Route planning in transportation networks - Bast et al. Yesterday we looked at the CS problems behind startups using mobile workforces to build variations on the pick-up and delivery problem. Today I thought it would be fun to look at a related problem - journey planning. What's the tech behind city navigation and journey planning … Continue reading Route planning in transportation networks
Dynamic vehicle routing, pickup, and delivery problems
A double-header today: A review of dynamic vehicle routing problems - Pillac et al. 2012, and Dynamic pickup and delivery problems - Berbeglia et al. 2010 With the ubiquity of location-enabled smartphones we're increasingly seeing new startup businesses that take advantage of a mobile workforce to pick up and deliver goods (e.g. groceries, meals, parcels) … Continue reading Dynamic vehicle routing, pickup, and delivery problems
An unsupervised algorithm for person-name disambiguation on the web
An unsupervised algorithm for person-name disambiguation on the web - Delgado et al. 2014 Many people share the same name. When you search for a person by name on the web, the results you get back are page ranked without consideration to the individual they refer to. If you're searching for a person who shares … Continue reading An unsupervised algorithm for person-name disambiguation on the web
Leases: An efficient fault-tolerant mechanism for distributed file cache consistency
Leases: An efficient fault-tolerant mechanism for distributed file cache consistency - Gray & Cheriton 1989 This paper introduced the leasing model for distributed systems. Leases are conceptually very straightforward and bring a surprising number of benefits for such a simple mechanism. Also in this paper you'll find the simple formulas that can help you figure … Continue reading Leases: An efficient fault-tolerant mechanism for distributed file cache consistency
The Google File System
The Google File System - Ghemawat, Gobioff & Leung, 2003 Here's a paper with a lot to answer for! Back in 2003 Ghemawat et al reported that We have designed and implemented the Google File System, a scalable distributed file system for large distributed data-intensive applications. It provides fault-tolerance while running on inexpensive commodity hardware, … Continue reading The Google File System
A few useful things to know about machine learning
A few useful things to know about machine learning - Domingos 2012 Developing successful machine learning applications requires a substantial amount of 'black art' that is hard to find in textbooks This paper looks at twelve key lessons including pitfalls to avoid, important issues to focus on, and answers to common questions. The paper was … Continue reading A few useful things to know about machine learning
Enabling blockchain innovations with pegged sidechains
Enabling blockchain innovations with pegged sidechains - Back et al. 2014 A very topical choice today. Last week a number of key players in the Bitcoin ecosystem published a paper (see link above) discussing a mechanism ('pegged sidechains') to allowed continued innovation and evolution of Bitcoin and related blockchain-based solutions. From the abstract: Since the … Continue reading Enabling blockchain innovations with pegged sidechains
Improving Cloud Service Resilience using Brownout-aware Load Balancing
Improving Cloud Service Resilience using Brownout-aware Load Balancing - Klein et al 2014 This is what the previous two #themorningpaper selections have been building to. What happens when you apply brownout techniques to a set of load-balanced servers? We study how to extend the classical cloud service architecture composed of a load-balancer and replicas with … Continue reading Improving Cloud Service Resilience using Brownout-aware Load Balancing
Brownout: building more robust cloud applications
Brownout: building more robust cloud applications - Klein et al. 2014 How can we design cloud applications to be resilient in the face of varying resources and user load, and always deliver the best possible user experience? That's a pretty important question these days, and Klein et al. report on a very interesting new development … Continue reading Brownout: building more robust cloud applications
Analysis of join-the-shortest-queue routing
Analysis of join-the-shortest queue routing for web server farms - Gupter et al 2007 What's the best way to balance web requests across a set of servers? Round-robin is the simple algorithm that everyone knows best, but there is a better way... This paper analyzes the Join the Shortest Queue (JSQ) routing policy and shows … Continue reading Analysis of join-the-shortest-queue routing
the morning paper 