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
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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
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”
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 truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: a pragmatic guide to assessing empirical evaluations
The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: A pragmatic guide to assessing empirical evaluations Blackburn et al. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 2016 Yesterday we looked at some of the ways analysts may be fooled into thinking they've found a statistically significant result when in fact they haven't. Today's paper … Continue reading The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: a pragmatic guide to assessing empirical evaluations
Toward sustainable insights, or why polygamy is bad for you
Toward sustainable insights, or why polygamy is bad for you Binning et al., CIDR 2017 Buckle up! Today we're going to be talking about statistics, p-values, and the multiple comparisons problem. Some good background resources here are: Statistics Done Wrong, by Alex Reinhart p-values on wikipedia Misunderstandings of p-values, also on wikipedia For my own … Continue reading Toward sustainable insights, or why polygamy is bad for you
Data provenance at internet scale: architecture, experiences, and the road ahead
Data provenance at Internet scale: Architecture, experiences, and the road ahead Chen et al., CIDR 2017 Provenance within the context of a single database has been reasonably well studied. In this paper though, Chen et al., explore what happens when you try to trace provenance in a distributed setting and at larger scale. The context … Continue reading Data provenance at internet scale: architecture, experiences, and the road ahead
Ground: A data context service
Ground: A Data Context Service Hellerstein et al. , CIDR 2017 An unfortunate consequence of the disaggregated nature of contemporary data systems is the lack of a standard mechanism to assemble a collective understanding of the origin, scope, and usage of the data they manage. Put more bluntly, many organisations have only a fuzzy picture … Continue reading Ground: A data context service
Prioritizing attention in fast data: principles and promise
Prioritizing attention in fast data: principles and promise Bailis et al., CIDR 2017 Today it's two for the price of one as we get a life lesson in addition to a wonderfully thought-provoking piece of research. I'm sure you'd all agree that we're drowning in information - so much content being pumped out all of … Continue reading Prioritizing attention in fast data: principles and promise
Incremental consistency guarantees for replicated objects
Incremental consistency guarantees for replicated objects Guerraoui et al., OSDI 2016 We know that there's a price to be paid for strong consistency in terms of higher latencies and reduced throughput. We also know that there's a price to be paid for weaker consistency in terms of application correctness and / or programmer difficulty. Furthermore, … Continue reading Incremental consistency guarantees for replicated objects
the morning paper 