Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is multiplication slower than addition?
Earlier, I asked whether integer addition was faster than bitwise exclusive or. My tests showed no difference, and nobody contradicted me. However, everyone knows...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
General Versus Domain Intelligence
Our brains come with hard-wired algorithms. Cats can catch birds or mice without thinking about it. I can grab and eat a strawberry without thinking. The Savanna...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Summer reading: my recommendations
Containment by Christian Cantrell is an excellent sci-fi novel. And you can grab it nearly for free from the author’s page. The premise of the book is that humanity...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Five Most Important Algorithms?
Bernhard Koutschan posted a compilation of the most important algorithms. The goal is to determine the 5 most important algorithms. Out of his list, I would select...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
NoSQL or NoJoin?
Several major players built alternatives to conventional database systems: Google created BigTable, Amazon built Dynamo and Facebook initiated Cassandra. There...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The fallacy of absolute numbers
I often come across the following type of arguments in research papers: You could save 3 bits of storage for every value in your database. Surely that’s irrelevant...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Lack of steady trajectories and failure
A common advice given out to young researchers is to find a niche. (See Michael’s Branding Your Research). That is certainly good advice. Instead of being another...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Academic publishing is archaic
Technological progress tends to increase the available information. Thus, our capacity to manage this information becomes overloaded (hence the term information...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Maximizing Your Impact as a Researcher (guest post)
The greatest challenge for a researcher is to choose projects that have a good chance of delivering impact. Alain Désilets from NRC—co-author of VoiceGrip, Webitext...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How Do We Choose Research Journals?
The publishing house Elsevier invited me to fill out a survey regarding their journals. As a reward, they gave me a glimpse at their statistics. The three most...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Computer Science is Shallow
Zed A. Shaw—author of several books on Ruby and Python—came up with an interesting criticism of Computer Science. He makes some good points: Computer Science is...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Sorting is fast and useful
I like to sort things. If you should learn one thing about Computer Science is that sorting is fast and useful. Here’s a little example. You want to check quickly...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Chinese researchers publish more research papers
Funding agencies in Canada seek to emulate American funding agencies by promoting excellence. What this means in concrete terms is that few professors get most...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Acceptance rate versus impact
Should you attend the most selective school? Maybe not: Students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Toward Data-driven Science
Science and business, so far, has being mostly model driven. That is, you collect a few data points, just enough to fit your model. Then you proceed from your model...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What is a good University?
Seth Godin wrote a devastating post on the future of higher education. Unlike Godin, I fail to see an imminent crash of high education. But then, I failed to predict...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Tell me What I Should be Researching!
I want to run a short crowdsourcing experiment: can the web give me better research directions? Or maybe good research directions for students, or readers of this...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The mythical reproducibility of science
David Donoho was among the first researchers to promote reproducible research through software publication
From Daniel Lemire's Blog