Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2020
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rapid Expansion of Amazon Pharmacy
What seems a rapid expansion of the Amazon Pharma delivery to multiple countries.
From Engadget by Mariella Moon
Amazon may be expanding its prescription drug delivery business to other countries. The e-commerce titan has applied…
From insideHPC
ASC20 to test Student Cluster Teams on Quantum & AI
Today the 2020 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC20) announced new tasks for the competition: using supercomputers to simulate Quantum circuit and training AI models. These tasks will be unprecedented challenges for the…
From Schneier on Security
Brazil Charges Glenn Greenwald with Cybercrimes
Glenn Greenwald has been charged with cybercrimes in Brazil, stemming from publishing information and documents that were embarrassing to the government. The charges are that he actively helped the people who actually did the…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Distinguished Lecture: Towards Usability, Transparency, and Trust for Data-Intensive Computations
Juliana Freire, New York University, will present “Towards Usability, Transparency, and Trust for Data-Intensive Computations,” part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE)…
From insideHPC
OSS PCI Express 4.0 Expansion System does AI on the Fly with Eight GPUs
Today One Stop Systems (OSS) announced the availability of a new OSS PCIe 4.0 value expansion system incorporating up to eight of the latest NVIDIA V100S Tensor Core GPU. As the newest member of the company’s AI on the Fly product…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA and Arm look to accelerate HPC Worldwide
In this video, NVIDIA’s Duncan Poole and Arm’s David Lecomber explain how the two company's accelerate the world’s fastest supercomputers. "At SC19, NVIDIA introduced a reference design platform that enables companies to quickly…
From insideHPC
European SiPearl Startup designing microprocessor for Exascale
Today European chip startup SiPearl announced it is moving into its operational phase. The company is now the 27th member of the European Processor Initiative (EPI) consortium. "By delivering supercomputing power, energy efficiency…
From insideHPC
AI & Blockchain: Internet of smarter things
Dr. Eng Lim Goh gave this talk at HPE Discover More. He describes inspiring real-world use cases that demonstrate the transformative power of AI and HPC. Hear how the next wave of Machine Intelligence is uncovering value in data…
From The Eponymous Pickle
RFID Powering of Smart Balls and Tags
An approach utilizing BLE power transmission that we examined and I still follow.
RFID Powers Smart Balls, Luggage Tags in RFIDJournal
Kookaburra's Smart Balls with SportCor technology using BLE transmissions, as well as British…
From Schneier on Security
SIM Hijacking
SIM hijacking -- or SIM swapping -- is an attack where a fraudster contacts your cell phone provider and convinces them to switch your account to a phone that they control. Since your smartphone often serves as a security measure…
From insideHPC
Registration Opens for HPC User Forum in Princeton, NJ
Hyperion Research has posted their preliminary agenda for the upcoming HPC User Forum. The event takes place March 30 - April 1 in Princeton, New Jersey. "The HPC User Forum was established in 1999 to promote the health of the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Builds Policy Lab for Regulation
Will read with interest what the meaning of 'precision' is here. And transcripts available of the discussion.
IBM unveils Policy Lab, advocates ‘precision regulation’ of AI
Kyle Wiggers in VentureBeat
BM formally announced the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Why Some AI Efforts Fail
From a former IBMer what we worked with on enterprise AI the first time around. Also insightful for many kinds of emerging tech. I have now followed up on this question for several major AI projects. Reading the report mentioned…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wll Augmented Reality Change Everything we See?
From the Penn Alumni Mag, a broad, descriptive and mostly academic oriented view of the world of augmented reality. Below the intro and at the link more...
Augmenting Reality
Will augmented reality change everything we see? A
By…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Filling large arrays with zeroes quickly in C++
Travis Downs reports that some C++ compilers have trouble filling up arrays with values at high speed. Typically, to fill an array with some value, C++ programmers invoke the std::fill. We might assume that for a task as simple…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blogging with Jupyter
Nicely, simply and well put, technical details at the link:
Blogging with Jupyter Notebooks
by Jeremy Howard in Fast.ai
Jupyter Notebooks is a great environment for creating “code heavy” blog posts. Maybe you didn’t even plan to…
From insideHPC
Podcast: AI4Good Lab Empowers Women in Computer Science
In this AI Podcast, Doina Precup describes why their doesn't need to be a gender gap in computer science education. An associate professor at McGill University and research team lead at DeepMind, Precup shares her personal experiences…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Predicting Predictions For the 20s
Before the reveal on January 22 Writer homepage source Claire Cameron is the senior science editor at an online publication called Inverse. She has written an incomplete article titled, “The 2020s: 20 science and tech predictions…
From insideHPC
Appentra Releases Parallelware Trainer 1.4
Today Appentra released Parallelware Trainer 1.4, an interactive, real-time code editor with features that facilitate the learning, usage, and implementation of parallel programming by understanding how and why sections of code…
From insideHPC
The State of HPC Storage – Requirements & Challenges
Steve Conway from Hyperion Research gave this talk at the Panasas User Group. "Hyperion Research conducted an industry survey to better understand TCO vs. initial costs/other purchase criteria, the benefits of greater simplicity…
From Schneier on Security
Clearview AI and Facial Recognition
The New York Times has a long story about Clearview AI, a small company that scrapes identified photos of people from pretty much everywhere, and then uses unstated magical AI technology to identify people in other photos. His…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Urges Proportionate AI Regulation
Google has the most to lose with very stringent regulation of AI methods. We recall this being brought up in the last AI surge, but the methods never evolved to this level.
Google chief urges 'proportionate' AI regulation in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intel AI Chips Announced
More hardware announcements at recent start of year conferences. Starting too see more work on hardware implementing faster solutions.
Intel Corp. made a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas late Monday afternoon…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Are Your Students Bored? Do They Understand?
Once you have information about emotion based engagement, this naturally follows. Could further be used to rate the quality of the instruction. Where does this kind of measurement end, even if not completely accurate?
Are…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Takes Food to Car
Another look by Wal-Mart at Robo Tech and attracting consumers. We had looked at attempts at completely automated grocery warehouse drive-throughs, but they had not succeeded.
Walmart Unveils Robot-Run Warehouse to Whisk Food…
From insideHPC
Video: Data Driven Ocean & Atmosphere Sciences at MoES in India
Dr. Suryachandra Rao from MoES gave this talk at the DDN User Group. "The Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) is mandated to provide services for weather, climate, ocean and coastal state, hydrology, seismology, and natural hazards…
From insideHPC
ORNL Tests Arm-based Wombat Platform with NVIDIA GPUs
Researchers at ORNL are trying out their HPC codes on Wombat, a test bed cluster based on production Marvell ThunderX2 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs. The small cluster provides a platform for testing NVIDIA’s new CUDA software stack…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Enterprise Value from Digital Factories
Via McKinsey, innovation studies inmanufacturing.
Industry’s fast-mover advantage: Enterprise value from digital factories
Manufacturing’s leaders in applying Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) digital technologies are building…
From Putting People First
Designing for digital well-being
Smartphone attachment is so prevalent that the fear of being without a phone has a name: nomophobia, writes Elizabeth Churchill in Interactions. What can be done to manage such unhealthy attachments?
From Putting People First
Are smart homes undermining our sense of ‘home’?
CES indicates we're still a far way off seeing technology for the home that genuinely fosters our sense of comfort, wellbeing and community.