Wired magazine published an article this week on the importance of caching for organizing computer memory -- concluding that it is a lot like organizing your closet. The article was excerpted from a book published April 19, "Algorithms to Live By" (Henry Holt & Co., 2016). In it, the writers quote former CSE professor Rik Belew.
Belew joined the UC San Diego department in 1986, switched to Cognitive Science f in 2002, where he is now an Emeritus Professor following retirement in 2012. (Today he lives in Oakland, CA, where contributes tacultyo open-government and open-access efforts, including the development of interactive data visualization to let citizens explore raw crime and election Belew's research in adaptive knowledge representation and the integration of new insights derived from low-level machine learning techniques with other representations of related human knowledge, relates to multiple applications, including searches through free-text documents. Using home storage as a metaphor, Belew was asked to weigh in on the dilemma of a husband who liked to store his clothes in a pile on the floor next to the bed -- creating a "smaller, faster, closer" form of cache compared to the bedroom closet or basement storage. The husband argued that a pile of clothes can be a highly efficient caching scheme, but his wife disagreed. In the face of this conundrum, Belew suggested a solution to the marital dispute. Belew, "who studies search engines from a cognitive perspective, recommended the use of a valet stand," according to the excerpt in Wired. "A valet stand is essentially a one-outfit closet, a compound hanger for jacket, tie and slacks -- the perfect piece of hardware for your domestic caching needs." The magazine goes on to say that Belew's solution "just goes to show that computer scientists won't only save you time; they might also save your marriage."