Athens Chapter
What was the last paper within the realm of computing you read and loved? What did it inspire you to build or tinker with? Come share the ideas in an awesome academic/research paper with fellow engineers, programmers, and paper-readers. Lead a session and show off code that you wrote that implements these ideas or just give us the lowdown about the paper. Otherwise, just come, listen, and discuss in a low ego, friendly environment.
We'll be using our chapter's repository for organising our meetups and accepting presentation proposals.
Please read and follow the Code Of Conduct. Please let one of the organisers know if anything makes you uncomfortable.
Chapter Details
Sign-up: Please RSVP for meetings via Meetup.com
Twitter: @papersweloveath
Contact: Please use the issue tracker on our chapter's repository for any suggestions.
Organizers: Nikos Fertakis, Giorgos Tsiftsis
Chapter Meetups
George Kadianakis on Onions Everyday: Food? Medicine? Protocol?
We are very excited to announce that the 12th Athenian Papers We Love meetup will feature George Kadianakis presenting on his work on Tor. This is a bit of a departure from our usual meetups since it won't focus on a single paper. Rather, the talk will cover various cutting-edge areas of research and engineering.
Talks
• George Kadianakis on Onions Everyday: Food? Medicine? Protocol?
Onions have many uses! Most people know Tor as a browser that provides a private web browsing experience. However, Tor can also provide privacy and anonymity to websites and other servers using "onion services". This talk is gonna give a high-level overview of how modern onion services work, shed some light to the crypto tricks used to make service-side anonymity happen and show people various improvements and behind-the-scenes developments that have happened in this space over the past year.
Reading material, in this order:
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Apollonas Matsoukas on Rapid solutions of problems by quantum computation
We are very excited to announce that the 11th Athenian Papers We Love meetup will feature Apollonas Matsoukas presenting on Rapid solutions of problems by quantum computation (https://www.isical.ac.in/~rcbose/internship/lectures2016/rt08deutschjozsa.pdf), by David Deutsch and Richard Jozsa. [1992].
Talks
• Apollonas Matsoukas on Rapid solutions of problems by quantum computation
The Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm is the first and simplest example of a deterministic quantum algorithm that solves a problem exponentially faster than any classical deterministic algorithm.
The key concept in quantum information theory is the "qubit". A set of controllable, interacting qubits can be used as a "quantum register". In this talk, after a brief introduction to the above notions, the Deutsch–Jozsa algorithm will be presented via a "quantum circuit", the most widespr…
Kakia Panagidi and Kostis Gerakos on The use of Kafka Platform for Mobile IOT
We are very excited to be back with a new event! The 10th Athenian Papers We Love meetup will feature Kakia Panagidi and Kostis Gerakos presenting on The use of Kafka Platform for Mobile IOT
Talks
• Kakia Panagidi and Kostis Gerakos presenting on The use of Kafka Platform for Mobile IOT
This presentation aims to describe the adoption of a highly efficient pub/sub middleware platform for unmanned mobile vehicles - UxVs (i.e., mobile vehicles of different categories) in real-world scenarios.
After the introduction of the designed architecture, the insights of applying a distributed middleware providing 'experimentation as a service' in an Internet-of-Things (IoT) environment are discussed.
It is worth noting that the discussed solution is invariant to the robotic platforms and scalable to new installations and additions in both software and hardware components. Quantitative findings presented show that the proposed scheme is efficient and can control…
Linos Giannopoulos on Building a DDoS mitigation pipeline using XDP
We are very excited to announce that the 9th Athenian Papers We Love meetup will feature Linos Giannopoulos presenting on Building a DDoS mitigation pipeline using XDP, based on the paper XDP in practice: integrating XDP into our DDoS mitigation pipeline (https://netdevconf.org/2.1/papers/Gilberto_Bertin_XDP_in_practice.pdf), by Gilberto Bertin. [2018].
Talks
• Linos Giannopoulos on Building a DDoS mitigation pipeline using XDP
XDP (eXpress Data Path) and eBPF in general is a relatively new technology added to the Linux kernel. It seems like the industry has picked up this technology and supported its growth these passed few years of its existence. For instance, Facebook has built and open-sourced its L4 Load Balancer (Katran) since March and Suricata (IDS) has built a packet filter based on XDP for faster packet processing.
During this talk, a brief intr…
Pantelis P. Analytis on Social Learning Strategies for Matters of Taste
We are very excited to announce that the eighth Athenian Papers We Love meetup will feature Pantelis P. Analytis presenting on Social Learning Strategies for Matters of Taste (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325403552_Social_learning_strategies_for_matters_of_taste), by Analytis, Barkoczi, and Herzog. [2018].
Talks
• Pantelis P. Analytis on Social Learning Strategies for Matters of Taste
Most choices people make are about ‘matters of taste’, on which there is no universal, objective truth. Nevertheless, people can learn from the experiences of individuals with similar tastes who have already evaluated the available options—a potential harnessed by recommender systems. We mapped recommender system algorithms to models of human judgement and decision-making about ‘matters of fact’ and recast the latter as social learning strat…
George Psarakis on HyperLogLog in Practice
We are very excited to announce that the seventh Athenian Papers We Love meetup will feature George Psarakis presenting on HyperLogLog in Practice: Algorithmic Engineering of a State of The Art Cardinality Estimation Algorithm (https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/40671.pdf), by Heule et al. [2013].
