Data Skeptic

Mikko Lauri, Post Doctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany, comes on the show today to discuss the work Information Gathering in Decentralized POMDPs by Policy Graph Improvements.

Follow Mikko: @mikko_lauri Github https://laurimi.github.io/

Balaji Arun, a PhD Student in the Systems of Software Research Group at Virginia Tech, joins us today to discuss his research of distributed systems through the paper "Taming the Contention in Consensus-based Distributed Systems."

Works Mentioned "Taming the Contention in Consensus-based Distributed Systems" by Balaji Arun, Sebastiano Peluso, Roberto Palmieri, Giuliano Losa, and Binoy Ravindranhttps://www.ssrg.ece.vt.edu/papers/tdsc20-author-version.pdf

"Fast Paxos" by Leslie Lamport https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00446-006-0005-x

Maartje ter Hoeve, PhD Student at the University of Amsterdam, joins us today to discuss her research in automated summarization through the paper "What Makes a Good Summary? Reconsidering the Focus of Automatic Summarization."

Works Mentioned "What Makes a Good Summary? Reconsidering the Focus of Automatic Summarization." by Maartje der Hoeve, Juilia Kiseleva, and Maarten de Rijke

Contact Email: [email protected]

Twitter: https://twitter.com/maartjeterhoeve

Website: https://maartjeth.github.io/#get-in-touch

Brian Brubach, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Wellesley College, joins us today to discuss his work "Meddling Metrics: the Effects of Measuring and Constraining Partisan Gerrymandering on Voter Incentives".

WORKS MENTIONED: Meddling Metrics: the Effects of Measuring and Constraining Partisan Gerrymandering on Voter Incentives by Brian Brubach, Aravind Srinivasan, and Shawn Zhao

Aside from victory questions like "can black force a checkmate on white in 5 moves?" many novel questions can be asked about a game of chess. Some questions are trivial (e.g. "How many pieces does white have?") while more computationally challenging questions can contribute interesting results in computational complexity theory.

In this episode, Josh Brunner, Master's student in Theoretical Computer Science at MIT, joins us to discuss his recent paper Complexity of Retrograde and Helpmate Chess Problems: Even Cooperative Chess is Hard.

Works Mentioned Complexity of Retrograde and Helpmate Chess Problems: Even Cooperative Chess is Hard by Josh Brunner, Erik D. Demaine, Dylan Hendrickson, and Juilian Wellman

1x1 Rush Hour With Fixed Blocks is PSPACE Complete by Josh Brunner, Lily Chung, Erik D. Demaine, Dylan Hendrickson, Adam Hesterberg, Adam Suhl, Avi Zeff

Eil Goldweber, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, comes on today to share his work in applying formal verification to systems and a modification to the Paxos protocol discussed in the paper Significance on Consecutive Ballots in Paxos.

Works Mentioned : Previous Episode on Paxos https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2020/distributed-consensus

Paper: On the Significance on Consecutive Ballots in Paxos by: Eli Goldweber, Nuda Zhang, and Manos Kapritsos

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Today on the show we have Adrian Martin, a Post-doctoral researcher from the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He comes on the show today to discuss his research from the paper "Convolutional Neural Networks can be Deceived by Visual Illusions."

Works Mentioned in Paper: "Convolutional Neural Networks can be Decieved by Visual Illusions." by Alexander Gomez-Villa, Adrian Martin, Javier Vazquez-Corral, and Marcelo Bertalmio

Examples:

Snake Illusions https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/rotating-snakes

Twitter: Alex: @alviur

Adrian: @adriMartin13

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Have you ever wanted to hear what an earthquake sounds like? Today on the show we have Omkar Ranadive, Computer Science Masters student at NorthWestern University, who collaborates with Suzan van der Lee, an Earth and Planetary Sciences professor at Northwestern University, on the crowd-sourcing project Earthquake Detective.

Email Links: Suzan: [email protected] Omkar: [email protected]

Works Mentioned:

Paper: Applying Machine Learning to Crowd-sourced Data from Earthquake Detective https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.04740 by Omkar Ranadive, Suzan van der Lee, Vivan Tang, and Kevin Chao Github: https://github.com/Omkar-Ranadive/Earthquake-Detective Earthquake Detective: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/vivitang/earthquake-detective

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Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is a desirable property in a distributed computing environment. BFT means the system can survive the loss of nodes and nodes becoming unreliable. There are many different protocols for achieving BFT, though not all options can scale to large network sizes.

Ted Yin joins us to explain BFT, survey the wide variety of protocols, and share details about HotStuff.

Kyle shared some initial reactions to the announcement about Alpha Fold 2's celebrated performance in the CASP14 prediction. By many accounts, this exciting result means protein folding is now a solved problem.

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