What is the Right Response to Employer Misbehavior in Research I enjoyed my conversations with Timnit when she was in the MSR-NYC lab, so her situation has been on my mind throughout NeurIPS. Piecing together what happened second-hand is always tricky, but Jeff Dean’s account and Timnit’s agree on a basic outline. Timnit and others wrote a paper for FAccT

Using Bloom filters to efficiently synchronise hash graphs This blog post uses MathJax to render mathematics. You need JavaScript enabled for MathJax to work. In some recent research, Heidi and I needed to solve the following problem. Say you want to sync a hash graph, such as a Git repository, between two nodes. In Git, each commit

Experiments with the ICML 2020 Peer-Review Process This post is cross-listed on the CMU ML blog. The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is a flagship machine learning conference that in 2020 received 4,990 submissions and managed a pool of 3,931 reviewers and area chairs. Given that the stakes in the review process are high — the careers

New courses on distributed systems and elliptic curve cryptography I have just published new educational materials that might be of interest to computing people: a new 8-lecture course on distributed systems, and a tutorial on elliptic curve cryptography. Distributed Systems Since last year I have been delivering an 8-lecture undergraduate course on distributed systems at the University of

The open source paradox A new idea is insinuating in social networks and programming communities. It’s the proportionality between the money people give you for coding something, and the level of demand for quality they can claim to have about your work. As somebody said, the best code is written when you are supposed to

Built to Last Mar Hicks. Built to Last. Logic. Issue 11, “Care”. It was this austerity-driven lack of investment in people—rather than the handy fiction, peddled by state governments, that programmers with obsolete skills retired—that removed COBOL programmers years before this recent crisis. The reality is that there are plenty of new COBOL

Tackling the Awkward Squad for Reactive Programming https://2020.ecoop.org/details/ecoop-2020-papers/19/Tackling-the-Awkward-Squad-for-Reactive-Programming-The-Actor-Reactor-Model Sam Van den Vonder, Thierry Renaux, Bjarno Oeyen, Joeri De Koster, Wolfgang De Meuter Reactive programming is a programming paradigm whereby programs are internally represented by a dependency graph, which is used to automatically (re)compute parts of a program whenever its input changes. In practice reactive programming can only be used

The Simple Essence of Algebraic Subtyping Principal Type Inference with Subtyping Made Easy The Simple Essence of Algebraic Subtyping: Principal Type Inference with Subtyping Made Easy, Lionel Parreaux, ICFP 2020. MLsub extends traditional Hindley-Milner type inference with subtyping while preserving compact principal types, an exciting new development. However, its specification in terms of biunification is difficult to understand, relying on the new concepts of

HOMER Provable Exploration in Reinforcement Learning Last week at ICML 2020, Mikael Henaff, Akshay Krishnamurthy, John Langford and I had a paper on a new reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that solves three key problems in RL: (i) global exploration, (ii) decoding latent dynamics, and (iii) optimizing a given reward function. Our ICML poster is here. The paper is a bit mathematically

The end of the Redis adventure When I started the Redis project more than ten years ago I was in one of the most exciting moments of my career. My co-founder and I had successfully launched two of the major web 2.0 services of the Italian web. In order to make them scalable we had to