It is clearly racist. “Ricing” comes from a derogatory term for Asian racing vehicles. You cannot excuse the racism inherent to it by personal ignorance. It’s the same logic as black face being racist, whether you’re personally aware of the history behind it or not.
Though I no longer live in the US, as an Asian computer scientist, I am quite aware of how it is clearly perceived as a racist term by many Asian Americans. To me, it will also never stop being offensive. So, please, stop with this “ricing” stuff.
The paper was published by IEEE and with professors as co-authors. Only the second author is a student. And I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand like that because of a magazine article. Students come up with breakthroughs all the time. The paper itself says it disproves Yao’s conjecture. I personally plan to implement and benchmark this because the results seem so good. It could be another fibonacci heap situation, but maybe not. Hash tables are so widely used, that it might even be worthwhile to make special hardware to use this on servers, if our current computer architecture is only thing that holds back the performance.
Edit: author sequence