“The Leicester City fairytale?”: Utilizing new soccer analytics tools to compare performance in the 15/16 and 16/17 EPL seasons

"The Leicester City Fairytale?" : Utilizing new soccer analytics tools to compare performance in the 15/16 and 16/17 EPL seasons Ruiz et al., KDD'17 In England the cricket season is coming to a close and a new football (soccer) season is getting underway. Today's paper choice is a bit of fun from the recent KDD'17 … Continue reading “The Leicester City fairytale?”: Utilizing new soccer analytics tools to compare performance in the 15/16 and 16/17 EPL seasons

Step by step towards creating a safe smart contract: lessons from a cryptocurrency lab

Step by step towards creating a safe smart contract: lessons and insights from a cryptocurrency lab Delmolino et al., 2015. This is an experience report from teaching a smart contract programming course to undergraduates at the University of Maryland, back in the Fall of 2014. Of course that's a very long time ago in the … Continue reading Step by step towards creating a safe smart contract: lessons from a cryptocurrency lab

Adding concurrency to smart contracts

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

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

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