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 Fail-slow at scale: evidence of hardware performance faults in large production systems
Author: adriancolyer
Venture Partner with Accel in London, author of 'The Morning Paper'
As we may think
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 As we may think
Dynamic word embeddings for evolving semantic discovery
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 Dynamic word embeddings for evolving semantic discovery
Can you trust the trend? Discovering Simpson’s paradoxes in social data
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 Can you trust the trend? Discovering Simpson’s paradoxes in social data
Putting data in the driver’s seat: optimising earnings for on-demand ride hailing
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 Putting data in the driver’s seat: optimising earnings for on-demand ride hailing
Tracing fake news footprints: characterizing social media messages by how they propagate
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 Tracing fake news footprints: characterizing social media messages by how they propagate
Decentralisation in Bitcoin and Ethereum networks
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 Decentralisation in Bitcoin and Ethereum networks
A survey on security and privacy issues of Bitcoin
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 A survey on security and privacy issues of Bitcoin
SoK: Research perspectives and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency – Part II
SoK: Research perspectives and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency Bonneau et al., IEEE Security and Privacy, 2015 Part 2 : modifications, extensions, anonymity. Here’s the map for what we’ll be talking about today. We’ll discuss considerations for modifying and/or upgrading the way Bitcoin works, the world of altcoins, and uses beyond cryptocurrency. We’ll also touch … Continue reading SoK: Research perspectives and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency – Part II
SoK: Research perspective and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency – Part I
SoK: Research perspectives and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency Bonneau et al., IEEE Security and Privacy, 2015 Part 1 : core technology and the question of stability. Yesterday we took a look at consensus for blockchain-based systems. Together we’re going back in time a little further to 2015, where we find a broader survey of … Continue reading SoK: Research perspective and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency – Part I
the morning paper 