Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2019
From The Eponymous Pickle
Consumers Breaking with Legacy Brands
Still nostalgia equity is a powerful thing for many brands.
Nostalgia Is Not Enough: Why Consumers Abandon Legacy Brands
Mar 25, 2019 Strategic Management North America
Earlier this month, Sears ended a nine-decade presence in
The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Comparison of Analytic Methods
Becasue I often work with different kinds of practitioners, I often get questions like: How is this different from statistical methods, from Operations Research .... ? I was trained in earlier methods that often had the same…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 13th 2019)
There is little evidence that digital screens are harmful to teenager’s mental health. If there is an effect, it is small. Cotton bags must be reused thousands of times before they match the environmental performance of plastic…
From insideHPC
Job of the Week: Computational Scientist at UT Southwestern Medical Center
The UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas is seeking a Computational Scientist in our Job of the Week. "The Computational Scientist will support faculty and students in adapting computational strategies to the specific features…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Enterprises go HPC at GPU Technology Conference
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at news from the GPU Technology Conference. "Dan has been attending GTC since well before it became the big and important conference that it is today. We get a quick update on what…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robots Sorting Trash
An excellent example of robot use. Its a classic example of solving a messy problem that can change the economics of a difficult problem. How well would it work?
MIT’s bot sifts through trash to do your recycling for you in …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Best Data Science Youtube Channels
Good resources, did quick scan and there are some useful things there, somewhat varied in quality, but there are gems.
4 of the Best Data Science YouTube Channels in Medium
Go to the profile of #ODSC - Open Data Science
There…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Natural Language and Intent with Ambiguity
Good simple explanation from Tableau on Intent. Have used the concept now in several projects, and of course there is ambiguity, beyond dictionary-definition, in the use of many terms within a company. The ambiguity in context…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data vs Democracy?
Interesting view ...
Who needs democracy when you have data?
Here’s how China rules using data, AI, and internet surveillance.
by Christina Larson in Technology Review
"... In 1955, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov published a…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Value of Inefficiency
I like the general thought. Pure efficiency can make us miss things. Its why had second thoughts about optimization methods, they could rarely be implemented directly, and their methods where often did not give you
Edward…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Detecting Illegal Squid Fishing with Satellite Imagery
Interesting. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered. Read my blog posting guidelines here....
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Code 8.7: How We Can Advance Collaborative Problem Solving
The following blog is reposted from the Delta 8.7 website. You can view the original post here. Contributions by: James Cockayne | Project Director – Delta 8.7 Nadya Bliss | Director, the Global Security Initiative at Arizona…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IOTA Zeus for Retail Payment
A somewhat unexpected application for the novel IOTA 'blockchain' approach. Following.
Zeux App Enables Use of IOTA For Cryptocurrency Payments at Retail Stores
By Gabriel M
The crypto payments startup Zeux has recently affirmed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmenting Quantum D-Wave Quantum Annealing
Mentioned before we connected with D-Wave Quantum Computing early on. Have posted many items about their work. Their annealing approach still has great potential for some difficult kinds of combinatorial problems. Note
A…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Extended Reality is for Employees for Now
Based on what we have seen form Microsoft and other players, VR and XR seem to be best for things the require a hands-free concept, which accept he oddness of wearing some unusual and expensive head gear. Do expect some exceptions…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why are unrolled loops faster?
A common optimization in software is to “unroll loops”. It is best explained with an example. Suppose that you want to compute the scalar product between two arrays: sum = 0; for (i = 0; i < length; i++) sum += x[i] * y[i]; An…
From Schneier on Security
Maliciously Tampering with Medical Imagery
In what I am sure is only a first in many similar demonstrations, researchers are able to add or remove cancer signs from CT scans. The results easily fool radiologists. I don't think the medical device industry has thought at…
From insideHPC
AMD Powers Corona Cluster for HPC Analytics at Livermore
Lawrence Livermore National Lab has deployed a 170-node HPC cluster from Penguin Computing. Based on AMD EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct GPUs, the new Corona cluster will be used to support the NNSA Advanced Simulation and…
From insideHPC
Berkeley Engineers build World’s Fastest Optical Switch Arrays
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have built a new photonic switch that can control the direction of light passing through optical fibers faster and more efficiently than ever. This optical "traffic cop" could…
From insideHPC
Arm A64fx and Post-K: A Game-Changing CPU & Supercomputer
Satoshi Matsuoka from RIKEN gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Santa Fe. "Post-K is the flagship next generation national supercomputer being developed by Riken and Fujitsu in collaboration. Post-K will have hyperscale class…
From BLOG@CACM
Immigrants Help Solve the Looming STEM Worker Shortage
Our economic vitality depends on them.
From insideHPC
GPUs Address Growing Data Needs for Finance & Insurance Sectors
A new whitepaper from Penguin Computing contends “a new era of supercomputing” has arrived — driven primarily by the emergence of graphics processing units or GPUs. The tools once specific to gaming are now being used by investment…
From Schneier on Security
New Version of Flame Malware Discovered
Flame was discovered in 2012, linked to Stuxnet, and believed to be American in origin. It has recently been linked to more modern malware through new analysis tools that find linkages between different software. Seems that Flame…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Buys Polymorph Labs
Wal-Mart continues to push tech. Now for online, digital targeted ads.
Walmart acquires adtech startup Polymorph Labs to scale up its ad business
By Sarah Perez @sarahintampa
Amazon has a large and growing advertising business…
From Computational Complexity
Elwyn Berlekamp Died April 9, 2019
Elwyn R. Berlekamp entered this world on Sept 6, 1940, and left it on April 9, 2019. Wikipedia calls him An American Mathematician which seems to narrow to me. He worked on a variety of topics which were Math, Comp Sci, finance…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Inventory Robotics at Giant Eagle
Note in particular the frequency of state and availability of merchandise.
Giant Eagle unveils plans for inventory robots
Giant Eagle has joined with Simbe Robotics to add the company's robot, Tally, to select stores in Pennsylvania…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tools and Techniques of Infrastructure
Infrastructure is important, the most important thing to really make things happen. Without it you might be able to trip over some useful, intelligent conclusions, but they are going to be very hard to find and implement in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predicting Patterns in Large Data Streams
Its all about patterns in context, whether to gain insight, predict or prescribe. So its analytics too. But from my perspective, AI occurs when we insert the analysis it into a useful process. And 'intelligence' when it interacts…
From insideHPC
Video: HPC Networking in the Real World
Jesse Martinez from Los Alamos National Laboratory gave this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop in Austin. "High speed networking has become extremely important in the world of HPC. As parallel processing capabilities increases…
From insideHPC
Scaling Deep Learning for Scientific Workloads on the #1 Summit Supercomputer
In this video, Jack Wells from ORNL presents: Scaling Deep Learning for Scientific Workloads on Summit. HPC centers have been traditionally configured for simulation workloads, but deep learning has been increasingly applied
…