Metadata

This post is a continuation from yesterday's post. I cover only some of the talks, you may check the other talks from the HPTS agenda. Mind your state for your state of mind (Pat Helland -Salesforce) HPTS day 1 started with a keynote from Pat Helland. Pat Helland is a database veteran. I had covered some of his papers on this blog before. He writes insightful position papers with a unique style. The keynote provided an overview of trends in storage and computing and hit the high notes from his earlier position papers as well, and mentioned this table:                           | fast-reads | fast-writes | read-your-write linearizable       | no             | no              | yes            nonlinearizable | yes            | yes            | no              cached-data       | yes            | no             | no              The point is you can't have everything. Pat argues "immutability is a solid rock to stand on" and is the closest you can get to ye

A couple weeks ago, I attended HPTS'17. As I wrote in my HTPS'15 posts ( day1 and day2 ), HPTS is an unconventional workshop. "Every two years, HPTS brings together a lively and opinionated group of participants to discuss and debate the pressing topics that affect today's systems and their design and implementation, especially where scalability is concerned. The workshop includes position paper presentations, panels, moderated discussions, and significant time for casual interaction. The only publications are slide decks by presenters who choose to post them." HPTS is by invitation only and keeps it under 100 participants. The workshop brings together experts from both industry and academia so that they can mix and interact. Although some people prefer to keep what happens at HPTS to stay at HPTS, I find it hard to not talk about HPTS. I learn a lot at HPTS and I want to share at least some of those. And this year I don't think there was any confidential t

Seth Godin defines authentic in relation to consistency.  Recently, he  defined it as "consistent emotional labor." We call a brand or a person authentic when they're consistent, when they act the same way whether or not someone is looking. Someone is authentic when their actions are in alignment with what they promise. Showing up as a pro. Keeping promises. Even when you don't feel like it. Especially when you don't. I agree with this definition. If I may refine it, I would define the authentic act/behavior as that which causes guilt/unrest, if you don't do it. If you don't act as your authentic self, you feel as if you shortchanged yourself, you feel guilt and pain. This doesn't mean that doing the authentic act is not painful. (After all if it is not painful, it is not worth doing. It is trivial.) Authentic means that if you don't do it, it is also painful because it causes guilt and unrest. At least if you act as your authentic se

The last couple of days we celebrated 50th anniversary of our department, CSE at University at Buffalo. We celebrated the anniversary with a technical conference and panels. Yesterday, I wrote about the Graduate Research Conference on Friday. Today, I am posting my notes on the Alumni Symposium that took place on Saturday.  Here is a link to the full program.  Keynote Speaker: Prof. Sung-Mo "Steve" Kang. “The 4th Industrial Revolution and Future of Nanoscience and Engineering”. Prof. Steve Kang got an MS from our department in 1972. He was Prof. Peter Scott's student. Steve talked about the era of the 4th industrial revolution: 1. steam engine (labor), 2. electricity (energy), 3. computing (knowledge), and 4. cyberphysical system (smart production / soft power). As part of this 4th era, Steve credits machine learning as important. He gave examples of alpha go vs Lee Sedol, a novel written by AI in Japan, the KAIST hubo roboto winning 2015 darpa robotic challenge,

Over the last couple of days, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of our department, CSE at University at Buffalo. We celebrated the anniversary with a technical conference and panels, so it was an opportunity to learn new things for everyone. With the attendance of many prominent UB-CSE alumni, it has been a really amazing 2.5 days. Here is a link to the CSE 50 conference program. On Thursday evening, the event was kicked off with a reception and an undergraduate poster session. The thing that surprised me in this poster session was how quickly the PM2.5 sensors miniaturized. PM2.5 refers to atmospheric particulate matter (PM) that have a diameter less than 2.5 micrometers, which is about 3% the diameter of a human hair. PM2.5 is a traffic-related pollutant implicated in a wide variety of adverse health outcomes. I was involved in a NIH/NIEHS project for using smartphone-based time-activity data for air pollutant exposure estimation from 2010-12. At that time PM2.5 sensors were mini