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
On being happy
What if you could engineer happiness? What if you could redesign your life so that you are happier? With professors in mind, Brian Martin wrote an essay entitled...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Probabilities are unnecessary mathematical artifacts
There has been much philosophical debate about randomness. While people often offer the nature of consciousness as a fundamental unresolved question, we should...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The language interpreters are the new machines
Most Computer Science textbooks assume that algorithms are written directly into machine language for an idealized machine under a Von Neumann architecture. Alas...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is Wikipedia anti-intellectual?
Sander recently posted a provocative piece where he argues that geeks suffer from anti-intellectualism. To some extend, his stance is that democratic sites such...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why I still program
People expect that, as you grow older, you give up practical jobs such as programming for more noble tasks such as managing a team and acquiring funding. This especially...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Automation will make you obsolete, no matter who you are
I was part of the first generation of kids to receive computers as gifts. I was also part of the first generation of professionals to adopt computer-assisted tele...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The perils of filter-then-publish
Why do I prefer the publish-then-filter system, which dominates social media such as blogs, to the traditional filter-then-publish system used by scientific journals...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
You cannot refuse to publish our paper because
I feel strongly that the convention peer review process needs to evolve to a publish-then-filter model. That is, I do not believe that a few select individuals...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Time-saving versus work-inducing software
At a glance, office software like Word, PowerPoint or Excel, are great time savers. Nobody would want to go back to the era before Word Processors? Unfortunately...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Scaling MongoDB
I have been spending much time thinking about a future where document-oriented databases are the default. Though they have their problems, I think that they are...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Improve your impact with abundance-based design
People design all the time: new cars, new software, new houses. All design is guided by constraints (cost, time, materials, space) and by objectives (elegance,...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is science more art or industry?
In my previous post, I argued that people who pursue double-blind peer review have an idealized “LEGO block” view of scientific research. Research papers are “pure”...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Case Against Double-blind Peer Review
Many scientific journals use double-blind peer review. That is, the authors submit their work in a way that cannot be traced back to them. Meanwhile, the authors...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Ten things Computer Science Tells us About Bureaucrats
Originally, the term computer applied to human beings. These days, it is increasingly difficult to distinguish reliably machines from human beings: we require ever...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The Open Java API for OLAP is growing up!
Software is typically built using two types of programming languages. On the one hand, we have query languages (e.g., XQuery, SQL or MDX). On the other, we have...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How information technology is really built
One of my favorite stories is how Greg Linden invented the famous Amazon recommender system, after after being forbidden to do so. The story is fantastic because...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
You can assess trends by the status of the participants
I conjecture that, everything else being equal, the level of your education is inversely correlated with innovation. At first, a new idea appears interesting, but...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Social Web or Tempo Web?
Back in 2004, Tim O’Reilly observed that the Web had changed, and coined the term Web 2.0. This new Web is made of several layers which enable the Social Web. Wikipedia...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Know the biases of your operating system
Douglas Rushkoff wrote in Life Inc. that our society is nothing more than an operating system upon which we (as software) live: The landscape on which we are living...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog