Communications of the ACM
Refine your search:
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 the memory usage of maps in Java
Though we have plenty of memory in our computers, there are still cases where you want to minimize memory usage if only to avoid expensive cache faults. To compare...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Where are all the search trees?
After arrays and linked lists, one of the first data structures computer-science students learn is the search tree. It usually starts with the binary search tree...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Secular stagnation: we are trimming down
Economists worry that we have entered in a secular stagnation called the Great Stagnation. To summarize: whereas industrial productivity grew steadily for mostContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Predicting the near future is a crazy, impossible game
Back in 1903, the Wright brothers flew for the first time, 20 feet above ground, for 12 seconds. Hardly anyone showed up. The event went vastly unnoticed. It was...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
JavaScript and fast data structures: some initial experiments
Two of my favorite data structures are the bitset and the heap. The latter is typically used to implement a priority queue. Both of these data structures come by...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Foolish enough to leave important tasks to a mere human brain?
To the ancient Greeks, the male reproductive organ was mysterious. They had this organ that can expand suddenly, then provide the seed of life itself. Today, much...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Could big data and wearables help the fight against diseases?
Biologists and medical researchers are used to drinking data with a straw. Doctors measure heart rate, weight and blood pressure, one at a time, at a high cost....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The “consensus” is sometimes wrong
Anyone who has a critical mind and who attended college long enough, knows not to trust textbooks. They are full of mistakes. Because textbooks tend to copy each...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The hacker culture is winning
Driven by companies like Google, the hacker spirit is winning. Though we fail to see it, our culture is being hacked. One annoying element of this culture has become...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Hackers vs. Academics: who is responsible for progress?
Many years ago, I interviewed for a job at a nearby college. One of the professors started talking about how they were working to take the “hacker spirit” out of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Revisiting Vernor Vinge’s “predictions” for 2025
Vernor Vinge is a retired mathematics professor who became famous through his science-fiction novels. He is also famous as being one of the first to contemplate...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What a technology geek sees when traveling abroad
Every time I travel, I try to pay attention to how the experience has evolved thanks to technology. Here are my notes about a recent trip: Only fifteen years ago...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Computing in 2025… what can we expect?
It is hot today in Montreal, so let me play my favorite game: (mis)predicting the future (2025). If the past is any guide, we shall still programming using Java...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The dystopia you should fear
It is popular to fear that climate change will turn the Earth into a water world or that genetically-modified food is going to kill all of us. These fears are probably...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The exponential cost of progress
When looking at the resolution of computer chips over time, we see that it takes roughly 5 years to cut the transistor size in half. However, this is costly. The...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My predictions for 2040
In second “Back to the future” movie (1989), the protagonists are sent 25 years in the future… October 2015. I watched this movie as a young adult and I was in...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Coping with accelerating progress: no more five-year plan
Today, the life expectancy of a corporation is about 15 years. Though corporations die for many reasons, technology and innovation are often the driving force underneath...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What ten years teaching a technical topic in college taught me…
Over ten years ago, XML was all the rage in information technology. XML was what the cool kids used to store, exchange and process data. By 2005, all the major...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We need to go beyond the web
Cegłowski, a web designer, wrote a beautiful essay called “Web Design: The First 100 Years“. His essay starts with a review of the aerospace industry… Back in 1965...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog