan: Last year's haul sank 15% to 53,000 tons, according to the JF Zengyoren national federation of fishing cooperatives. The squid catch has fallen by half in just two years. The previous low was plumbed in 2016. Lighter…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pattern Recognition in Road Tracing
We had a similar challenge when we managed roads and their quality in Alberta. We were mostly interested in if the roads had degraded, and needed to manage resources to improve them to a level where they would satisfy predicted…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alibabas AI Chips
Much more at the link.
Alibaba is developing its own AI chips, too in Technology Review
The Chinese e-commerce giant will join a raft of other tech firms in designing its own processors tailored to in-house machine learnings…
From insideHPC
Fujitsu Upgrades RAIDEN at RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project
Fujitsu reports that the company has significantly boosted the performance of the RAIDEN supercompuer. RAIDEN is a computer system for artificial intelligence research originally deployed in 2017 at the RIKEN Center for Advanced…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI and Bad Process
More evidence you have to get the context process right, with or without advanced methods.
Don’t Let Artificial Intelligence Supercharge Bad Processes in Sam Ransbotham in Sloan Review
When artificial intelligence is used to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Skill Blueprints
More on Skill Blueprints in ZDNet. Via Walter Riker.
Why Amazon's Alexa Skill Blueprints are a master stroke
Amazon has opened up Alexa to the masses with Alexa Skill Blueprints and integrated the digital assistant even more
…
From insideHPC
Video: Why UIC Uses Containers for HPC Applications on GPUs
In this video from the GPU Technology Conference, John Stone from the University of Illinois describes how container technology in the NVIDIA GPU Cloud help the University distribute accelerated applications for science and engineering…
From insideHPC
Video: HPC Use for Earthquake Research
Christine Goulet from the Southern California Earthquake Center gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Tucson. "SCEC coordinates fundamental research on earthquake processes using Southern California as its principal natural…
From insideHPC
Students: Sign up now for ISC STEM Student Day in Frankfurt
Registration for the ISC STEM Student Day program is now open. As part of the ISC 2018 conference, the full-day program is free of charge and takes place June 27 in Frankfurt, Germany. "We have created a program to welcome science…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Securing the Intelligent Edge
Still in private test. A considerable piece.
Introducing Microsoft Azure Sphere: Secure and power the intelligent edge
Galen Hunt, Partner Managing Director, Microsoft Azure Sphere ..
" ... Here, you can read more about how
…
From Schneier on Security
Securing Elections
Elections serve two purposes. The first, and obvious, purpose is to accurately choose the winner. But the second is equally important: to convince the loser. To the extent that an election system is not transparently and auditably…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF WATCH TALK-The Hidden Multi-Billion Dollar International Trade in Our Medical Data
The next WATCH talk, called The Hidden Multi-Billion Dollar International Trade in Our Medical Data, from Adam Tanner, Author of “Our Bodies, Our Data: How Companies Make Billions Selling Our Medical Records,” is Tuesday, May…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
By how much does AVX-512 slow down your CPU? A first experiment.
Intel is finally making available processors that support the fancy AVX-512 instruction sets and that can fit nicely in a common server rack. So I went to Dell and ordered a server with a Skylake-X microarchitecture: an Intel…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retail uses for Machine Learning
Machine Learning for SMB Retailers and Brands. Talk and panel discussion. Sponsored by Retailwire.
Here is the recording of the webinar and supporting slides.
Meeting Description:
Machine Learning can provide SMBs the edge they…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Releases Skills Blueprint
OK, easy, and may kick up the Skill count. But will it increase quality? No code involved. It might be better to make it easier to create plug-in capable micro skill-services that can be readily shared. Not as easy, as…
From insideHPC
Intel Open Sources nGraph Deep Neural Network model for Multiple Devices
Over at Intel, Scott Cyphers writes that the company has open-sourced nGraph, a framework-neutral Deep Neural Network (DNN) model compiler that can target a variety of devices. With nGraph, data scientists can focus on data science…
From insideHPC
JUWELS Supercomputer in Germany to be based on Modular Supercomputing
"The supercomputer JUQUEEN, the one-time reigning power in Europe’s high-performance computing industry, is ceding its place to its successor, the Jülich Wizard for European Leadership Science. Called JUWELS for short, the supercomputer…
From insideHPC
Universities step up to Cloud Bursting
In this special guest feature, Mahesh Pancholi from OCF writes that many of universities are now engaging in cloud bursting and are regularly taking advantage of public cloud infrastructures that are widely available from large…
From insideHPC
Charliecloud: Unprivileged Containers for User-Defined Software Stacks
"What if I told you there was a way to allow your customers and colleagues to run their HPC jobs inside the Docker containers they're already creating? or an easily learned, easily employed method for consistently reproducing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Talk: AI and Business Process
Reminder, later this morning:
Talk by: Chitra Dorai, IBM Fellow, Vice President and CTO
“The Real World of AI: Business Processes Reimagined End to End”
19 Apr 2018: 10:30 AM, ET Access Instructions below.
Talk slides and later…
From insideHPC
Exascale Computing for Long Term Design of Urban Systems
In this episode of Let's Talk Exascale, Charlie Catlett from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago describes how extreme scale HPC will be required to better build Smart Cities. "Urbanization is a bigger set…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intel Backs off Smart Glasses
Perhaps a bit surprising given the enthusiasm they gave only a short while ago. They had been working on object analysis as well. So will we see new moves in this space? I expect it from Asia.
Intel is giving up on its smart…