RNN models for image generation

Today we're looking at the remaining papers from the unsupervised learning and generative networks section of the 'top 100 awesome deep learning papers' collection. These are: DRAW: A recurrent neural network for image generation, Gregor et al., 2015 Pixel recurrent neural networks, van den Oord et al., 2016 Auto-encoding variational Bayes, Kingma & Welling, 2014 … Continue reading RNN models for image generation

On decentralizing prediction markets and order books

On decentralizing prediction markets and order books Clark et al., 13th Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, 2014 This is the last of five papers in the ACM Queue Research for Practice series on 'Cryptocurrencies, Blockchains, and Smart Contracts .' It serves as a good example of repurposing block chains as a foundation … Continue reading On decentralizing prediction markets and order books

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