Slicer: Auto-sharding for datacenter applications

December 2, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Slicer: Auto-sharding for datacenter applications Adya et al. (Google) OSDI 2016 Another piece of Google's back-end infrastructure is revealed in this paper, ready to spawn some new open source implementations of the same ideas no doubt. Slicer is a general purpose sharding service. I normally think of sharding as something that happens within a (typically ... Continue Reading

Morpheus: Towards automated SLOs for enterprise clusters

December 1, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Morpheus: Towards automated SLOs for enterprise clusters Jyothi et al. OSDI 2016 I'm really impressed with this paper - it covers all the bases from user studies to find out what's really important to end users, to data-driven engineering, a sprinkling of algorithms, a pragmatic implementation being made available in open source, and of course, ... Continue Reading

Firmament: Fast, centralized cluster scheduling at scale

November 30, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Firmament: Fast, centralized cluster scheduling at scale Gog et al. OSDI' 16 Updated link to point to official usenix hosted version As this paper demonstrates very well, cluster scheduling is a tricky thing to get right at scale. It sounds so simple on the surface: "here are some new jobs/tasks - where should I run ... Continue Reading

Early detection of configuration errors to reduce failure damage

November 29, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

Early detection of configuration errors to reduce failure damage Xu et al, OSDI '16 Here's one of those wonderful papers that you can read in the morning, and be taking advantage of the results the same afternoon! Remember the 'Simple testing can prevent most critical failures' paper from OSDI'14 that we looked at last month? ... Continue Reading

Kraken: Leveraging live traffic tests to identify and resolve resource utilization bottlenecks in large scale web services

November 28, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Kraken: Leveraging live traffic tests to identify and resolve resource utilization bottlenecks in large scale web services Veeraraghavan et al. (Facebook) OSDI 2016 How do you know how well your systems can perform under stress? How can you identify resource utilization bottlenecks? And how do you know your tests match the condititions experienced with live ... Continue Reading

Building machines that learn and think like people

November 25, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 16 Comments

Building machines that learn and think like people Lake et al., arXiv 2016 Pro-tip: if you're going to try and read and write up a paper every weekday, it's best not to pick papers that run to over 50 pages. When the paper is as interesting as "Building machines that learn and think like people" ... Continue Reading

Smart Reply: Automated response suggestion for email

November 24, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Smart Reply: Automated response suggestion for email Kannan, Kaufman, Karach, et al. KDD 2016 I’m sure you’ve come across (or at least heard of) Google Inbox’s smart reply feature for mobile email by now. It’s currently used for 10% of all mobile replies, which must equate to a very large number of messages per day. ... Continue Reading

Playing FPS games with deep reinforcement learning

November 23, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Playing FPS games with deep reinforcement learning Lample et al. arXiv preprint, 2016 When I wrote up ‘Asynchronous methods for deep learning’ last month, I made a throwaway remark that after Go the next challenge for deep learning systems would be to win an esports competition against the best human teams. Can you imagine the ... Continue Reading

Achieving human parity in conversational speech recognition

November 22, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition Xiong et al. Microsoft Technical Report, 2016 The headline story here is that for the first time a system has been developed that exceeds human performance in one of the most difficult of all human speech recognition tasks: natural conversations held over the telephone. This is known as ... Continue Reading

Artificial Intelligence and life in 2030

November 21, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030 Stanford University, 2016 Strictly speaking, this isn’t a research paper, it’s a report from the Stanford University One hundred year study of Artificial Intelligence, “a long-term investigation of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its influences on people, their communities, and society.” A 100 year study is hard ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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