End of term

July 22, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

I can't believe we've arrived at the end-of-term again already! I'll be taking a four-week break from writing The Morning Paper, normal service resumes on Monday 19th August. A big milestone will slip quietly by during this recess - it was five years ago on the 30th July 2014 that I read and shared the ... Continue Reading

Meta-learning neural Bloom filters

July 19, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments

Meta-learning neural bloom filters Rae et al., ICML'19 Bloom filters are wonderful things, enabling us to quickly ask whether a given set could possibly contain a certain value. They produce this answer while using minimal space and offering O(1) inserts and lookups. It’s no wonder Bloom filters and their derivatives (the family of approximate set ... Continue Reading

Challenging common assumptions in the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations

July 17, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Challenging common assumptions in the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations Locatello et al., ICML'19 Today’s paper choice won a best paper award at ICML’19. The ‘common assumptions’ that the paper challenges seem to be: "unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is possible, and useful!" The key idea behind the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is that ... Continue Reading

Data Shapley: equitable valuation of data for machine learning

July 15, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

Data Shapley: equitable valuation of data for machine learning Ghorbani & Zou et al., ICML'19 It’s incredibly difficult from afar to make sense of the almost 800 papers published at ICML this year! In practical terms I was reduced to looking at papers highlighted by others (e.g. via best paper awards), and scanning the list ... Continue Reading

View-centric performance optimization for database-backed web applications

July 12, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

View-centric performance optimization for database-backed web applications Yang et al., ICSE 2019 The problem set-up in this paper discusses the importance of keeping web page load times low as a fundamental contributor to user satisfaction (See e.g. ‘Why performance matters’). Between client-side tools such as Google’s Lighthouse, back-end tools that can analyse ORM usage and ... Continue Reading

Three key checklists and remedies for trustworthy analysis of online controlled experiments at scale

July 10, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Three key checklists and remedies for trustworthy analysis of online controlled experiments at scale Fabijan et al., ICSE 2019 Last time out we looked at machine learning at Microsoft, where we learned among other things that using an online controlled experiment (OCE) approach to rolling out changes to ML-centric software is important. Prior to that ... Continue Reading

Software engineering for machine learning: a case study

July 8, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 10 Comments

Software engineering for machine learning: a case study Amershi et al., ICSE'19 Previously on The Morning Paper we’ve looked at the spread of machine learning through Facebook and Google and some of the lessons learned together with processes and tools to address the challenges arising. Today it’s the turn of Microsoft. More specifically, we’ll be ... Continue Reading

Automating chaos experiments in production

July 5, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Automating chaos experiments in production Basiri et al., ICSE 2019 Are you ready to take your system assurance programme to the next level? This is a fascinating paper from members of Netflix’s Resilience Engineering team describing their chaos engineering initiatives: automated controlled experiments designed to verify hypotheses about how the system should behave under gray ... Continue Reading

One SQL to rule them all: an efficient and syntactically idiomatic approach to management of streams and tables

July 3, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

One SQL to rule them all: an efficient and syntactically idiomatic approach to management of streams and tables Begoli et al., SIGMOD'19 In data processing it seems, all roads eventually lead back to SQL! Today’s paper choice is authored by a collection of experts from the Apache Beam, Apache Calcite, and Apache Flink projects, outlining ... Continue Reading

The convoy phenomenon

July 1, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 14 Comments

The convoy phenomenon Blasgen et al., IBM Research Report 1977 (revised 1979) Today we’re jumping from HotOS topics of 2019, to hot topics of 1977! With thanks to Pat Helland for the recommendation, and with Jim Gray as one of the authors, we have a combination that’s very hard to ignore :). Here’s the set-up ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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Month: July 2019