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
What is Watson? A Significant Part of the Future of AI
Thoughtful piece. Despite recent criticism as not having attained enough, Watson is a genuine accomplishment. We saw it early on and remarked about how it was the direction for enterprise AI, solving difficult, data rich…
From insideHPC
Taming the Cost of HPC in the Cloud
This timely article from our friends over at Univa examines methods for reigning in costs for managing HPC in the cloud, specifically moving beyond cloud automation to cloud expense management. Three proactive approaches for
…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Senior Research Analyst for New Hardware Technologies at Hyperion Research
Hyperion Research is seeking a Senior Research Analyst for New Hardware Technologies in our Job of the Week. "Working collaboratively with the Hyperion Research team, you will conduct research and produce analyses on new hardware…
From Schneier on Security
Wi-Fi Hotspot Tracking
Free Wi-Fi hotspots can track your location, even if you don't connect to them. This is because your phone or computer broadcasts a unique MAC address. What distinguishes location-based marketing hotspot providers like Zenreach…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Writing Smart Contracts
Now have seen some very contradictory views of how well a 'smart contract' could truly model an actual legal contract, except for the most trivial ones. Maintaining them might also required considerable preliminary design…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Personalized Games
Much like the general idea, Could it be applied to other kinds of tasks. Could it be used to allocate resources to problems. Connect with the right kinds of assistants?
Researchers Create 'Player Trait Model' Allowing for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Standardizing Deep Learning Model Deployment
Tomorrow of interest:
Join @MLnick on Oct 10, 8:30am US Eastern (note unusual time) - Nick Pentreath: Principal Engineer, CODAIT (Center for Open-Source Data & AI Technologies) at IBM. "Standardizing deep learning modelhttp…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Upcoming NSF CISE Deadlines
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate has some upcoming solicitation deadlines. Check them out! CCF Core Solicitation The CCF Core Solicitation (NSF 19-589)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Causation to Provide the Why
Basic causation is a great start. Why did this happen? We are doing it all the time. Its one of our basic knowledge processing capabilities that lead to learning. We can figure out the answer by observation and combing
An…
From Schneier on Security
Cheating at Professional Poker
Interesting story about someone who is almost certainly cheating at professional poker. But then I start to see things that seem so obvious, but I wonder whether they aren't just paranoia after hours and hours of digging into…
From insideHPC
Harvard Names New Lenovo HPC Cluster after Astronomer Annie Jump Cannon
Harvard has deployed a liquid-cooled supercomputer from Lenovo at it's FASRC computing center. The system, named "Cannon" in honor of astronomer Annie Jump Cannon, is a large-scale HPC cluster supporting scientific modeling and…
From insideHPC
Julia Computing Chief Scientist Alan Edelman Wins Prestigious IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award
Alan Edelman, professor of applied mathematics at MIT, has been selected to receive the 2019 IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award. Edelman was cited for “for outstanding breakthroughs in high-performance computing, linear algebra, and…
From insideHPC
Parallel Computing in Python: Current State and Recent Advances
Pierre Glaser from INRIA gave this talk at EuroPython 2019. "Modern hardware is multi-core. It is crucial for Python to provide high-performance parallelism. This talk will expose to both data-scientists and library developers…
From insideHPC
Lenovo and Intel Power Data-Intensive Science at the Flatiron Institute
Today Lenovo and Intel revealed how their collaboration on joint technology solutions that accelerate the convergence of HPC and AI are helping scientists at the Flatiron Institute solve scientific challenges in entirely new
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Procurement in Retail
Have noted the broad increase in quality and sticking of private labels. Also linking these labels with other purchases in retail. Advances are in play. Considerable detail here:
Rethinking procurement in retail
For retailers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smarticles for Robotic Locomotion
New means of locomotion provide new options for robotic use.
Shape-Shifting Robot Built from 'Smarticles' Shows New Locomotion Strategy
Georgia Tech Research Horizons
September 18, 2019
strategy
Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT)…
From Schneier on Security
Illegal Data Center Hidden in Former NATO Bunker
Interesting: German investigators said Friday they have shut down a data processing center installed in a former NATO bunker that hosted sites dealing in drugs and other illegal activities. Seven people were arrested. [...] Thirteen…
From Schneier on Security
Speakers Censored at AISA Conference in Melbourne
Two speakers were censored at the Australian Information Security Association's annual conference this week in Melbourne. Thomas Drake, former NSA employee and whistleblower, was scheduled to give a talk on the golden age of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Knock it with a SmartPhone to Identify
Here a system built in South Korea that lets you knock on an object with a smartphone, and it identifies it using sound and motion sensors. We worked on problems that predicted maintenance needs of machinery, using sounds and…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
New NSF Solicitation for National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes!
Contributions to this blog were provided by CCC and CRA staff. The National Science Foundation (NSF), in partnership with the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Removing Bias from Predictive Modeling
Podcast of interest from Wharton re Bias, Podcast at the link.
Wharton's James Johndrow discusses his research on removing human bias from predictive modeling.
Predictive modeling is supposed to be neutral, a way to help remove…
From insideHPC
Traverse Supercomputer to accelerate fusion research at Princeton
Princeton’s High-Performance Computing Research Center recently hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Traverse, it’s newest supercomputer. Traverse is a 1.4 petaflop HPC cluster that ranks among the top 500 systems in the world…
From insideHPC
Visualizing and Simulating Atomic Structures with CUDA
In this video, John Stone from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign discusses the role of CUDA and GPUs in processing large datasets to visualize and simulate high-resolution atomic structures. CUDA does this by allowing…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Advancing Scientific Research with HPC
In this podcast, Dana Chang from Atipa Technologies joins Conversations in the Cloud to discuss Atipa’s Polaris High Performance Computing and Visualization (HPCV) platform. "Today’s scientists need faster insights and visualize…
From insideHPC
Bright Computing Powers Deep Learning at University of North Dakota
The University of North Dakota is using Bright Computing software to unify its newly designed clustered infrastructure, giving them more versatility, access to the cloud and to deep learning resources. “Bright software makes
…
From insideHPC
Video: What Can HPC on AWS Do?
Ian Colle from Amazon gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "AWS provides the most elastic and scalable cloud infrastructure to run your HPC applications. With virtually unlimited capacity, engineers, researchers, and HPC system…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Learning More Efficient Allocation
Consider other possibilities for real time efficiency
Artificial intelligence could help data centers run far more efficiently
MIT system “learns” how to optimally allocate workloads across thousands of servers to cut costs, save…
From Schneier on Security
New Unpatchable iPhone Exploit Allows Jailbreaking
A new iOS exploit allows jailbreaking of pretty much all version of the iPhone. This is a huge deal for Apple, but at least it doesn't allow someone to remotely hack people's phones. Some details: I wanted to learn how Checkm8…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Quantum Supremacy? Yes and No!
In this podcast, the RadioFreeHPC team discusses the Google/NASA paper, titled “Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor”, that was published and then unpublished. "The tantalizing promise of quantum computers…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The price of a MacBook Air worldwide
Apple sells identical laptops worldwide. There might be small differences with respect to power adaptors and so forth, but the laptops are the same internally. Of course, there are differences in taxes but Apple quote pricesContinue…