Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2017
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Awards $36.6 million in New Food-Energy-Water System Grants
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently announced a partnership with the Department of Agriculture’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to create the joint program on Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy…
From insideHPC
Exascale: The Movie
In this video from HPE, researchers describe how Exascale will advance science and improve the quality of life for all. "Why is the U.S. government throwing down this gauntlet? Many countries are engaged in what has been referred…
From insideHPC
New Book: Using OpenMP – The Next Step
Ruud van der Pas from Oracle has co-authored a new book on OpenMP. It covers the OpenMP 4.5 specifications, with a focus on the practical usage of the language features and constructs. "We start where the specifications end and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Podcast on the Nudge Nobel
How Richard Thaler’s ‘Simple Insights’ Led to a Nobel Prize
Wharton's Katherine Milkman discusses the awarding of the Nobel Prize to behavioral economist
Richard H. Thaler, the “father of behavioral economics,” has this week
Once…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Optimizing Production
My earliest responsibilities in industry were to use optimization technology to improve quality and cost of manufacturing. So the concern is not new. We continue to improve this. In McKinsey:
Optimizing production in the
As…
From insideHPC
Video: Why your school should enter the ISC Student Cluster Competition
In this video, future HPC professionals discuss their participation in the ISC Student Cluster Competition. "Now in its seventh year, the Student Cluster Competition enables international teams to take part in a real-time contest…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Thinking Platform vs Process
Clever way to think about this.
Instead of Optimizing Processes, Reimagine Them as Platforms by Michael Schrage in HBR
Process optimization can transform user experience. Rethinking process optimization — visualizing processes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Honda Robotics for Disaster Response
Quite an impressive piece. An obvious place to use robotics of this type. A number of images and videos in the article. Honda has been known for a long time to provide advances in such extreme applications of robotics. Applications…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs Power New TYAN Server
Today TYAN showcased their latest GPU-optimized platforms that target the high performance computing and artificial intelligence sectors at the GPU Technology Conference in Munich. "TYAN’s new GPU computing platforms are designed…
From insideHPC
Video: Revolution in Computer and Data-enabled Science and Engineering
Ed Seidel from the University of Illinois gave this talk at the 2017 Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. The theme of his talk centers around the need for interdisciplinary research. "Interdisciplinary research…
From insideHPC
OSS Showcases New HDCA Platforms with Volta GPUs at GTC Europe
At GTC Europe this week, One Stop Systems (OSS) will exhibit two of the most powerful GPU accelerators for data scientists and deep learning researchers, the CA16010 and SCA8000. NVIDIA GPU computing is helping researchers and…
From BLOG@CACM
The Binary System Was Created Long Before Leibniz
There are reports of much older number systems using only two symbols that have been developed mainly in Asia.
From insideHPC
Google Compute Engine offers VMs with 96 Skylake CPUs and 624GB of Memory
Google Compute Engine now offers new VMs with the most Skylake vCPUs of any cloud provider. "Skylake in turn provides up to 20% faster compute performance, 82% faster HPC performance, and almost 2X the memory bandwidth compared…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Connected Car as a New Way of Marketing
A Whole new Way of Marketing in KouponMedia
With connected cars on the rise and the number of minutes spent in the car also increasing, a powerful new marketing channel has emerged.
The connected car enables brands and retailers…
From insideHPC
Accelerating Quantum Chemistry for Drug Discovery
In the pharmaceutical industry, drug discovery is a long and expensive process. This sponsored post from Nvidia explores how the University of Florida and University of North Carolina developed an anakin-me neural network engine…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gartner Blog on Conversational AI
Conversational Artificial Intelligence. We Need To Talk About It. by Adrian Lee in Gartner Blog
Gartner released its Top Strategic Predictions for 2018 and beyond on 29th September. I heaved a sigh of relief when I saw that…
From Schneier on Security
Changes in Password Best Practices
NIST recently published their four-volume SP800-63-3 Digital Identity Guidelines. Among other things, they make three important suggestions when it comes to passwords: Stop it with the annoying password complexity rules. They…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
CS Educator Interview: Vicky Sedgwick
My first teaching jobs were teaching in a pair of schools (half time in each) where I saw students from kindergarten through eight grade. It was a great learning experience but I was happy to move on to high school after a year…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
We are restarting The CSTA Advocate Blog!
Hello fellow educators of CS! After a one year hiatus, we are relaunching The CSTA Advocate Blog. With CSTA Advocate, we will bring people and ideas together. For the next year, I will be editor. We will have a new … Continue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advertising Stats: A Cheat Sheet
At first I thought these would define the stats and how they are obtained, but its a statement of their value, and in some cases trends. Rounded values. Mostly US numbers. Still interesting. A few links to sources. In…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Intel Omni-Path adds Performance and Scalalability
"Intel OPA, part of Intel Scalable System Framework, is a high-performance fabric enabling the responsiveness, throughput, and scalability required by today's and tomorrow's most-demanding high performance computing workloads…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Critical View of Data Viz Eye Tracking
Data viz expert Stephen Few looks at work done by Tableau using eye tracking methods to get insight about designing data visualizations. I recall seeing some previous research in this area. It is not too unlike similar work…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Dear Colleague Letter: NSF Accepting Proposals Related to Hurricane Irma
In the wake of the recent hurricanes that have affected the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has released the following Dear Colleague Letter calling for proposals that focus on solving the challenges related…
From Computational Complexity
Michael Cohen
When I first saw posts about Michael Cohen (see here, here, here) I wondered
is that the same Michael Cohen who I knew as a HS student?
It is. I share one memory.
Michael Cohen's father is Tom Cohen, a physics professor at…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Spending on Intelligent Assistants
Interesting piece, note the list of companies sharing their experiences with an intelligence assistance strategy.
Intelligent Assistants Answer the Challenge of Omnichannel CX Editor's Pick! by Dan Miller in CustomerThink
These…
From insideHPC
Future HPC Leaders Gather at Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing
Over at ALCF, Andrea Manning writes that the recent Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing brought together HPC practitioners from around the world. "You can’t get this material out of a textbook,” said Eric Nielsen…
From The Noisy Channel
Session Context
The most immediate context for a search query is a search session, a sequence of activities the searcher performs in order to pursue an information-seeking task. Relating a search query to the searcher’s previous session activities…
From insideHPC
PRACE Awards 1.7 Million Core Hours for Research Projects in Europe
Today the European PRACE initiative announced that 46 Awards from their recent 15th Call for Proposals total up to nearly 1.7 thousand million core hours. The 46 awarded projects are led by principal investigators from 12 different…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Patient Centric Hospitals of the Future
Below was an article that came up in my survey of patient-centric hospital designs, and the use of Hospital Virtual assistants. Where might virtual assistance be best inserted?
Building Patient-Centric Hospital Of Future
By…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Previews the SC17 Plenary on Smart Cities
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Smart Cities. As the featured topic this year at the SC17 Plenary, the Smart Cities initiative looks to improve the quality of life for residents using urban informatics and other…