Making smart contracts smarter Luu et al., CCS 2016 This is the fourth in a series of papers from the ACM Queue Research for Practice 'Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains and Smart Contracts' selections, in which Luu at al. look at smart contracts in Ethereum. Smart contracts are a really intriguing idea and have generated a lot of … Continue reading Making smart contracts smarter
Author: adriancolyer
Venture Partner with Accel in London, author of 'The Morning Paper'
A first look at the usabilty of Bitcoin key management
A first look at the usability of Bitcoin key management Eskandari et al., USEC 2015 This is the third of five papers from the ACM Queue Research for Practice selections on 'Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts.' And thankfully it's much easier to read and understand than yesterdays! The authors point out that a cryptocurrency intended … Continue reading A first look at the usabilty of Bitcoin key management
Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin
Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin Ben-Sasson et al., 2014 Yesterday we saw that de-anonymising techniques can learn a lot about the true identities of participants in Bitcoin transactions. Ben-Sasson et al. point out that given this, Bitcoin could be considered significantly less private than traditional schemes: While users may employ many identities (or pseudonyms) … Continue reading Zerocash: Decentralized anonymous payments from Bitcoin
A fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing payments among men with no names
A fistful of bitcoins: characterizing payments among men with no names Meiklejohn et al., USENIX ;login: 2013 This week we're going to be looking at the five papers from the ACM Queue Research for Practice selections on 'Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts.' These papers are chosen by Arvind Narayanan and Andrew Miller, co-authors of the … Continue reading A fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing payments among men with no names
Online actions with offline impact: how online social networks influence online and offline social behavior
Online actions with offline impact: how online social networks influence online and offline user behavior Althoff et al., WSDM 2017 You can go to a lot of effort to build social networking features or support into your app or website. If the goal is engagement directly within the app then at least you have something … Continue reading Online actions with offline impact: how online social networks influence online and offline social behavior
Beyond the words: predicting user personality from heterogeneous information
Beyond the words: predicting user personality from heterogeneous information Wei et al., WSDM 2017 Here's a very topical paper! You may have seen the recent Motherboard piece, "The data that turned the world upside down," describing how personality profiling was used to provide tailored messages to voters in the recent American elections. In the interest … Continue reading Beyond the words: predicting user personality from heterogeneous information
RedQueen: An online algorithm for smart broadcasting in social networks
RedQueen: An online algorithm for smart broadcasting in social networks Zarezade et al., WSDM 2017 Update: see also this very helpful project page by the authors: RedQueen. Ssshh, don't tell the folks in marketing ;). This paper starts out with a simple question "when's the best time to tweet if you want to get noticed?," … Continue reading RedQueen: An online algorithm for smart broadcasting in social networks
Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views
Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views Garimella et al., WSDM 2017 Society is often polarized by controversial issues that split the population into groups with opposing views. When such issues emerge on social media, we often observe the creation of ‘echo chambers’, i.e., situations where like-minded people reinforce each other’s opinion, but do not get … Continue reading Reducing controversy by connecting opposing views
Quantifying controversy in social media
Quantifying controversy in social media Garimella et al. WSDM 2016 Last week I had the pleasure of dropping in on WSDM (Web Search & Data Mining) 2017 for the conference start-up day in Cambridge (UK). This week I'll be bringing you a selection of papers from the conference, but to kick things off I'm going … Continue reading Quantifying controversy in social media
Learning to protect communications with adversarial neural cryptography
Learning to protect communications with adversarial neural cryptography Abadi & Anderson, arXiv 2016 This paper manages to be both tremendous fun and quite thought-provoking at the same time. If I tell you that the central cast contains Alice, Bob, and Eve, you can probably already guess that we're going to be talking about cryptography (that … Continue reading Learning to protect communications with adversarial neural cryptography
the morning paper 