As we may think

February 23, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

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

Dynamic word embeddings for evolving semantic discovery

February 22, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

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

Can you trust the trend? Discovering Simpson’s paradoxes in social data

February 21, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

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

Putting data in the driver’s seat: optimising earnings for on-demand ride hailing

February 20, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

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

Tracing fake news footprints: characterizing social media messages by how they propagate

February 19, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

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

Decentralisation in Bitcoin and Ethereum networks

February 16, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

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

A survey on security and privacy issues of Bitcoin

February 15, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

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

SoK: Research perspectives and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency – Part II

February 14, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

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 perspective and challenges for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency – Part I

February 13, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

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: Consensus in the age of blockchains

February 12, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

SoK: Consensus in the age of blockchains Bano et al., arXiv 2017 There are so many things to consider when evaluating a blockchain based technology / system. For example (and in no particular order): What cryptographic building blocks does it depend on? Does it offer privacy of identity (anonymity)? Does it offer privacy of data? ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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