San Francisco - October 29, 2015
Aysylu Greenberg on Probabilistic Accuracy Bounds
Jeff Carpenter presents Design Principles Behind Smalltalk
Description
Aysylu Greenberg presents Probabilistic Accuracy Bounds for Fault-Tolerant Computations that Discard Tasks.
Aysylu tells us "As our systems get more complex and expensive to operate, tradeoffs between accuracy and performance gains become more relevant. The paper demonstrates a new approach to analyzing programs where we can train statistical models to bound the error as tasks fail. This allows us to be more resilient in the face of system failures in many applications that can tolerate 'good enough' results. This area of research is particularly dear to my heart as I was first exposed to it while taking a compiler engineering course at MIT which the author, Prof. Martin Rinard, taught. The probabilistic high-performance computing captured my interest because it challenges the widely accepted expectation that for-loops are deterministic."
Aysylu Greenberg has many hobbies. By day, she works on a distributed build system at Google. For fun, she writes open-source libraries in Clojure, ponders the design of systems that deal with inaccuracies, paints and sculpts. Her curiosity for everything new and unexplored drives her to seek out cutting edge research papers. You can find @aysylu22 on github.com/aysylu and http://aysy.lu.
Jeff Carpenter presents Design Principles Behind Smalltalk by Daniel H. H. Ingalls.
Jeff tells us: "This a paper I love because it frames programming language design as a means to 'provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone.' The paper describes the design principles the Learning Research Group at PARC discovered as they evolved the design of the Smalltalk language."
Jeff is a software engineer at Braintree where he works on the JavaScript SDK and various payment services. He is particularly interested in improving developer experiences, open sourcing all the things, and learning about new programming languages.
The San Francisco Chapter would like to give special thanks to Fastly for sponsoring the October meetup.