The Semantic Elegance of Applicative Languages

November 28, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

The Semantic Elegance of Applicative Languages - Turner '81. Here's a paper you can enjoy simply for its prose! In what does the alleged superiority of applicative languages consist? In what indeed! And while we're at it, what's an applicative language? I looked up a few definitions; if we call it a functional language I ... Continue Reading

SwiftCloud: Fault-tolerant geo-replication integrated all the way to the client

November 27, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

SwiftCloud: Fault-tolerant geo-replication integrated all the way to the client machine - Zawirski et al. 2013 Data is stored in the cloud, presentation is on mobile devices, and application processing is increasingly split between the two. As mobile devices get more and more capable, we would like to exploit more and more of that capability. ... Continue Reading

The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM Tree)

November 26, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (LSM Tree) - O'Neil et al. '96. Log-Structured Merge is an important technique used in many modern data stores (for example, BigTable, Cassandra, HBase, Riak, ...). Suppose you have a hierarchy of storage options for data - for example, RAM, SSDs, Spinning disks, with different price/performance characteristics. Furthermore, you have a large ... Continue Reading

Detecting Discontinuities in Large-Scale Systems

November 25, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Detecting Discontinuities in Large-Scale Systems - Malik et al 2014. The 7th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing is coming to London in a couple of weeks time. Many of the papers don't seem to be online yet, but here's one that is. Malik et al. tackle the problem of long-term forecasting for ... Continue Reading

Use of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services

November 24, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 18 Comments

Use of Formal Methods at Amazon Web Services - Newcombe et al 2014 Leslie Lamport recently gave a talk at the React conference on the specification language TLA. I wasn't there to hear the talk, but I was intrigued enough to dig in and find out a little more. Especially since I have some experience ... Continue Reading

Church’s Thesis and Functional Programming

November 21, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Church's Thesis and Functional Programming - Turner 2006 One of a collection of papers celebrating the 70th anniversary of Church's thesis in 2006, as recently recommended by Erik Meijer on twitter. Both the thesis and the lambda calculus have been of seminal influence on the development of Computing Science. There were three independently developed definitions ... Continue Reading

Life Beyond Distributed Transactions

November 20, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Life Beyond Distributed Transactions: An Apostate's Opinion - Pat Helland, 2007 It takes real skill to strip something back to its essence and explain it clearly in such a way that the ramifications become apparent. In my view Pat Helland pulls this off admirably in this paper and helps the reader think more deeply about ... Continue Reading

Probabilistic Programming

November 19, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Probabilistic Programming - Gordon et al 2014 Let's jump straight into some code - what is the meaning of this program in the PROB programming language? [code lang=text] bool c1, c2; c1 = Bernoulli(0.5); c2 = Bernoulli(0.5); observe(c1 || c2); return (c1,c2); [/code] On lines 2 and 3, c1 and c2 are assigned to the ... Continue Reading

One VM to Rule Them All

November 18, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

One VM to rule them all - Wuerthinger et al. 2013 Building high-performance virtual machines is hard , and a number of widely used languages only have lower-performance implementations. Wuerthinger et al. want to make it easier for you to create high-performance VMs without needing to create highly complex implementations. According to the paper: Java ... Continue Reading

RAPPOR: Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response

November 17, 2014 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

RAPPOR: Randomized Aggregatable Privacy-Preserving Ordinal Response - Erlingsson et al. 2014 The RAPPOR paper made a brief appearance on HN a few weeks ago, and addresses the question of privacy preservation while collecting data - for example, in order to improve a service offering. Crowdsourcing data to make better, more informed decisions is becoming increasingly ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
Made delightfully fast by strattic

Month: November 2014