Daniel Lemire's blog

Battlestar Galactica: when AI goes wrong

, 2 min read

I bought Season One of the new Battlestar Galactica series. I’m an old man, so I watched the original. The difference between this new version and the old one is that now, the cylons are machines built by man. In other words, Battlestar Galactica tells the story of AI gone wrong. What if we built…

More measure of impact factors for CS conferences

, 1 min read

Thanks to Yuhong Yan and Peter Turney, I have more links for you if you care to know what are the prestigious conferences: Citeseer list of impact factors; Computer Science Conference Rankings (also here); Frontier in bioscience list of impact factors (not just about bioscience!); Conference…

Repositories of electronic journals

, 1 min read

Is it just me or the popularity of electronic journals is growing? Directory of open access journals; Electronic Journals with RSS feeds (University of Sask.); Free Electronic Mathematics Journals; University of Nevada Reno list of eJournals.

That´s why I tinker

, 1 min read

Here’s an old quote that’s worth repeating from time to time: People like me need to do things in order to understand. That’s why I build systems. That’s why I tinker. That’s why I read so much. (Jim Gray, IEEE Distributed Systems Online 2004) Short story: research is not about spending…

Career Swings

, 2 min read

Read in the latest Communications of the ACM (Sept. 2005, Vol. 48, No. 9, page 10): Research firm Gartner Inc. predicts up to 15% of todays’ tech workers will drop out of the profession in five years, not including those who retire or die. (…) demand for technology developpers is forecast to…

Google Blog Search

, 1 min read

Google Blog Search is out. You have Atom/RSS feeds for your favorite queries: Can I subscribe to search results? Yes. At the bottom of each page of search results you can find several links, offering the top 10 or 100 results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just grab the links from here and…

We are only visiting the shore of mathematics

, 1 min read

I like Doron Zeilberger’s 66th Opinion: all what human mathematics does is apply implicit exponential-time algorithms, called “heuristics” to find some trivial pebbles on the shore of the (even decidable part!) of the mathematical ocean. In short, a mathematician solves trivial problems, a…

Make your publications available as a RSS feed

, 1 min read

A long time ago, I turned my publication list into an RSS feed. To my knowledge, I’m the first researcher to have done so. It came to me today that I should probably claim this innovation now before other people start doing it. If everyone I care about did it, I could monitor publications in a…

Now, that´s fun stuff!

, 1 min read

Shane Butler is building a learner to predict AFL game results. I don’t know why, but this sounds like fun stuff! Its been a while since my I last wrote that I was thinking of building a learner to predict AFL game results. Obviously with the finals starting this week I’m a bit late in the…

Why I think a lot of Machine Learning research is misguided

, 1 min read

Suresh has this to say about some Machine Learning algorithms (neural nets and genetic algorithms): I dislike them greatly though because they are extremely general hammers that typically don’t have provably performance or running time guarantees, and don’t reveal any interesting insights into…

Balmer Vows to Kill Google

, 1 min read

According to slashdot, Microsoft CEO, Ballmer, wants to kill Google: Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. ‘I’m going to fing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fing kill Google.’ I just don’t get this type of…

8 reasons why I like Gmail

, 2 min read

Around a year ago, Google launched it web email service, Gmail. Since I started using it, I haven’t looked back. All my mail goes to my Gmail account, including all university and professional mail. You can redirect email arriving at gmail elsewhere. You even have POP access to your gmail…