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 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
Chinese researchers publish more research papers
Funding agencies in Canada seek to emulate American funding agencies by promoting excellence. What this means in concrete terms is that few professors get most...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Acceptance rate versus impact
Should you attend the most selective school? Maybe not: Students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Toward Data-driven Science
Science and business, so far, has being mostly model driven. That is, you collect a few data points, just enough to fit your model. Then you proceed from your model...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What is a good University?
Seth Godin wrote a devastating post on the future of higher education. Unlike Godin, I fail to see an imminent crash of high education. But then, I failed to predict...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Tell me What I Should be Researching!
I want to run a short crowdsourcing experiment: can the web give me better research directions? Or maybe good research directions for students, or readers of this...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The mythical reproducibility of science
David Donoho was among the first researchers to promote reproducible research through software publication
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On the design of design
Following a blog post by John D. Cook, I started reading Fred Brooks‘ latest book. Brooks is famous, among other things, for his earlier book, the Mythical Man...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What I
I’m currently a tenured professor with research grants and graduate students.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are there too many Ph.D.
Would you accept work designing mass destruction weapons?
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
External-Memory Sorting in Java : the First Release
In my previous post, you were invited to help with a reference implementation of external sorting in Java. Several people tested and improved the code. I like the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
External-Memory Sorting in Java
Sometimes, you want to sort large file without first loading them into memory. The solution is to use External Sorting. Typically, you divide the files into small...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The paperless campus: still a long way to go
Today I spent money from a research grant.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Write Good Papers: My Slides
I agreed to give a talk to graduate students on how to write good research papers. I have posted the slides of my talk online. They are mostly taken out of my web...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
So, you know what
Most researchers are convinced that their current work is important. Otherwise, they wouldn’t do it. Yet, few of them work on obviously important things like curing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
External-memory shuffling in linear time?
You can sort large files while using little memory. The Unix sort tool is a widely available implementation of this idea. Files are written to disk sequentially...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog