The Morning Paper
Adrian Colyer — Venture partner and former CTO
Daily summaries of influential computer science research papers.
blog.acolyer.orgExperience shows that many databases do not provide the isolation guarantees they claim.
Adrian Colyer spent years reading a computer science research paper every weekday morning and writing clear, engaging summaries of each one. The blog covers distributed systems, databases, machine learning, security, and more. It's on hiatus since 2021, but the archive is one of the best free resources on the internet for understanding what CS researchers actually work on.
Written by Adrian Colyer since 2014.
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The ants and the pheromones
TLDR; this is the last edition of The Morning Paper for now. Plus: one strand of research you won’t want to miss! I was listening to a BBC Radio 4 podcast recently (More or Less: Behind the Stats – Ants and Algorithms) in which the host Tim Harford is interviewing David Sumpter about his recent book, ‘The ten equations that rule the world.’ One of those equations, the ‘reward equation’ models how ants communicate using pheromones, and our own brains keep track of rewards using dopamine. Ab...
An overview of end-to-end entity resolution for big data
An overview of end-to-end entity resolution for big data, Christophides et al., ACM Computing Surveys, Dec. 2020, Article No. 127 The ACM Computing Surveys are always a great way to get a quick orientation in a new subject area, and hot off the press is this survey on the entity resolution (aka record linking) problem. It’s an important part of many modern data workflows, and an area I’ve been wrestling with in one of my own projects.Entity Resolution (ER) aims to identify different descripti...
Bias in word embeddings
Bias in word embeddings, Papakyriakopoulos et al., FAT*’20 There are no (stochastic) parrots in this paper, but it does examine bias in word embeddings, and how that bias carries forward into models that are trained using them. There are definitely some dangers to be aware of here, but also some cause for hope as we also see that bias can be detected, measured, and mitigated. …we want to provide a complete overview of bias in word embeddings: its detection in the embeddings, its diffusion...
Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation
Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation, Crooks et al., PODC’17. Last week we looked at Elle, which detects isolation anomalies by setting things up so that the inner workings of the database, in the form of the direct serialization graph (DSG), can be externally recovered. Today’s paper choice, ‘Seeing is believing’ also deals with the externally observable effects of a database, in this case the return values of read operations, but instead of doing th...
Elle: inferring isolation anomalies from experimental observations
Elle: inferring isolation anomalies from experimental observations, Kingsbury & Alvaro, VLDB’20 Is there anything more terrifying, and at the same time more useful, to a database vendor than Kyle Kingsbury’s Jepsen? As the abstract to today’s paper choice wryly puts it, “experience shows that many databases do not provide the isolation guarantees they claim.” Jepsen captures execution histories, and then examines them for evidence of isolation anomalies. General linearizability and s...
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Even on hiatus, this archive is a goldmine. If you've ever been curious about a CS research paper but didn't want to slog through the PDF alone, start here.