Digital giants are crazy about this Quebec professor’s algorithms

Did you know that Daniel Lemire helped make your web browser more efficient and faster?

• Also read: Easy to cheat thanks to ChatGPT during online exams at TÉLUQ

• Also read: AI: a conversational robot sparks controversy at TÉLUQ

No, not the comedian who made us laugh so much with Uncle Georges, but rather the computer science professor from TÉLUQ University.

The latter is far from having the notoriety of the first in Quebec, but the repercussions of his work are worldwide. Without knowing it, everyone who uses Chrome and Safari browsers benefits from it every day.

“There have been significant performance gains,” Mr. Lemire tells Journal. If you install an old browser from 15 years ago, you will realize that even on the computer you are using now, it will not be able to render sites correctly and will be much slower.

As is often the case with important discoveries, Daniel Lemire’s first motivation was personal frustration.

“I was making plans and I was a little nervous, as impatient people can sometimes be… I found the loading times were long. I was wondering, “Why is it so long?” I started digging and people told me: “We are limited by the speed of our disks, our networks.”

Original approach

The explanation did not convince Mr. Lemire. In fact, the performance of computers and networks has progressed impressively over the years. The problem was that the speed of the software had not kept up.

“In the early days of computing, people were very concerned about software efficiency and now, it’s a bit out of fashion,” explains Daniel Lemire. With my colleagues, we tried to revive that and show that we could do lots of really interesting things by making software more efficient. That’s a bit of the originality of my approach.”

The Quebec professor’s work has resonated with digital giants, who have integrated the tools he helped create into several of their platforms. These include Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Uber, Shopify and Netflix.

How could such critical discoveries come from a professor employed by a small university like TÉLUQ?

“Before, it was easier to do high-level research at large universities with large libraries. But in IT, today, all resources are online,” underlines Mr. Lemire.

“I had offers [d’autres universités]he admits, but for the moment, I like my work at TÉLUQ.”

Among the most cited

According to a Stanford University ranking, Daniel Lemire is in the select group of the 2% most cited scientists in the world, all disciplines combined. And he is one of the 0.0006% of most followed programmers on GitHub, a platform that brings together more than 100 million developers.

A fervent defender of free software, the professor made almost no money from his discoveries.

“My personal income is essentially my salary as a professor,” he says. […] I have nothing against free enterprise, but that’s not what I do.”

Some contributions from Daniel Lemire

• The simdjson parser, the first software library capable of processing data from web services (JSON) at speeds of gigabytes per second (used by Chrome and Safari)
• Roaring Bitmaps, a data compression protocol used in particular by Google (YouTube)
• An algorithm that quadruples the speed of reading numbers, adopted by several programming languages ​​and software like Safari and Chrome
• A library of many algorithms that is part of the popular Node.js JavaScript runtime, which is used at Netflix, Uber, Microsoft (Teams and LinkedIn), Salesforce (Slack), and Discord, among others.