Value Iteration Networks Tamar et al., NIPS 2016 'Value Iteration Networks' won a best paper award at NIPS 2016. It tackles two of the hot issues in reinforcement learning at the moment: incorporating longer range planning into the learned strategies, and improving transfer learning from one problem to another. It's two for the price of … Continue reading Value iteration networks
Author: adriancolyer
Venture Partner with Accel in London, author of 'The Morning Paper'
Does the online card payment landscape unwittingly facilitate fraud?
Does the online card payment landscape unwittingly facilitate fraud? Ali et al., IEEE Security & Privacy 2017 The headlines from this report caused a stir on the internet when the story broke in December of last year: there's an easy way to obtain all of the details from your Visa card needed to make online … Continue reading Does the online card payment landscape unwittingly facilitate fraud?
Finding security bugs in web applications using a catalog of access control patterns
Finding security bugs in web applications using a catalog of access control patterns Near & Jackson, ICSE 2016 If you had a formal specification of the desired security attributes of your web application, and could map that to the source code, you'd be able to verify that it did indeed satisfy the specification. But let's … Continue reading Finding security bugs in web applications using a catalog of access control patterns
Password managers: attacks and defenses
Password managers: Attacks and defenses Silver et al. USENIX 2014 As a regular reader of The Morning Paper, I'm sure you're technically savvy enough to know not to use the same password across all the websites you use. To make good quality site-unique passwords practical therefore, you probably use a password manager. Maybe you remember … Continue reading Password managers: attacks and defenses
Dynamics on emerging spaces: modeling the emergence of novelties
Dynamics on expanding spaces: modeling the emergence of novelties Loreto et al., ArXiv 2017 Something a little bit left field today to close out the week. I was drawn into this paper by an MIT Technology Review article entitled "Mathematical model reveals the patterns of how innovations arise." Who wouldn't want to read about that!? … Continue reading Dynamics on emerging spaces: modeling the emergence of novelties
Fencing off Go: Liveness and safety for channel-based programming
Fencing off Go: Liveness and safety for channel-based programming, Lange et al. POPL 2017 In the true spirit of POPL (Principles of Programming Languages), I present today's summary of 'Fencing off Go' : What more do you need to know? Let's try again :) Fencing off Go: Liveness and safety for channel-based programming, Lange et … Continue reading Fencing off Go: Liveness and safety for channel-based programming
Explaining outputs in modern data analytics
Explaining outputs in modern data analytics Chothia et al. ETH Zurich Technical Report, 2016 Yesterday we touched on some of the difficulties of explanation in the context of machine learning, and last week we looked at some of the extensions to ExSPAN to track network provenance. Lest you be under any remaining misapprehension that explanation … Continue reading Explaining outputs in modern data analytics
European Union regulations on algorithmic decision making and a “right to explanation”
European Union regulations on algorithmic decision-making and a “right to explanation” Goodman & Flaxman, 2016 In just over a year, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes law in European member states. This paper focuses on just one particular aspect of the new law, article 22, as it relates to profiling, non-discrimination, and the right … Continue reading European Union regulations on algorithmic decision making and a “right to explanation”
How good are query optimizers, really?
How good are query optimizers, really? Leis et al., VLBD 2015 Last week we looked at cardinality estimation using index-based sampling, evaluated using the Join Order Benchmark. Today's choice is the paper that introduces the Join Order Benchmark (JOB) itself. It's a great evaluation paper, and along the way we'll learn a lot about mainstream … Continue reading How good are query optimizers, really?
Cardinality estimation done right: index-based join sampling
Cardinality estimation done right: Index-based join sampling Cardinality estimation done right: Index-based join sampling Leis et al., CIDR 2017 Let's finish up our brief look at CIDR 2017 with something closer to the core of database systems research - query optimisation. For good background on this topic a great place to start is Selinger's 1979 … Continue reading Cardinality estimation done right: index-based join sampling
the morning paper 