End of term

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

Challenging common assumptions in the unsupervised learning of disentangled representations

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

View-centric performance optimization for database-backed web applications

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

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

Automating chaos experiments in production

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