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
The fundamental properties of computing
Physics works with fundamental properties such as mass, speed, acceleration, energy, and so on. Quantum mechanics has a well known trade-off between position and...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The end of
In the late sixties and seventies, we wanted universities to become more accessible. We founded the Open University, the Universit
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Actual programming with HTML and CSS (without javascript)
I usually stick with academic or research issues, but today, I wanted to have some fun. Geek fun. While W3C describes Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as a mechanism...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Database Questions for 2010: What
I started 2009 with an interest in Web 2.0 OLAP and collaborative data processing. The field of collaborative data processing has progressed tremendously. Last...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My Best Blog Posts (2009)
As year 2009 comes to an end, I selected a few of my best blog posts. Database, compression and column stores: More database compression means more speed? Right...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Entropy-efficient Computing
Microprocessors and storage devices are subject to the second law of thermodynamics: using them turn usable energy (oil, hydrogen) into unusable energy (heat).
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Run-length encoding (part 3)
In Run-length encoding (part 1), I presented the various run-length encoding formats. In part 2, I discussed the coding of the counters. In this third part, I want...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why You Should Be a Global Warming Skeptic
The debacle of the leaked emails, data and code from the University of East Anglia showed that reputed global warming scientists were petty and cheaters. As always...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Job ad: Research Chair in Software and Knowledge Engineering
The University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) is looking for candidates to fill a level 2 (junior) Canada Research Chair in Software and Knowledge Engineering. You...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Learning and the Social Web: A Call for Papers (new deadline)
We have extended the deadline of our call for papers on Learning and the Social Web (http://socialwebjetwi.info/). It is a special issue for the Journal of Emerging...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Run-length encoding (part 2)
(This is a follow-up to my previous blog post.) Any run-length encoding requires you to store the number of repetitions. In my example, AAABBBBBZWWK becomes 3A-5B...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Run-length encoding (part I)
Run-length encoding (RLE) is probably the most important and fundamental string compression technique. Countless multimedia formats and protocols use one form or...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
More database compression means more speed? Right?
Current practical database compression techniques stress speed over compression: Vectorwise is using Super-scalar RAM-CPU cache compression which includes a carefully...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Which should you pick: a bitmap index or a B-tree?
Morteza Zaker sent me pointer to their work comparing bitmap indexes and B-trees in the Oracle database. They examine the folklore surrounding bitmap indexes—which...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Procrastination can be your friend
Procrastination can be a serious problem leading to job loss, high anxiety and even significant psychological disability and dysfunction (according to wikipedia)...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Reading recommendation: Saturn
I just finished Saturn’s children. This is my third
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Top 25 Canadian Universities by Research Funding (2009)
University of Toronto (where I got my B.Sc. and M.Sc.) University of Alberta University of British Columbia Universit
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Secret Behind Radical Innovation
Our global knowledge grows in slow, incremental steps. Darwin and Einstein mostly reinterpreted existing ideas. However, practical implementations sometimes take...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Become Independent of Peer Review
When I asked the director of a large—and successful—British software house his most serious problem, he said without hesitation “how to prevent clusters of incompetence...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog