Adding concurrency to smart contracts Dickerson et al., PODC'17 Yesterday we looked at how analogies from concurrent objects could help us understand smart contract behaviour. In today's paper choice from PODC'17 (which also has one Maurice Herlihy on the author list) we get to borrow some ideas from concurrent objects to increase the concurrency of … Continue reading Adding concurrency to smart contracts
Month: August 2017
A concurrent perspective on smart contracts
A concurrent perspective on smart contracts Sergey & Hobor, Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts, 2017 Maurice Herlihy gave a keynote on 'Blockchains and the future of distributed computing' at PODC'17. In his slides (I wasn't there to hear the talk in person), he recommends reading 'A concurrent perspective on smart contracts.' And here we are! … Continue reading A concurrent perspective on smart contracts
Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation
Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation Crooks et al., PODC’17 This paper takes a fresh look at the issue of isolation levels, a topic we’ve looked at before and which contains quite a bit of complexity. The gold standard reference for understanding isolation is Adya’s Generalized isolation level definitions. Unlike the definitions … Continue reading Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation
Using chatbots against voicespam: analyzing Lenny’s effectiveness
Using chatbots against voice spam: analyzing Lenny's effectiveness Sahin et al., SOUPS'17 Act I, Scene I. Lenny is at home in his living room. The phone rings. Lenny: Hello, thi- this is Lenny! Telemarketer: Lenny, I'm looking for Mr. NameRedacted Lenny: Uh-- sso- sorry, I'b- I can barely hear you there? Telemarketer: homeowner Lenny: ye- … Continue reading Using chatbots against voicespam: analyzing Lenny’s effectiveness
Towards deploying decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
Towards deploying decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes Shahrad & Wentzlaff, HotCloud'17 I have one simple rule when it comes to selecting papers for The Morning Paper: I only cover papers that I like and find interesting. There are some papers though, that manage to generate in me a genuine feeling of excitement, … Continue reading Towards deploying decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes
A cloud-based content gathering network
A cloud-based content gathering network Bhattacherjee et al., HotCloud'17 We all know what a content distribution network is, but what's a content gathering network?! CDNs are great, but their benefits are reduced for clients that have a relatively slow last mile connection - especially given that a typical web page request will involve many round … Continue reading A cloud-based content gathering network
Growing a protocol
Growing a protocol Ramasubramanian et al., HotCloud'17 I've been really enjoying working my way through a selection of the HotCloud papers - they're relatively short, thought-provoking, and designed to promote discussion (each paper has a set of discussion questions at the very end - great if you're looking at them in a group of some … Continue reading Growing a protocol
JavaScript for extending low-latency in-memory key-value stores
JavaScript for extending low-latency in-memory key-value stores Zhang & Stutsman, HotCloud'17 Last year we looked at RAMCloud, an ultra-low latency key-value store combining DRAM and RDMA. (Also check out the team's work on patterns for writing distributed, concurrent, fault-tolerant code and how to support linearizable multi-object transactions on RAMCloud with RIFL). Now the RAMCloud research … Continue reading JavaScript for extending low-latency in-memory key-value stores
Paracloud: bringing application insight into cloud operations
Paracloud: bringing application insight into cloud operations Nadgowda et al., HotCloud'17 We'll be looking at a selection of papers from HotCloud'17 this week. The HotCloud workshop focuses on new and emerging trends in cloud computing, and the CfP particularly encourages position papers that describe novel research directions and work that is in its formative stages. … Continue reading Paracloud: bringing application insight into cloud operations
Deep photo style transfer
Deep photo style transfer Luan et al., arXiv 2017 Here's something a little fun for Friday: a collaboration between researchers at Cornell and Adobe, on photographic style transfer. Will we see something like this in a Photoshop of the future? In 2015 in the Neural Style Transfer paper ('A neural algorithm of artistic style'), Gatys … Continue reading Deep photo style transfer
the morning paper 