Computer Science
Past Presentations
Modern Distributed Optimization
We often want to find the best settings for our systems, whether it’s configuring the best JVM parameters, optimizing user workflows, or selecting the right configuration for a machine learning algorithm. Black-box optimization techniques that can find good (hopefully optimal!) parameters have...
Tackling Computing Challenges @CERN
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is the world's most powerful particle accelerator and is one of the largest and most complicated machines ever built. The LHC has been vital in helping physicists make new discoveries such as the Higgs boson in 2012. Today, the Worldwide LHC Computing...
Homoiconicity: It Is What It Is
What do Lisp, Prolog, Tcl, machine code, and XSLT have in common? It's a computer science-y word that sounds cool and lends an academic sheen to your programming language, but do you know what "homoiconicity" really means? Maybe you saw some Scheme in college, but S-expressions aren't just about...
What Came First: The Ordering of Events in Systems
Your favorite distributed system and the concurrent program you wrote last week are built on the same foundational principle for ordering events across the system. This talk will explore the beautifully simple happens-before principle that lies behind these complex systems. We will delve into how...
Real World Virtual Reality
Virtual reality has been all the rage of late. With a myriad new devices and everyone talking about it, it’s easy to get lost in the hype cycle… but how much has VR made it into the real world? Having reached more than a million students, Google Expeditions is at the forefront of bringing VR...
Machine Learning from Theory to Practice
With recent advances in computational power, machine learning is positioned to change the way we interact with the world around us. Likewise, a surge of well-maintained machine learning libraries has made it possible for engineers to use machine learning models with minimal background. However,...
Interviews
Fast Log Analysis by Automatically Parsing Heterogeneous Log
Who is the main audience the talk is targeting?
The talk is mainly targeting people who design/architect log analytics solutions and are focused on making the troubleshooting operational problems faster by analyzing logs. When a computer operates, it generates logs to communicate with humans -- logs act as tweets to inform system status. If something fails, somebody has to...
Read Full InterviewGit Gud with Property-Based Testing
What is the focus of your work?
Today, I am working on using property-based testing to create various different kinds of distributed git repository scenarios. The goal is to validate that our solution to the git metadata vulnerability is working as designed. So I am trying to create any kind of wacky system state to ensure that our solution still works.
Read Full InterviewProbabilistic Programming from Scratch
What do you want someone to leave your talk with?
The audience will leave with a strong non-mathematical intuition for how Bayesian inference allows us to quantify the strength of conclusions drawn from real-world data. They’ll hopefully be excited to solve other toy problems with the tool we put together during the talk, and keen to check out PyMC3.
Read Full InterviewAutoCAD & WebAssembly: Moving a 30 Year Code Base to the Web
Your talk is about porting AutoCAD on the desktop to a browser with WebAssembly. How do you plan to go about the talk?
I plan to start my talk with how we arrived at our current technology stack (which is Emscripten and WebAssembly Binaryen) by talking about our journey from trying flash, JavaScript, asm.js, and, finally, getting to WebAssembly. After that, I would like to highlight some of the peculiarities of the large and constantly changing...
Read Full InterviewIntroduction to gVisor: Sandboxed Linux Container Runtime
What’s the focus of the work you do today? You're an advocate, are you focused on talking about gVisor right now or what's your main focus?
I am focused on application development, specifically Ruby development, and working to deliver content for application developers to run their applications on cloud. I encourage application developers to use Google Cloud in addition to their current infrastructure by explaining why Google Cloud is efficient and secure on its own.
Read Full InterviewEBtree - Design for a Scheduler and Use (Almost) Everywhere
What is the focus of your work today?
Currently I work on making sure that HAProxy is and remains the fastest and most widely used software load balancer today. My team and I work on improving and extending HAProxy. We constantly try to find new ways to integrate it into existing and emerging platforms and environments. We know that HAProxy is often an indispensable piece...
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