Menu
"cs" entries
Data Brokers, Car Data, Pattern Classification, and Hogwild Deep Learning
-
Inside Data Brokers — very readable explanation of the data brokers and how their information is used to track advertising effectiveness.
-
Elon, I Want My Data! — Telsa don’t give you access to the data that your cars collects. Bodes poorly for the Internet of Sealed Boxes. (via BoingBoing)
-
Pattern Classification (Github) — collection of tutorials and examples for solving and understanding machine learning and pattern classification tasks.
-
HOGWILD! (PDF) — the algorithm that Microsoft credit with the success of their Adam deep learning system.
Browser Crypto, Real Time Consistency, Exploring CS, and CS as Social Movement
-
Javascript Cryptography Considered Harmful — tl;dr: “don’t”. If you don’t trust the network to deliver a password, or, worse, don’t trust the server not to keep user secrets, you can’t trust them to deliver security code. The same attacker who was sniffing passwords or reading diaries before you introduce crypto is simply hijacking crypto code after you do.
-
Eventual Consistency in Real Time Apps — answering How do you ensure that your local model is in sync with what’s stored on the backend?
-
Exploring CS — Both courses are designed to teach the fundamental concepts and big ideas of computing along with coding, and to inspire kids about computer science’s creative potential to transform society.
-
Why Computer Literacy Is Key To Winning the 21st Century (Mother Jones) — [teaching CS to] middle and high schoolers at the UCLA Community School, an experimental new public K-12 school. “I saw this as a new frontier in the social-justice fight,” she says. “I tell my students, ‘I don’t necessarily want to teach you how to get rich. I want to teach you to be a good citizen.'”
It's Complicated, Solid World, Bitcoin Redux, and CS Papers
-
It’s Complicated — Danah Boyd’s new book on teens use of the online world is available for PDF download (but buy a copy anyway!).
-
Building a Solid World — O’Reilly research paper about the “software-enhanced networked physical world”. Gonna be mighty interesting in a world where our stuff knows more and is better connected than its owners.
-
What Did Not Happen at Mt Gox — interesting analysis of some of the popular theories. Overall, Bitcoin has been an ongoing massive online course on economics and distributed systems for the libertarian masses. It’s ironic that Mt. Gox turned into a chapter on fractional reserve banking.
-
Papers We Love (Github) — a collection of papers from the computer science community to read and discuss.
Floating Point, Secure Distributed FS, Cloud Robotics, and Domestic Sensors
-
What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic — in short, “it will hurt you.”
-
Ori — a distributed file system built for offline operation and empowers the user with control over synchronization operations and conflict resolution. We provide history through light weight snapshots and allow users to verify the history has not been tampered with. Through the use of replication instances can be resilient and recover damaged data from other nodes.
-
RoboEarth — a Cloud Robotics infrastructure, which includes everything needed to close the loop from robot to the cloud and back to the robot. RoboEarth’s World-Wide-Web style database stores knowledge generated by humans – and robots – in a machine-readable format. Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models).
-
Mother — domestic sensors and an app with an appallingly presumptuous name. (Also, wasn’t “Mother” the name of the ship computer in Alien?) (via BoingBoing)
3D Motion Tracking, Linux of Things, Techno Panics, and Great CS Papers
-
Witrack — tracks the 3D motion of a user from the radio signals reflected off her body. It works even if the person is occluded from the WiTrack device or in a different room. WiTrack does not require the user to carry any wireless device, yet its accuracy exceeds current RF localization systems, which require the user to hold a transceiver. It transmits wireless signals whose power is 100 times smaller than Wi-Fi and 1000 times smaller than cellphone transmissions.
-
A Linux Christmas — Linux drives pretty much all of Amazon’s top-selling consumer electronics.
-
Techno Panic Timeline — chart from Exposing the War on Fun showing the fears of technology from 1493 to the modern day.
-
Best Paper Awards in CS Since 1996 (Jeff Huang) — fantastic resource for your holiday reading.
Inside the Nest Protect, Log Structures, Predictions, and In-Memory Data Cubes
-
Nest Protect Teardown (Sparkfun) — initial teardown of another piece of domestic industrial Internet.
