Frontier Tower AI Paper Reading Club - Week 14 - Roaring Bitmaps
The Weekly Paper:
Arto will lead the discussion on Roaring Bitmaps. Primary reading here:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06549
Find the Rust implementation here:
https://github.com/RoaringBitmap/roaring-rs
The Summary:
Arto will be presenting the Roaring Bitmaps papers and giving a sneak peek on how ASIMOV uses them to power complex on-device queries on large social graphs!
Compressed bitmaps are a core data structure behind databases, search engines, and analytics systems, helping represent large sets of IDs efficiently while supporting fast operations like union, intersection, and filtering. This paper explains Roaring Bitmaps, a hybrid format that combines arrays, uncompressed bitmaps, and run-length encoded segments to get both speed and compression. The key idea is that no single representation works best for every density pattern, so Roaring splits the integer space into chunks and chooses the best container type for each one.
The Speaker:
Arto Bendiken, Tech Founder, ASIMOV Protocol
Arto isn’t another “AI founder” with a slide deck. He’s one of the people who built the stack you’re standing on.
Early cypherpunk and digital currency pioneer (since the e‑gold era)
Creator of The Unlicense, a public‑domain licence used by roughly 3% of all software repositories worldwide, including many of the most widely‑deployed open‑source projects.
Built the first graph database‑as‑a‑service (GDBaaS), years before Neo4j made graphs mainstream
Shipped OSINT systems for the US Navy, data warehouses for S&P 500 and the European Space Agency, and tactical software for drones
Led EVM development at NEAR Protocol
Has been working with knowledge graphs since RDF was new, and has raised $15M+ across three startups while hyperscaling teams from 10 to 80 people
Long‑time cryptoanarchist / maker who still writes code, not just threads
What are the group goals? Stay on top of AI research, improve understanding of AI fundamentals+math.
Who is welcome? Everyone! Try to put in at least some time on the paper and come prepared with questions or things you'd like to discuss, but it's ok to just show up.
How will it work? Ideally everyone shows up and has at least made one solid pass through the paper, and then we can spend 30-60 minutes as a group going over it.
This event is hosted at the Frontier Tower:
We are transforming a 16-floor tower in San Francisco into a self-governed vertical village—a hub for frontier technologies and creative arts. Tier-one labs presenting AI, Ethereum, biotech, neuroscience, longevity, robotics, makerspace, human flourishing, and arts & music. These floors will house innovators and creators pushing the boundaries of human potential in a post-AI-singularity world.
Apply here for founding citizenship: https://frontiertower.io/apply
Why should I become a citizen?
Be part of creating the first self-governed vertical village
Connect with the most creative people in the city
Get access to all floors, free event space & movement floor
Website: https://frontiertower.io
Need more reading? Visit https://frontiertower.notion.site/