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
How reliable is science?
It is not difficult find instances of fraud in science: Ranjit Chandra faked medical research results. He pocketed the money meant for running the experiments....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Write a Twitter application in 5 minutes
I spend much time alone, writing and thinking.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Manifesto for Half-Arsed Academic Research
Research results are more important than the number of publications or citations. This is fine. Yet, we don’t have time to read your papers. So, just keep publishing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Counterintuitive Factors Determining Research Productivity
Permanent researchers publish more when they are in smaller labs. Having many Ph.D. students fails to improve productivity. Funding has little effect on research...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Working long hours is stupid
We do too much. We carry too many projects. This overproduction creates problems which we try to fix by working even more. We value most what we create (see
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How to get everyone talking about your research!
Deolalikar claims to have solved the famous P versus NP problem.
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