Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2019
From The Eponymous Pickle
Race to Quantum
Useful sort view from Europe on quantum efforts underway. There are very big stakes. Solving the most complex, wicked problems in new ways.
By Katia Moskvitch in Wired UK
Inside the High Stakes Race to Make Quantum Computers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Overviews Accessibility Efforts
Have always though of accessibility as having a goal of augmentation. If its an assistant or simple access adjustment. Good examples here.
Making technology accessible for everyone in the Google Blog
Super G pinata
Written by…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Apple Fixes Squid Emoji
Apple fixed the squid emoji in iOS 13.1: A squid's siphon helps it move, breathe, and discharge waste, so having the siphon in back makes more sense than having it in front. Now, the poor squid emoji will look like it should,…
From Schneier on Security
I Have a New Book: We Have Root
I just published my third collection of essays: We Have Root. This book covers essays from 2013 to 2017. (The first two are Schneier on Security and Carry On.) There is nothing in this book is that is not available for free on…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Review of Gary Marcus' Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust
Just reading this book. Found the below non technical overview/review quite useful. Mostly agree with this, and the outline of chapters is useful. Saving it here for my own reference. Buy a copy.
Kenneth Forbus review of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Introduces Sterling Supply Chain Suite
Our earliest work in supply chain, from supplier to plant to consumer, was supported by IBM optimization methods. Recently saw some of their proposals for integrating Watson with supply chain. Also worked with some of IBM's…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
A Diophantine Obvious Problem}
With a short solution that was hard for me to find. [ Royal Society ] Sir Timothy Gowers is a Fields medalist and fellow blogger. Sometimes he (too) writes about simple topics. Today I would like to talk about a simple problem…
From insideHPC
GigaIO Nominated for Connect’s Most Innovative New Product Awards
Today the San Diego Venture Group (SDVG) announced that GigaIO is a finalist Connect’s Most Innovative New Product Awards. The winning companies will be announced at the Innovation Awards, an event held annually, honoring the…
From insideHPC
Cost-effective Cloud Research Computing comes to Penn State
Penn State’s Institute for CyberScience (ICS) announced that a new cloud computing environment has been added to its suite of high-performance computing offerings. This expanded capability provides Penn State researchers with…
From insideHPC
Podcast: How AI is Helping Astronomers Scour the Skies for Habitable Planets
In this AI Podcast, astronomers Olivier Guyon and Damien Gratadour how they’re using GPU-powered extreme adaptive optics in very large telescopes to image nearby habitable planets. "Imagine staring into the high-beams of an oncoming…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
What Time Is 30 Minutes From Now?
Got the proctor guide for the PSAT that I have to proctor next week. There is a chart to help proctors determine stop times that are 25, 35, 50, and 60 minutes from a time after the start time hour.
Wait! What? Someone needsSome…From insideHPC
Zenotech launches Aerospace Cloud Services
Zenotech is launching a new two-year project, Aerospace Cloud Services, to provide technology to enable the UK aerospace sector to add competitiveness to simulation-based design by accessing cloud HPC cost-effectively and securely…
From insideHPC
The Eco-System of AI and How to Use It
Glyn Bowden from HPE gave this talk at the UK HPC Conference. "This presentation walks through HPE's current view on AI applications, where it is driving outcomes and innovation, and where the challenges lay. We look at the eco…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger Selling its Marketing Technology
Excerpt from ModernRetail:
Why Kroger’s advertising program remains a nascent opportunity
By Cale Guthrie Weissman
" ..... Kroger — which boasts over 443,000 employees — for the last few years has been trying to improve its digital…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tracking Your Data: Exist
Brought to my attention:
Exist: Track everything together. Understand your behaviour.
By combining data from services you already use, we can help you understand what makes you more happy, productive, and active.
Bring your activity…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Future of Malicious Online Activity
Recent events have been troublesome here. We like to trust our machines, but the more autonomous and 'intelligent' they are, leads to lest trust and more complexity. Malware can use autonomy and intelligence as well. Data…
From Schneier on Security
Details on Uzbekistan Government Malware: SandCat
Kaspersky has uncovered an Uzbeki hacking operation, mostly due to incompetence on the part of the government hackers. The group's lax operational security includes using the name of a military group with ties to the SSS to register…
From Universal Acceptance Steering Group
Are the World’s Top Websites Truly Accessible for Global Audiences?
Are the World’s Top Websites Truly Accessible for Global Audiences? An Evaluation of Acceptance of Email Addresses in 2019. By Mark W. Datysgeld, UASG Ambassador and research coordinator for this evaluation The Domain Name Space…
From CERIAS Blog
Near the Root of Cybersecurity Dysfunction
I’ve been missing from the CERIAS blog for much of the last year+ as I enjoyed a long-overdue sabbatical.
While I was away, I was going through some materials in my account and found slides from a talk I was giving many years…From Computational Complexity
William Kruskal's 100th birthday
Today, Oct 10, 2019 is William Kruskal's 100th birthday (he's dead, so no cake. Oh well.) William Kruskal was a great statistician. To honor him we have a guest post by his nephew Clyde Kruskal. We also note that the Kruskalhere…
From Schneier on Security
New Reductor Nation-State Malware Compromises TLS
Kaspersky has a detailed blog post about a new piece of sophisticated malware that it's calling Reductor. The malware is able to compromise TLS traffic by infecting the computer with hacked TLS engine substituted on the fly,…
From insideHPC
Altair Acquires PollEx Electronic Design Automation Software
Today Altair announced the acquisition of Polliwog Co. Ltd., a high-tech software company based near Seoul, providing EDA software to the rapidly growing electronics industry. “Polliwog’s powerful PCB modeler and design verification…
From insideHPC
Q-CTRL Software to power Bleximo Quantum Accelerators for Business Computing
Today quantum startup Q-CTRL announced a global partnership to power superconducting ‘quantum accelerators’ from Bleximo, a full-stack quantum computing startup based in Berkeley, Calif. With the agreement, Q-CTRL will deliver…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Standardizing Deep Learning Model Deployment
Got this more detailed invite late, and the talk is over, but below you can follow along on slides and talk, see below:
Nick Pentreath, IBM , "Standardizing deep learning model deployment with the Model Asset Exchange"
Background…
From Putting People First
Smart City Index that takes citizen engagement into account
A team of researchers from IMD in Switzerland and SUTD in Singapore put together the Smart City Index. For the first time, researchers attempted to assess people’s perceptions of technology – as opposed to the quality of the
…
From insideHPC
ExaNoDe Builds Groundbreaking 3D prototype of Compute Element for Exascale
Today the European ExaNoDe project announced it has built a groundbreaking compute node prototype paving the way to exascale. "In the ExaNoDe project, we have built a complete prototype that integrates multiple core technologies…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rolling Your Own Neural Network
Seen several of these tutorials now interlaced with all concepts, math and code. This one seems nicely done. When we first played with these in the 80s we wrote our own from bottom up code, now you can roll your own with libraries…
From insideHPC
Video: Arm as a Viable Architecture for HPC & AI
Dr. Oliver Perks from Arm gave this talk at the UK HPC Conference. "The ARM architecture has grown in availability and usability for the HPC community in just the past few years. This is demonstrated by several ARM-based projects…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Reinforcement Training Frameworks
Good to see the kind of open source development being done.
DeepMind Has Quietly Open Sourced Three New Impressive Reinforcement Learning Frameworks
Three new releases that will help researchers streamline the implementation of…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Michael Backus Alaska Middle School Computer Science Teacher
Every so often I run into a computer science teacher’s work online and ask myself “how have I never heard of this person before?” This week I listened to a podcast by Vicki Davis with a middle school CS teacher from Alaska by…