a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
Visit blog.acolyer.org → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2016 – Nov 2022
Systems & Performance 22Software Engineering 19Databases & Data 12Security & Privacy 11AI & Machine Learning 10Math & Algorithms 8
Fear the reaper: characterization and fast detection of card skimmers Scaife et al., USENIX Security 2018 Until I can get my hands on a Skim Reaper I’m not sure I’ll ever trust an ATM or other expo…
… and post a write-up on this blog. That sounds crazy of course – who has the time to read a paper every weekday? Let alone write it up! I’ve done it for each of the last two calendar y…
What’s wrong with Git? A conceptual design analysis De Rossi & Jackson Onward! 2013 We finished up last week talking about the how to find good concepts / abstractions in a software desig…
To type or not to type: quantifying detectable bugs in JavaScript Gao et al., ICSE 2017 This is a terrific piece of work with immediate practical applications for many project teams. Is it worth th…
ServiceFabric: a distributed platform for building microservices in the cloud Kakivaya et al., EuroSys’18 (If you don’t have ACM Digital Library access, the paper can be accessed either by fo…
When coding style survives compilation: de-anonymizing programmers from executable binaries Caliskan et al., NDSS’18 As a programmer you have a unique style, and stylometry techniques can be used t…
Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0 Bernstein, 2007 I find security much more important than speed. We need invulnerable software systems, and we need them today, even if they ar…
DéjàVu: A map of code duplicates on GitHub Lopes et al., OOPSLA ‘17 ‘DéjàVu’ drew me in with its attention grabbing abstract: This paper analyzes a corpus of 4.5 million non-fork projects hosted on…
Machine learning systems are stuck in a rut Barham & Isard, HotOS’19 In this paper we argue that systems for numerical computing are stuck in a local basin of performance and programmabil…
Towards deep symbolic reinforcement learning Garnelo et al, 2016 Every now and then I read a paper that makes a really strong connection with me, one where I can’t stop thinking about the imp…
Designing far memory data structures: think outside the box Aguilera et al., HotOS’19 Last time out we looked at some of the trade-offs between RInKs and LInKs, and the advantages of local in…
For today’s post, I’ve drawn material not just from one paper, but from five! The subject matter is ‘word2vec’ – the work of Mikolov et al. at Google on efficient vect…
Learning to prove theorems via interacting with proof assistants Yang & Deng, ICML’19 Something a little different to end the week: deep learning meets theorem proving! It’s been a while …
Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems Sathaye et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 It’s been a while since we last looked at security attacks against connected real-world entiti…
How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories Meli et al., NDSS’19 On the one hand you might say there’s no new news here. We know that developers shouldn’t …
Serverless computing: one step forward, two steps back Hellerstein et al., CIDR’19 The biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research has come round again. Today’s paper choice is su…
Distributed consensus revised Howard, PhD thesis Welcome back to a new term of The Morning Paper! To kick things off, I’m going to start by taking a look at Dr Howard’s PhD thesis, ‘Distributed con…
Nines are not enough: meaningful metrics for clouds Mogul & Wilkes, HotOS’19 It’s hard to define good SLOs, especially when outcomes aren’t fully under the control of any single party. Th…
The design and implementation of modern column-oriented database systems Abadi et al., Foundations and trends in databases, 2012 I came here by following the references in the Smoke paper we looked…
Why neurons have thousands of synapses, a theory of sequence memory in neocortex Hawkins & Ahmad, Front. Neural Circuits 2016 It all began with a fascinating lunchtime conversation with Martin …
50 ways to leak your data: an exploration of apps’ circumvention of the Android permissions system Reardon et al., USENIX Security Symposium 2019 The problem is all inside your app, she said to me …
An empirical study on the correctness of formally verified distributed systems Fonseca et al., EuroSys’17 “Is your distributed system bug free?” “I formally verified it!R…
Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys’19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs enviro…
Mergeable replicated data types Kaki et al., OOPSLA’19 This paper was published at OOPSLA, but perhaps it’s amongst the distributed systems community that I expect there to be the greatest in…
EnclaveDB: A secure database using SGX Priebe et al., IEEE Security & Privacy 2018 This is a really interesting paper (if you’re into this kind of thing I guess!) bringing together the security…
The why and how of nonnegative matrix factorization Gillis, arXiv 2014 from: ‘Regularization, Optimization, Kernels, and Support Vector Machines.’ Last week we looked at the paper ‘Beyond news cont…