We have been living in the age of “big data” for some time now. This is an age where incredible things can be accomplished through the effective application of statistics and machine learning at large scale (for example see: “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data” Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, Fernando Pereira, IEEE Intelligent Systems (2009)). But I have gotten to thinking about the period before this. The period before we had easy access to so much data, before most computation was aggregation and before we accepted numerical analysis style convergence as “efficient.” A small problem I needed to solve (as part of a bigger project) reminded me what theoretical computer scientists did then: we worried about provable worst case efficiency.
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Categories: Computer Science, Expository Writing, Mathematics Tags: Age of Big Data, Big Data, Mathematical Bedside Reading, Mean, Mean of Medians, Median, Median of Means, Theorist, Winsorized mean
This article is a worked-out exercise in applying the Scala type system to solve a small scale optimization problem. For this article we supply complete Scala source code (under a GPLv3 license) and some design discussion. Read more…
Categories: Applications, Coding, Computer Science, Exciting Techniques, Mathematics, Programming, Tutorials Tags: Automatic Differentiation, Conjugate Gradient, Dual Numbers, Geometric Median, Numeric Methods, Optimization, Scala, Steiner Tree
One of my research interests is finding the principles that underly the management of information, complexity and uncertainty. When something as simple as a web-form is called “technology” it is time to step back and examine your principles. One principle I am not sure about Postel’s law. It doesn’t hold often enough to be relied on and when it fails I am not sure who to be angry with. Read more…
We describe the “the local to global principle.” It is a principle used to break algorithmic problem solving into two distinct phases (local criticism followed by global solution) and is an aid both in the design and in the application of algorithms. Instead of giving a formal definition of the principle we quickly define it and discuss a few examples and methods. We have produced both a stand-alone PDF (more legible) and a HTML/blog form (more skimable).
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On The Hysteria Over “The Cloud”
The frenzy of anticipation and opinion about “The Cloud” is so intense and so pointless it becomes “parody proof.”
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What is “genetic art?” My answer to this is http://www.geneticart.org (redirects to http://www.mzlabs.com), but this requires some explanation. Read more…
An interesting article on programming languages by Guillaume Marceau is making the rounds:
The speed, size and dependability of programming languages. The article points out very clearly what some of the differences in major programming languages are. The author uses benchmarking and graphs in an interesting way.
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Some time ago I subscribed to The Database Column because it would be fun to see what these incredible people wanted to discuss. We owe much of our current database technology to Professor Stonebraker and Vertica sounds like an incredible product. And I definitely want to continue to subscribe.
However, the reading experience is marred by some flaw in their RSS system that keeps marking the article “MapReduce: A major step backwards” as a new article. This causes the article to appear in my RSS reader every few weeks as “new.” This wouldn’t bother me too much except that the article runs so counter to experience that it is itself offensive.
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The other day’s blog post and a recent Andrew Binstock interview of Donald Knuth made me think more about how the ACM is really not serving the interests of computer science. Read more…
“Sorting Used in Anger” (A rambling glimpse into the mind of a theorist)
Author: John Mount
4-24-2008
The other day I had a bit of time to kill before an appointment. Luck was with me: there was a nearby bookstore and I was able to pass some of the time skimming through a book called “Beautiful Code.” Everything started out fun and nostalgic. The book title reminded me of “The Art of Computer Programming” (a book that probably did as much through the grace of its title as it did through its incredible contents to attract minds into theoretical computer science). One of the chapters of “Beautiful Code” was by Jon Bentley (a hero of sharp reasoning and clever coding) and as I flipped to the chapter my day was ruined. There it was: Quicksort an algorithm that I have a long love and hate relationship with.
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