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
Who the heck got Universities into the email business?
My current employer, UQAM, refuses to allow email forwarding. Students would rather forward their emails to their existing GMail accounts, for example. And the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is programming
According to student evaluations, most of my students appreciate short programming assignments. Yet, every year, some students think that programming is below them...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Most Common Questions About Recommender Systems
I get ten to fifteen questions a week on recommender systems from entrepreneurs and engineers. Sometimes, I help people find their way in the literature. On occasion—for...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The best software developers are great at Mathematics?
One of the upsides of working for a university are the stimulating academic discussions. Yesterday, a philosopher challenged me a question: Beyond the fact that...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Open Sourcing your software hurts your competitiveness as a researcher?
Almost all software I write for my research is open sourced. Some fellow researcher argued today that I risk reducing the gap between and my pursuers. Similarly...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Trading latency for quality in research
I am not opposed to the Publish or Perish mantra. I am an academic writer. I am what I publish. We all think of researchers as people wearing laboratory coats,...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Where to get your ebooks?
If you read my blog, you probably like to read in general. Thus, if you don’t own an ebook device, you will soon. The choice is growing: the Amazon Kindle, the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Getting serious about online teaching
Earlier this month, Michael Mitzenmacher told us about the record number of students attending his Harvard class online-only.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
You know your research is original when
Many consider Frank Hebert’s Dune the most important work of science-fiction ever written. Consider that Star Wars is just a variation on Dune. Yet, it was rejected...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The fundamental properties of computing
Physics works with fundamental properties such as mass, speed, acceleration, energy, and so on. Quantum mechanics has a well known trade-off between position and...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The end of
In the late sixties and seventies, we wanted universities to become more accessible. We founded the Open University, the Universit
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Actual programming with HTML and CSS (without javascript)
I usually stick with academic or research issues, but today, I wanted to have some fun. Geek fun. While W3C describes Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as a mechanism...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Database Questions for 2010: What
I started 2009 with an interest in Web 2.0 OLAP and collaborative data processing. The field of collaborative data processing has progressed tremendously. Last...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My Best Blog Posts (2009)
As year 2009 comes to an end, I selected a few of my best blog posts. Database, compression and column stores: More database compression means more speed? Right...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Entropy-efficient Computing
Microprocessors and storage devices are subject to the second law of thermodynamics: using them turn usable energy (oil, hydrogen) into unusable energy (heat).
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Run-length encoding (part 3)
In Run-length encoding (part 1), I presented the various run-length encoding formats. In part 2, I discussed the coding of the counters. In this third part, I want...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why You Should Be a Global Warming Skeptic
The debacle of the leaked emails, data and code from the University of East Anglia showed that reputed global warming scientists were petty and cheaters. As always...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Job ad: Research Chair in Software and Knowledge Engineering
The University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) is looking for candidates to fill a level 2 (junior) Canada Research Chair in Software and Knowledge Engineering. You...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog