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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
What I
I’m currently a tenured professor with research grants and graduate students.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are there too many Ph.D.
Would you accept work designing mass destruction weapons?
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
External-Memory Sorting in Java : the First Release
In my previous post, you were invited to help with a reference implementation of external sorting in Java. Several people tested and improved the code. I like the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
External-Memory Sorting in Java
Sometimes, you want to sort large file without first loading them into memory. The solution is to use External Sorting. Typically, you divide the files into small...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The paperless campus: still a long way to go
Today I spent money from a research grant.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Write Good Papers: My Slides
I agreed to give a talk to graduate students on how to write good research papers. I have posted the slides of my talk online. They are mostly taken out of my web...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
So, you know what
Most researchers are convinced that their current work is important. Otherwise, they wouldn’t do it. Yet, few of them work on obviously important things like curing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
External-memory shuffling in linear time?
You can sort large files while using little memory. The Unix sort tool is a widely available implementation of this idea. Files are written to disk sequentially...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Language, Mathematics and Programming
Even if you have extensive training in Mathematics, the average Mathematics paper is undistinguishable from the ramblings of a madman. Many of these papers seek...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Who the heck got Universities into the email business?
My current employer, UQAM, refuses to allow email forwarding. Students would rather forward their emails to their existing GMail accounts, for example. And the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is programming
According to student evaluations, most of my students appreciate short programming assignments. Yet, every year, some students think that programming is below them...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Most Common Questions About Recommender Systems
I get ten to fifteen questions a week on recommender systems from entrepreneurs and engineers. Sometimes, I help people find their way in the literature. On occasion—for...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The best software developers are great at Mathematics?
One of the upsides of working for a university are the stimulating academic discussions. Yesterday, a philosopher challenged me a question: Beyond the fact that...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Open Sourcing your software hurts your competitiveness as a researcher?
Almost all software I write for my research is open sourced. Some fellow researcher argued today that I risk reducing the gap between and my pursuers. Similarly...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Trading latency for quality in research
I am not opposed to the Publish or Perish mantra. I am an academic writer. I am what I publish. We all think of researchers as people wearing laboratory coats,...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Where to get your ebooks?
If you read my blog, you probably like to read in general. Thus, if you don’t own an ebook device, you will soon. The choice is growing: the Amazon Kindle, the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Getting serious about online teaching
Earlier this month, Michael Mitzenmacher told us about the record number of students attending his Harvard class online-only.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog