RedQueen: An online algorithm for smart broadcasting in social networks Zarezade et al., WSDM 2017 Update: see also this very helpful project page by the authors: RedQueen. Ssshh, don't tell the folks in marketing ;). This paper starts out with a simple question "when's the best time to tweet if you want to get noticed?," … Continue reading RedQueen: An online algorithm for smart broadcasting in social networks
Month: February 2017
Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views
Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views Garimella et al., WSDM 2017 Society is often polarized by controversial issues that split the population into groups with opposing views. When such issues emerge on social media, we often observe the creation of ‘echo chambers’, i.e., situations where like-minded people reinforce each other’s opinion, but do not get … Continue reading Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views
Quantifying controversy in social media
Quantifying controversy in social media Garimella et al. WSDM 2016 Last week I had the pleasure of dropping in on WSDM (Web Search & Data Mining) 2017 for the conference start-up day in Cambridge (UK). This week I'll be bringing you a selection of papers from the conference, but to kick things off I'm going … Continue reading Quantifying controversy in social media
Learning to protect communications with adversarial neural cryptography
Learning to protect communications with adversarial neural cryptography Abadi & Anderson, arXiv 2016 This paper manages to be both tremendous fun and quite thought-provoking at the same time. If I tell you that the central cast contains Alice, Bob, and Eve, you can probably already guess that we're going to be talking about cryptography (that … Continue reading Learning to protect communications with adversarial neural cryptography
Value iteration networks
Value Iteration Networks Tamar et al., NIPS 2016 'Value Iteration Networks' won a best paper award at NIPS 2016. It tackles two of the hot issues in reinforcement learning at the moment: incorporating longer range planning into the learned strategies, and improving transfer learning from one problem to another. It's two for the price of … Continue reading Value iteration networks
Does the online card payment landscape unwittingly facilitate fraud?
Does the online card payment landscape unwittingly facilitate fraud? Ali et al., IEEE Security & Privacy 2017 The headlines from this report caused a stir on the internet when the story broke in December of last year: there's an easy way to obtain all of the details from your Visa card needed to make online … Continue reading Does the online card payment landscape unwittingly facilitate fraud?
Finding security bugs in web applications using a catalog of access control patterns
Finding security bugs in web applications using a catalog of access control patterns Near & Jackson, ICSE 2016 If you had a formal specification of the desired security attributes of your web application, and could map that to the source code, you'd be able to verify that it did indeed satisfy the specification. But let's … Continue reading Finding security bugs in web applications using a catalog of access control patterns
Password managers: attacks and defenses
Password managers: Attacks and defenses Silver et al. USENIX 2014 As a regular reader of The Morning Paper, I'm sure you're technically savvy enough to know not to use the same password across all the websites you use. To make good quality site-unique passwords practical therefore, you probably use a password manager. Maybe you remember … Continue reading Password managers: attacks and defenses
Dynamics on emerging spaces: modeling the emergence of novelties
Dynamics on expanding spaces: modeling the emergence of novelties Loreto et al., ArXiv 2017 Something a little bit left field today to close out the week. I was drawn into this paper by an MIT Technology Review article entitled "Mathematical model reveals the patterns of how innovations arise." Who wouldn't want to read about that!? … Continue reading Dynamics on emerging spaces: modeling the emergence of novelties
Fencing off Go: Liveness and safety for channel-based programming
Fencing off Go: Liveness and safety for channel-based programming, Lange et al. POPL 2017 In the true spirit of POPL (Principles of Programming Languages), I present today's summary of 'Fencing off Go' : What more do you need to know? Let's try again :) Fencing off Go: Liveness and safety for channel-based programming, Lange et … Continue reading Fencing off Go: Liveness and safety for channel-based programming
the morning paper 