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
Science and Technology links (May 5th, 2017)
Lungs make blood cells: In experiments involving mice, the team found that they produce more than 10 million platelets (tiny blood cells) per hour, equating toContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 28th, 2017)
It is estimated that our species, homo sapiens, appeared in Africa as far back as 200,000 years ago, and that we left Africa about 60,000 years ago. Confusingly...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Quickly pruning elements in SIMD vectors using the simdprune library
Modern processors have powerful vector instructions. However, some algorithms are tricky to implement using vector instructions. I often need to prune selectedContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The real lesson of the human genome project
When I was pursuing my PhD, the human genome project was often both regarded as overly ambitious (maybe even impossible) and full of possibilities. To many people...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 21st, 2017)
Can we trust software? Lance Fortnow, a famous computer scientist, answers… Sometimes I feel we put to much pressure on the machines. When we deal with humans,Continue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
“I have read all of your papers”
There is a common movie quote where one (often the hero) says to an academic: “I have read all of your papers”. This does not happen. If you are an academic and...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 14th, 2017)
I announced last week that Tesla, the electric car company run by Elon Musk, had surpassed Ford in value. This week, we learned that Tesla has surpassed General...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Removing duplicates from lists quickly
Suppose you have lists of numbers where some values are repeated (e.g., 1,1,2,3,3,3,4). You want these duplicates to be removed (e.g., 1,2,3,4). To avoid potentially...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Robots have not yet stolen our jobs
Though it is not yet widespread, I encounter more and more people who seem to believe that there is growing unemployment, or falling labor participation rate, due...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 7th, 2017)
Many people suffer from obesity. I am not sure we know how to combat this epidemic effectively. There is a never ending stream of wonder diets, but nothing seems...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How much are elite universities worth?
Will you do better if you attend a selective college? If you are Caucasian (white) and from a middle class or better background… you will not: “Our estimates of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My review of ‘Ghost in the Shell’ (2017)
Ghost in the Shell was, in 1995, a forward-thinking science-fiction anime. It is said to have had a lasting influence on movies such as the Matrix. Hollywood offers...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Compressed bitset libraries in C and C++
The bitset data structure is a clever way to represent efficiently sets of integers. It supports fast set operations such as union, difference, intersection. For...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 30, 2017)
A famous and highly-funded researcher from Cornel, Brian Wansink, has published many studies regarding how we eat. His work has guided public policy all over the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Never reason from averages
StackOverflow published its list of “top paying technologies“. Worldwide, the best-paid programmers, on average, work in Clojure and Rust (these are programming...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The technology of Mass Effect Andromeda
Mass Effect Andromeda is the long-awaited sequel to the popular Mass Effect video game series. It is available to a game console near you. It was given a roughContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 24, 2017)
There are many claims that innovation is slowing down. In the XXth century, we went from horses to planes. What have we done lately? We have not cured cancer or...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Does software performance still matter?
This morning, a reader asked me about the real-world relevance of software performance: I’m quite interested in your work on improving algorithm performance using...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 17, 2017)
We live in a world where the most powerful companies in the world have super smart people working on trying to emulate human intelligence in machines. Yann LeCun...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog