Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2024
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid-Inspired Needle Technology
Interesting research:
Blog moderation policy…Using jet propulsion inspired by squid, researchers demonstrate a microjet system that delivers medications directly into tissues, matching the effectiveness of traditional needles.
From Schneier on Security
Race Condition Attacks against LLMs
These are two attacks against the system components surrounding LLMs:
We propose that LLM Flowbreaking, following jailbreaking and prompt injection, joins as the third on the growing list of LLM attack types. Flowbreaking is…From Schneier on Security
NSO Group Spies on People on Behalf of Governments
The Israeli company NSO Group sells Pegasus spyware to countries around the world (including countries like Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Mexico, Morocco and Rwanda). We assumed that those countries use the spyware themselves. Now…
From insideHPC
AMD Releases ROCm Version 6.3
Nov. 26, 2024: AMD today announced the release of ROCm Version 6.3 open-source platform, introducing tools and optimizations for AI, ML and HPC workloads on AMD Instinct GPU accelerators. ROCm 6.3 is engineered for a range of…
From insideHPC
Quantum: Alice & Bob Announce Logical Qubit Emulator
PARIS, 26th November 2024 – Alice & Bob, a fault-tolerant quantum computing company, today announced Felis 1.0, its toolbox with logical qubit emulator designed to help users prepare for quantum computing by facilitating the
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From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Hour of Code and Corporate Involvement in CS Education
An interesting article was shared on Facebook recently -Is the 'Hour of Code' the New 30-Minute Saturday Morning Cartoon Commercial? Take a look at it. It may make you think.
One statement there is that "corporate-sponsored Hour…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning and Hexapawn
A presenter at the recent New England CSTA New England Conference 
From insideHPC
Harbor Service, VAST Data Provide Storage Upgrade for NCSA Systems
Nov. 20, 2024: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications and VAST Data are giving supercomputing system Delta and the newly launched DeltaAI a boost in their storage and application performance. NCSA launched Harbor…
From insideHPC
Webinar: ALCF Developer Session on HPC Workflows to Be Held Dec. 11
The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility will hold a webinar at 11 am Central Time on Wednesday, Dec. 11 covering remote workflows at ALCF. Registration is here. HPC resources like those at ALCF are increasingly becoming integrated…
From The Noisy Channel
Documents, Queries, and Categories
I have published a number of posts and presentations about the bag-of-documents model, which essentially represents query intent as a distribution in a document vector space. Conversely, I have written about the bag-of-queries…
From insideHPC
Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute Selects IQM Spark Quantum Computer
Taipei, Taiwan, 25th November 2024 – The Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute (TSRI) under the National Applied Research Laboratories today announces the procurement of its first full-stack quantum computer from IQM Quantum…
From Computational Complexity
We Will All Write Like AI
From Schneier on Security
Security Analysis of the MERGE Voting Protocol
Interesting analysis: An Internet Voting System Fatally Flawed in Creative New Ways.
Abstract: The recently published “MERGE” protocol is designed to be used in the prototype CAC-vote system. The voting kiosk and protocol transmit…From Writing
Everything I wish I'd known about rotator cuff surgery
Image source: Nucleus Communications.
From insideHPC
Jan. 5 Registration Deadline for ASC25 Student Supercomputer Challenge
ATLANTA, Nov. 22, 2024 –The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge 2025 (ASC25) kicked off its inaugural briefing session at SC24, unveiling a timeline for the upcoming competition. Aspiring undergraduate teams from around the world…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
To be (CEO) or not to be (CEO)
by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London, based on an interview between Hamit Soyel and Queen Mary Innovations Just because you start a start-up doesn’t mean you have to be the boss (the CEO) running the company… Hamit…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
The Blue Planet?
by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London How much should we change the world to make it easier for our machines to work? Plant scientists have spotted a problem they can solve. Weeding robots are finding it difficult to…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
ACM Women at Computing Education Research conferences: ICER and UKICER
By Adriana Wilde, ACM-W Communication co-chair, and Arati Dixit, ACM-W Regional Activities, co-chair Earlier this year (12-15 August 2024), as representatives of ACM Women, we had the privilege of attending the 20th ACM Conference…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Invisible Women in IT
By Ingrid Maria Christensen and Melissa Høegh Marcher The lack of IT specialists in Europe is a growing problem, with 63% of European hiring enterprises reporting challenges filling their IT vacancies. Likewise, a Danish report…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Announcing the New ACM-W Professional Chapters Chair and Committee!
ACM-W is excited to announce the launch of the ACM-W Professional Chapters Committee! This new project team will promote the mission of ACM-W to support the creation of new professional chapters worldwide and provide resources…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Transcriptome Analysis of the Indian Squid
Lots of details that are beyond me.
From insideHPC
IBM and Pasqal Expand Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Initiative
Yorktown Heights, New York, and Paris, Nov. 21, 2024 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Pasqal today announced an update to their intended collaboration to build new, integrated frameworks for quantum-centric supercomputing with Qiskit quantum…
From Schneier on Security
The Scale of Geoblocking by Nation
Interesting analysis:
We introduce and explore a little-known threat to digital equality and freedomwebsites geoblocking users in response to political risks from sanctions. U.S. policy prioritizes internet freedom and access…From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
2nd ACM Celebration of Women in Computing in Africa: Africa CWIC 2024
The organizers of Africa CWIC 2024 report on their 2nd ACM Celebration of Women in Computing. On Friday, 1st November 2024, United States International University – Africa (USIU-Africa) hosted the 2nd ACM Celebration of Women…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Mixing Research with Entrepreneurship: Find a need and solve it
by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London Becoming a successful entrepreneur often starts with seeing a need: a problem someone has that needs to be fixed. For David Ronan, the problem was that of how hard it is to mixContinue…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Parsing floats at over a gigabyte per second in C#
A few years ago, we wrote csFastFloat, a C# library to parse floating-point numbers faster. Given the string “3.1416”, it computes the binary value 3.1416. The functionality of the library is equivalent to the C# function Double…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Introducing JUST ACM-W Student Chapter
This month, we are introducing the ACM-W Student Chapter at Jordan University of Science and Technology, officially established on August 19, 2024. The chapter is the first ACM-W Student Chapter in Jordan and brings together…
From insideHPC
Exascale: Gordon Bell Prize Team Presents Record-Breaking Algorithm for Chemistry and Biology
Atlanta, Nov. 21, 2024 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, named an eight-member team drawn from Australian and American institutions as the winner of the 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for the project, “Breaking the
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From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interested in Industry Visitors to Your CS Class?
I get interesting messages from all sorts of places. Recently, I received this message on LinkedIn. I love the idea of bringing industry professionals in to talk to students. If you’re interested, check out their web page and…
From insideHPC
Hyperion Annunces 2024 HPC Innovation Excellence Awards
ST PAUL, Minn., Nov. 21, 2024 — Hyperion Research today announced the recipients of the 20th round of HPC Innovation Excellence Awards. Since 2011, these semi-annual innovation excellence awards have been recognized globally
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