-
Logs — The distributed log can be seen as the data structure which models the problem of consensus. Not kidding when he calls it “real-time data’s unifying abstraction”.
-
Mining the Web to Predict Future Events (PDF) — Mining 22 years of news stories to predict future events. (via Ben Lorica)
-
Nanocubes — a fast datastructure for in-memory data cubes developed at the Information Visualization department at AT&T Labs – Research. Nanocubes can be used to explore datasets with billions of elements at interactive rates in a web browser, and in some cases it uses sufficiently little memory that you can run a nanocube in a modern-day laptop. (via Ben Lorica)
Graph Compression, Learning Minecraft Coding, Performance Enhancing, and Explained Shell
-
WebGraph — a framework for graph compression aimed at studying web graphs. It provides simple ways to manage very large graphs, exploiting modern compression techniques. (via Ben Lorica)
-
Learn to Program with Minecraft Plugins — You’ll need to add features to the game itself: learn how to build plugins for your own Minecraft server using the Java programming language. You don’t need to know anything about programming to get started—-this book will teach you everything you need to know! Shameless Christmas stocking bait! (via Greg Borenstein)
-
In Search of Perfection, Young Adults Turn to Adderall at Work (Al Jazeera) — “Adderall is just the tip of the iceberg,” Essig said. “There are lots more drugs coming down the pike. The way we set up our cultural model for dealing with psychologically performance-enhancing drugs is a real serious question.”
-
Explain Shell — uses parsed manpages to explain a shell commandline. (via Tracy K Teal)
Zombie Drones, Algebra Through Code, Data Toolkit, and Crowdsourcing Antibiotic Discovery
-
Skyjack — drone that takes over other drones. Welcome to the Malware of Things.
-
Bootstrap World — a curricular module for students ages 12-16, which teaches algebraic and geometric concepts through computer programming. (via Esther Wojicki)
-
Harvest — open source BSD-licensed toolkit for building web applications for integrating, discovering, and reporting data. Designed for biomedical data first. (via Mozilla Science Lab)
-
Project ILIAD — crowdsourced antibiotic discovery.
ISS Malware, Computational Creativity, Happy Birthday Go, Built Environment for Surveillance
-
ISS Enjoys Malware — Kaspersky reveals ISS had XP malware infestation before they shifted to Linux. The Gravity movie would have had more registry editing sessions if the producers had cared about FACTUAL ACCURACY.
-
Big Data Approach to Computational Creativity (Arxiv) — although the “results” are a little weak (methodology for assessing creativity not described, and this sadly subjective line “professional chefs at various hotels, restaurants, and culinary schools have indicated that the system helps them explore new vistas in food”), the process and mechanism are fantastic. Bayesian surprise, crowdsourced tagged recipes, dictionaries of volatile compounds, and more. (via MIT Technology Review)
-
Go at 4 — recapping four years of Go language growth.
-
Las Vegas Street Lights to Record Conversations (Daily Mail) — The wireless, LED lighting, computer-operated lights are not only capable of illuminating streets, they can also play music, interact with pedestrians and are equipped with video screens, which can display police alerts, weather alerts and traffic information. The high tech lights can also stream live video of activity in the surrounding area. Technology vendor is Intellistreets. LV says, Right now our intention is not to have any cameras or recording devices. Love that “right now”. Can’t wait for malware to infest it.
Coding for Unreliability, AirBnB JS Style, Category Theory, and Text Processing
-
Quantitative Reliability of Programs That Execute on Unreliable Hardware (MIT) — As MIT’s press release put it: Rely simply steps through the intermediate representation, folding the probability that each instruction will yield the right answer into an estimation of the overall variability of the program’s output. (via Pete Warden)
-
AirBNB’s Javascript Style Guide (Github) — A mostly reasonable approach to JavaScript.
-
Category Theory for Scientists (MIT Courseware) — Scooby snacks for rationalists.
-
Textblob — Python open source text processing library with sentiment analysis, PoS tagging, term extraction, and more.