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 26th, 2017)
Linux, the operating system driving cloud computing and the web, was developed using an open source model. For a time, Linux was seen as a direct competitor toContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Counting exactly the number of distinct elements: sorted arrays vs. hash sets?
Suppose that you have ever larger sets of 64-bit integers, and you want to quickly find out how many distinct integers there are. So given {10, 12, 10, 16}, you...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (May 18th, 2017)
Google has announced at its annual conference (I/O 2017) that it has computing pods capable of 11.5 petaflops. They are made of 64 customized TPU (processors specialized...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Educational backgrounds of the CEOs of the top 5 corporations in the US
Apple is the most valuable company in the US. The CEO is Tim Cook who has a bachelor of science in industrial engineering from Auburn University. The chairman is...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Has the Internet killed real estate agents yet?
Back in 2002 when I was first interested in buying a house, I went on the Internet and found lots of houses for sale, directly from the sellers. I bought the house...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My review of Change Agent: A Novel (by Daniel Suarez)
Change Agent is a sci-fi novel still hot from the presses. It set in our near future (2049). The genre has been captured by writers who love dystopian futures.Continue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (May 12th, 2017)
The Apple watch can be used to diagnose heart disease automatically. This is not marketing talk, but hard research. And, of course, there is no reason for thisContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Signed integer division by a power of two can be expensive!
Remember when you learned the long division algorithm in school? It was painful, right? It turns out that even on modern processors, divisions are expensive. So...
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