Barrier-enabled IO stack for Flash storage

February 28, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Barrier-enabled IO stack for flash storage Won et al., FAST’18 The performance of Flash storage has benefited greatly from concurrency and parallelism - for example, multi-channel controllers, large caches, and deep command queues. At the same time, the time to program an individual Flash cell has stayed fairly static (and even become slightly worse in ... Continue Reading

Protocol aware recovery for consensus-based storage

February 27, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Protocol aware recovery for consensus based storage Alagappan et al., FAST’18 Following on from their excellent previous work on ‘All file systems are not created equal’ (well worth a read if you haven’t encountered it yet), in this paper the authors look at how well some of our most reliable protocols — those used in ... Continue Reading

Fail-slow at scale: evidence of hardware performance faults in large production systems

February 26, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

Fail-slow at scale: evidence of hardware performance faults in large production systems Gunawi et al., FAST’18 The first thing that strikes you about this paper is the long list of authors from multiple different establishments. That’s because it’s actually a study of 101 different fail-slow hardware incidents collected across large-scale cluster deployments in 12 different ... Continue Reading

As we may think

February 23, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

As we may think Vannevar Bush, The Atlantic, 1945 To close out the week, here’s another selection from the ‘Great moments in computing’ list - and it’s a true classic. Bush’s article was written in 1945 when he was Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development coordinating the work of about six thousand ... Continue Reading

Dynamic word embeddings for evolving semantic discovery

February 22, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Dynamic word embeddings for evolving semantic discovery Yao et al., WSDM’18 One of the most popular posts on this blog is my introduction to word embeddings with word2vec (‘The amazing power of word vectors’). In today’s paper choice Yao et al. introduce a lovely extension that enables you to track how the meaning of words ... Continue Reading

Can you trust the trend? Discovering Simpson’s paradoxes in social data

February 21, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

Can you trust the trend? Discovering Simpson’s paradoxes in social data Alipourfard et al., WSDM’18 In ‘Same stats, different graphs,’ we saw some compelling examples of how summary statistics can hide important underlying patterns in data. Today’s paper choice shows how you can detect instances of Simpson’s paradox, thus revealing the presence of interesting subgroups, ... Continue Reading

Putting data in the driver’s seat: optimising earnings for on-demand ride hailing

February 20, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Putting data in the driver’s seat: optimising earnings for on-demand ride hailing Chaudhari et al., WSDM’18 (The link above is to the ACM Digital Library official version, which may not grant you access when clicked in your email client, but should do if you visit via the blog itself.) There is something deeply rooted in ... Continue Reading

Tracing fake news footprints: characterizing social media messages by how they propagate

February 19, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

Tracing fake news footprints: characterizing social media messages by how they propagate Wu & Liu, WSDM’18 This week we’ll be looking at some of the papers from WSDM’18. To kick things off I’ve chosen a paper tackling the problem of detecting fake news on social media. One of the challenges here is that fake news ... Continue Reading

Decentralisation in Bitcoin and Ethereum networks

February 16, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum networks Gencer et al., FC’18 I thought it would be fitting to round off this week’s selections by looking at the state of Bitcoin and Ethereum in practice. Today’s paper presents the results of a series of measurements of the respective networks, taken through 2016 and 2017. Ongoing research explores ... Continue Reading

A survey on security and privacy issues of Bitcoin

February 15, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

A survey on security and privacy issues of Bitcoin Conti et al., arVix 2017 At the core of this survey is a catalogue of security attacks on Bitcoin, together with known defences or mitigations where applicable. We’ve touched on many of these before in one way or another, but it’s helpful to see them all ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

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

Month: February 2018