Talks
• George Psarakis on HyperLogLog in Practice: Algorithmic Engineering of a State of The Art Cardinality Estimation Algorithm
Cardinality estimation has a wide range of applications and is of particular importance in database systems. Various algorithms have been proposed in the past, and the HyperLogLog algorithm is one of them. We will outline the basic concepts and characteristics of the original HyperLogLog algorithm, and also present a series of improvements to this algorithm proposed by the Google researchers in the…
Nikolaos Papaspyrou on QuickCheck
We are very excited to announce that the sixth Athenian Papers We Love meetup will feature professor Nikolaos Papaspyrou presenting on QuickCheck: Α lightweight tool for random testing of Haskell programs (https://www.cs.tufts.edu/%7Enr/cs257/archive/john-hughes/quick.pdf), by Koen Claessen and John Hughes [2000].
Talks
• Nikolaos Papaspyrou on QuickCheck: Α lightweight tool for random testing of Haskell programs
QuickCheck is a combinator library originally written in Haskell, designed to assist in software testing by generating test cases for test suites.
In QuickCheck the programmer writes assertions about logical properties that a function should fulfill. Then QuickCheck attempts to generate a test case that falsifies these assertions. Once such a test case is found, QuickCheck tries to reduce it to a minimal failing subset by removing or simplifying inp…
Diomidis Spinellis on Unix Architecture Evolution Milestones and Lessons Learned
We are very excited to announce that the fifth Athenian Papers We Love meetup will feature professor Diomidis Spinellis presenting on the Unix Architecture Evolution.
Talks
• Diomidis Spinellis presenting on the Unix Architecture Evolution: Milestones and Lessons Learned
The Unix operating system has had a profound influence on the development of open source software and associated communities. Many of today's systems trace their code or design to a 1970 unnamed operating system kernel, implemented in 2489 lines of PDP-7 assembly language. This evolved into the Unix operating system, whose direct descendants include today's BSD systems and intellectual heirs form the various GNU/Linux distributions.
How did the architecture of Unix evolve over the past half century? Based on a GitHub repository (https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo) recording the system's history fr…
Spyros Anastasopoulos on Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture
We are excited to announce that the fourth Athenian Papers We Love meetup will feature Spyros Anastasopoulos presenting on Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture (https://www.ics.uci.edu/%7Etaylor/documents/2002-REST-TOIT.pdf) by Roy Fielding [2002].
Talks
• Spyros Anastasopoulos on Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture:
Roy Fielding introduced the REST architecture for networked applications in his PhD Dissertation and used it to formally define the architecture of the web. He presented his research in two papers: A preliminary version at ICSE 2000 and published an extended version at ACM Transactions on Internet Technology.
My presentation will focus on the extended version.
Bio
I enjoy working with likeminded programmers on challenging projects in environments where I can experiment, innovate, learn, and have fun. My areas o…
Nikos Fertakis on The Dataflow Model
The third Athenian Papers We Love meetup will feature Nikos Fertakis presenting on The Dataflow Model: A Practical Approach to Balancing Correctness, Latency, and Cost in Massive-Scale, Unbounded, Out-of-Order Data Processing (https://research.google.com/pubs/archive/43864.pdf), by Akidau et al (Google) [2015].
Talks
• Nikos Fertakis on The Dataflow Model:
As Adrian Colyer put it on his Morning Paper blog: "Akidau et al. set out a strong manifesto for modern data processing, based on the notion of accepting uncertainty and incompleteness."
I think Dataflow is a really interesting framework on processing infinite streams. And make no mistake, infinite streams are all around us, even though we are used to splitting them into artificial segments (batches) to simplify how we process them.
The problems that can be solved this way include:
• log joining pipelines
Chris Mantas on Chord
We are very excited to host Chris Mantas for our second meetup! Chris will be presenting on Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup service for internet applications (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/chord:sigcomm01/chord_sigcomm.pdf) by Stoica, et al.
In addition to Chris' talk, Costas Drogos will be closing the event with a lightning talk on the Meltdown and Spectre attacks as these are described in their papers, found on https://meltdownattack.com.
Talks
• Chris Mantas on Chord:
This 2001 paper has over 13K (!) citations on Google Scholar and is considered to be one of the most influential architectures in Distributed Systrems.
While originally designed with P2P in mind, evolutions of Its architecture (Distributed Hash Table based) are the at the core of many modern (and old) NoSQL systems:…
Nick Palladinos on The Essence of Functional Programming
We are very excited to host Nick Palladinos for our very first meetup! Nick will be presenting on The Essence of Functional Programming by Phillip Wadler.
Talks
• Nick Palladinos on The Essence of Functional Programming:
The paper is full of beautiful ideas and introduces the notion of a monad as a program structuring mechanism. You can think of it as the first and best monad tutorial out there! For me personally is not only a beautiful written paper but also a milestone for my later intellectual development.
Bios
Nick Palladinos (twitter) has more than 20 years of programming experience in many different programming paradigms and development environments. Over the years he has acquired great interest and experti…
