Data Skeptic

Yuqi Ouyang, in his second year of PhD study at the University of Warwick in England, joins us today to discuss his work "Video Anomaly Detection by Estimating Likelihood of Representations." Works Mentioned: Video Anomaly Detection by Estimating Likelihood of Representations https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.01468 by: Yuqi Ouyang, Victor Sanchez

Nirupam Gupta, a Computer Science Post Doctoral Researcher at EDFL University in Switzerland, joins us today to discuss his work "Byzantine Fault-Tolerance in Peer-to-Peer Distributed Gradient-Descent."   Works Mentioned:  https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.12316 Byzantine Fault-Tolerance in Peer-to-Peer Distributed Gradient-Descent by Nirupam Gupta and Nitin H. Vaidya   Conference Details: https://george...

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 Ravindran...

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...

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 Sha...

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 Comput...

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 Consecut...

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,...

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:  suzan@earth.northwestern.edu   Omkar:  omkar.ranadi...

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. Thanks to our sponsors! Brilliant  is a great last-minute gift idea! Give access to 60 + interactive courses including Quantum Computing and Group Theory. There's something for everyone at...

Above all, everyone wants voting to be fair. What does fair mean and how can we measure it? Kenneth Arrow posited a simple set of conditions that one would certainly desire in a voting system. For example, unanimity - if everyone picks candidate A, then A should win! Yet surprisingly, under a few basic assumptions, this theorem demonstrates that no voting system exists which can satisfy all the cr...

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the public (or at least those with Twitter accounts) are sharing their personal opinions about mask-wearing via Twitter. What does this data tell us about public opinion? How does it vary by demographic? What, if anything, can make people change their minds? Today we speak to, Neil Yeung and Jonathan Lai, Undergraduate students in the Department of Computer Scie...

Niclas Boehmer, second year PhD student at Berlin Institute of Technology, comes on today to discuss the computational complexity of bribery in elections through the paper "On the Robustness of Winners: Counting Briberies in Elections." Links Mentioned: https://www.akt.tu-berlin.de/menue/team/boehmer_niclas/ Works Mentioned: "On the Robustness of Winners: Counting Briberies in Elections." by Nicla...

Clement Fung, a Societal Computing PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses his research in security of machine learning systems and a defense against targeted sybil-based poisoning called FoolsGold. Works Mentioned: The Limitations of Federated Learning in Sybil Settings Twitter: @clemfung Website: https://clementfung.github.io/ Thanks to our sponsors: Brilliant - Online learning plat...

Simson Garfinkel, Senior Computer Scientist for Confidentiality and Data Access at the US Census Bureau, discusses his work modernizing the Census Bureau disclosure avoidance system from private to public disclosure avoidance techniques using differential privacy. Some of the discussion revolves around the topics in the paper Randomness Concerns When Deploying Differential Privacy .   WORKS MENTIO...

Computer Science research fellow of Cambridge University, Heidi Howard discusses Paxos, Raft, and distributed consensus in distributed systems alongside with her work "Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?" She goes into detail about the leaders in Paxos and Raft and how The Raft Consensus Algorithm actually inspired her to pursue her PhD. Paxos vs Raft paper:  https:...

Linhda joins Kyle today to talk through A.C.I.D. Compliance (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability). The presence of these four components can ensure that a database's transaction is completed in a timely manner. Kyle uses examples such as google sheets, bank transactions, and even the game rummy cube.   Thanks to this week's sponsors: Monday.com - Their Apps Challenge is underway and...

Patrick Rosenstiel  joins us to discuss the  The National Popular Vote .

Yudi Pawitan  joins us to discuss his paper  Defending the P-value .

Ivan Oransky joins us to discuss his work documenting the scientific peer-review process at retractionwatch.com .  

Derek Lim joins us to discuss the paper Expertise and Dynamics within Crowdsourced Musical Knowledge Curation: A Case Study of the Genius Platform .  

Neil Johnson  joins us to discuss the paper  The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views .

Mashbat Suzuki  joins us to discuss the paper  How Many Freemasons Are There? The Consensus Voting Mechanism in Metric Spaces . Check out Mashbat's and many other great talks at the  13th Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT 2020)