Daniel Lemire's blog

The Combinatorial Object Server

, 1 min read

It looks like it is quite old, but I found the Combinatorial Object Server for the first time this week and I thought I’d share it with my readers. I was looking for irreducible polynomials with binary coefficients (don’t ask why) and I found that this server can generate them on the fly for…

When to use the geometric mean?

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This is better documented elsewhere, but I could not find a quick reference on the web as to when you’d want to use the geometric mean instead of the arithmetic (usual) mean. Suppose that I’m 30% richer than last year, but last year I was 20% richer than the year before… what is the average…

The 20th century blueprint for research is now mythical

, 1 min read

Will sent me a link to this article in InformationWeek called Research Revolution (April 10th, 2006). It explains how the “web labs”, while still small, are changing the way we do research. Industry research would now be extremely fast paced and be based the vast amounts of data we have. To be…

The end of SOA web services

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The Web is the biggest success story in IT ever. Well, maybe Walmart would come close behind. What bugs me is that people still don’t understand why the web is a success. It is not because Tim Berners-Lee is a great scientist. He had the wrong big idea about the web, but as a great hacker, he…

Why blog? What about Reed´s law?

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Here’s one reason to blog: so that you can belong to a very large network. The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network. (Wikipedia entry.)

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest Final Results

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The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest results are out. The top ten schools are given below. Saratov State University (Russia) Jagiellonian University – Krakow (Poland) Altai State Technical University (Russia) University of Twente (The Netherlands) Shanghai Jiao Tong University…

Asian Universities are beginning to dominate

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Asian Universities are beginning to dominate the Top Institutions portion of the Top Scholars and Institutions survey conducted and published by the Journal of Systems and Software each year in October. In the latest survey findings, published in October 2005, among the leading institutions of the…

What are the computer langage people waiting for?

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The glorious time when people could design a new insightful computer language is gone. Or is it? In our Data Warehousing and OLAP classes, we cover MDX and various APIs for OLAP. Arguably, MDX is de facto the standard OLAP language. But as far as languages go, it is just ugly. Microsoft chose to…

Kunal Anand: Some XML exam questions

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Kunal has almost picked up my challenge on his blog: come up with deep homework questions having to do with XML. Given at least 10 blog/link feeds, determine the top ten outbound URLs? Parse an iTunes library file and capture all the unique artist/albums. Given a user’s XML file from…

Slashdot: Why Is Data Mining Still A Frontier?

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Slashdot asks “Why Is Data Mining Still A Frontier?” The article itself is not very exciting, but the comments are great. Here are some I like: I would suggest that, in practice, the real difficulty is that the problems that need to really be solved for data mining to be as effective as some…

CSWWS 2006: Call for Participation

, 2 min read

The 2006 Canadian Semantic Web Working Symposium will be held June 6th at Laval University, Quebec, Canada. We invite you to attend. This event which will be held in conjunction with Canadian AI 2006. On-line registration is available. THERE WILL BE NO ON-SITE REGISTRATION.- Industry partner and…