The Philosophy of Trust and Cloud Computing
The Philosophy of Trust and Cloud Computing
April 5/6, Corpus Christi, Cambridge
Sponsored by Microsoft Research
Richard Harper (MSR) and Alex Oliver (Cambridge) outlined
the goals of the meeting, and everyone introduced themselves - the
majority of attendees were either in Social Science/Anthropology or
Philosophy, with a few industrials and a couple of technical people
from Computing (networks&security).
The talks were mostly in the social science style
(people literally "read" papers, rather than powerpoint), so one had
to concentrate a bit more than usual, rather than looking at
bulletpoints and catching up on email/facebook.
Supporting control flow in the CIEL execution engine
How do you write a program that runs on hundreds or thousands of computers? Over the last decade, this has become a real concern for many companies that must be able to handle ever-growing data sets in order to stay in business. When those data sets grow to terabytes or petabytes in size, a single disk (or even a RAID array) can't deliver the data fast enough, so a solution is needed to exploit the throughput of hundreds or thousands of disks in parallel. In this post, I'll introduce various solutions to this problem, and explain how our CIEL execution engine supports a larger class of algorithms than existing systems.
20th International World Wide Web Conference – WWW 2011
I am just back from Hyderabad, in India, where I attended the 20th International World Wide Web Conference, also known as WWW 2011, to present our work on tracking geographic social cascades to improve video delivery.  This conference, organised as usual by the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2),  represents the annual opportunity for the international community to discuss and debate the evolution of the Web, providing a mixture of academic and industrial content.
The word cloud shows pretty well the main themes of the conference this year, which heavily revolved around two large pivotal aspects: "social" and "search". Interestingly, there was not any attempt of merging the two things together, as Aardvark tried last year. Not surprisingly, "networks" are still popular in the community, and "Twitter" still enjoys a lot of interest, even though this may change with their new controversial Terms Of Service, which are likely to hamper social media data harvesting.
Overall it is a fairly big conference, with 2 initial days of workshops, tutorial and panels and then 3 days with 81 research papers. Also, there were three world-known personalities such as Dr. Abdul Kalam, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Christos Papadimitriou that gave a keynote each. I will give a brief summary of the main research themes, with pointers to the most interesting papers. However, it was physically impossible to attend all the research sessions, as they were often happening simultaneously: you can find much more information on the conference website and on the official proceedings.
IETF 80 highlights: Bufferbloat
Continuing my series of articles about noteworthy happenings at last week's IETF meeting, here is a summary of Jim Gettys's presentation on "Bufferbloat" to the Transport Area open meeting, which is in turn a summary of his many articles on the topic. This is significant not because it is new, but because it is a very thorough treatment of an old problem which has gone ignored by much of the IETF community - and probably by others too.
IETF 80 highlights: Multipath TCP
I have spent the last week in Prague for the 80th IETF meeting, and will be writing a few articles on the most interesting of the sessions I attended. Â Here's the first.