Berlin Chapter
What was the last paper within the realm of computing you read? What did it inspire you to build or tinker with? Come share the ideas in an awesome academic/research publication 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, learn, and discuss.
We'll be using papers-we-love's curated repository. Please contribute by adding PR's for papers, code, and/or links to other repositories.
PWL Berlin strictly adheres to the Code of Conduct set forth by all PWL charters.
Chapter details
Location: ThoughtWorks Berlin - Zimmerstraße 23, Berlin, Germany
Sign-up: Please RSVP for meetings via Meetup.com
Twitter: @PapersWeLoveBln
Organizers: Haskell Pointer, Igor Wiedler, and Michael Kleen
Sponsors
Chapter Meetups
Scheme: An Interpreter for Extended Lambda Calculus
In this talk, Veit will present "Scheme: An Interpreter for Extended Lambda Calculus."
In the latter half of the 1970s, Gerald J. Sussman and Guy L. Steele published a series of ground-breaking papers on their new dialect and implementation of Lisp, Scheme. All of them are worth examining, and in this talk we will look at the first paper in the series: “Scheme: An Interpreter for Extended Lambda Calculus”. We’ll look at some of the design choices and rationale, the historical context of the decisions, and try to understand some of the more interesting code snippets in the paper.
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/5794/AIM-349.pdf
…Spoon - Source Code Analysis and Transformation for Java
In this talk, Martin Monperrus will present Spoon, a metaprogramming library that enables you to transform and analyze Java source code. Spoon provides a complete and fine-grained Java metamodel where any program element (classes, methods, fields, statements, expressions...) can be accessed both for reading and modification. Spoon takes as input source code and produces transformed source code ready to be compiled. Spoon can be integrated in Maven and Gradle. See https://github.com/INRIA/spoon/
…Under the spell of Leibniz's Dream
This month we'll be doing things slightly different and instead of a paper per se, Claudiu will present the historical context around ideas and references from Dijkstra's farewell lecture "Under the spell of Leibniz's Dream"*
* https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1298.html
…The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms
This week we welcome Erich Grunewald. Erich is a programmer at Futurice and a member of musical projects Mount Fog and Ape Finger of the Stars.
Intro:
This talk presents Godfried Toussaint’s influential paper “The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms”, which he begins with the following question. “What do African rhythms, spallation neutron source accelerators in nuclear physics, string theory in computer science, and an ancient algorithm described by Euclid have in common?”
The Paper can be downloaded from http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~godfried/publications/banff.pdf
…Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Analyzing Scientific Data
This month we welcome a guest from Helsinki: Juha-Matti Santala.
Juhis will present the paper "Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Analyzing Scientific Data" by William S. Cleveland and Robert McGill. The paper can be downloaded here: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/565d/843c2c0e60915709268ac4224894469d82d5.pdf
Intro:
Data Visualizations That Tell a Story
It's easy to make charts nowadays. However, just throwing in some data and selecting a chart type won't fly far. William Cleveland's research from the 80s in the field of graphical perception and data visualization is a great starting point for people who want to make charts that are understandable and optimal in conveying the message to the reader.
In my talk, I'll be walking you through the important pieces of Cleveland’s paper Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Ana…
Merkle-CRDTs
This month should be really exciting! We'll be learning about the paper "Merkle-CRDTs" presented by one of its authors, Héctor Sanjuán!
From the abstract:
"Merkle-DAG-backed CRDTs have been used to build some dis- tributed applications on top of the Interplanetary File System (IPFS). In this paper we study Merkle-DAGs as transport and persistence layer for CRDT data types, coining the term Merkle-CRDTs and providing an overview of the different concepts, properties, advantages and lim- itations involved. We show how Merkle-CRDTs have the potential to greatly simplify the design and implementation of convergent data types in systems with weak messaging layer guarantees and a poten- tially large number of replicas."
Come join us!
https://hector.link/presentations/merkle-crdts/merkle-crdts.pdf
…Intellectual Property, Lessig and the EU Copyright Directive
In this month's meetup, we'll do something slightly different. We'll use as our source material a chapter from Lawrence Lessig's Code 2.0 and take it as a starting point for discussing the new EU Copyright Directive.
You can find the book here http://codev2.cc/download+remix/Lessig-Codev2.pdf and we'll be discussing Chapter 10 "Intellectual Property".
…Automatically RESTful Web Applications
Greetings friends and neighbors!
Jesse will be presenting and leading discussion on Jay McCarthy's 2009 paper Automatically RESTful Web Applications. From the abstract:
"Continuation-based Web servers provide distinct advantages over traditional Web application development: expressive power and modularity. This power leads to fewer errors and more interesting applications. Furthermore, these Web servers are more than prototypes; they are used in some real commercial applications. Unfortunately, they pay a heavy price for the additional power in the form of lack of scalability.
"We fix this key problem with a modular program transformation that produces scalable, continuation-based Web programs based on the REST architecture. Our programs use the same features as non-scalable, continuation-based Web programs, so we do not sacrifice expressive power for performance. In particular, we allow continuation marks in Web programs. Our system uses 10 percent (or less) of…
A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages
Nikolas Martens will be presenting "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages" by Alan Kay ( http://www.vpri.org/pdf/hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf ).
From the abstract:
"This note speculates about the emergency of personal, portable information manipulators and their effects when used by both children and adults. Although it should be read as science fiction, current trends in miniaturization and price reduction almost guarantee that many of the notions discussed will actually happen in the near future."
Please join us on January 24th and find out if Kay was right!
…On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services
Vivek will be presenting On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services by James Hamilton.
From the introduction:
"This paper summarizes a set of best practices for designing and developing operations-friendly services. Designing and deploying high-scale services is a rapidly evolving subject area and, consequently, any list of best practices will likely grow and morph over time. Our aim is to help others
1. deliver operations-friendly services quickly and
2. avoid the early morning phone calls and meet- ings with unhappy customers that non-opera-
tions-friendly services tend to yield."
The paper can be found here: https://mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf
Please join us!
…Operationalizing Conflict & Cooperation between Automated Software Agents [...]
Lusy will be presenting the paper Operationalizing Conflict and Cooperation between Automated Software Agents in Wikipedia: A Replication and Expansion of “Even Good Bots Fight".
You can find this paper here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Operationalizing-conflict-bots-wikipedia-cscw-preprint.pdf
The paper is a very nice example of thorough methodology and critical approach to data and documenting the whole research process.
…On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
Knut will present the paper "On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules" by David L Parnas, published in 1971.
A summary can be found here:
https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/05/on-the-criteria-to-be-used-in-decomposing-systems-into-modules/
The paper can be found here: https://www.win.tue.nl/~wstomv/edu/2ip30/references/criteria_for_modularization.pdf
…PWL Bln: The Synthesis of Complex Audio Spectra by Means of Frequency Modulation
This month Haskell will present "The Synthesis of Complex Audio Spectra by Means of Frequency Modulation" by J.M. Chowning. Originally published in 1973 by the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, this paper describes a method of sound synthesis referred to as FM synthesis that can be used to create interesting timbres of sound by modulating an audible carrier wave with another high frequency wave or a series of these waves. This is rather much of an oversimplification and there's a fair amount of jargon and abstraction that has grown up around these ideas.
FM Synthesis has been fairly popular lately amongst music instrument manufacturers and musicians, but it has a long history and was also the primary method of synthesizing sounds in many older computer games and a lot of specialized hardware used to exist for just this purpose.
Come join us to talk about this paper and FM synthesis- it's pretty rad. Food will be provided.
Experiments on the mechanization of game-learning
• What we'll do
Knut will be presenting the paper "Experiments on the mechanization of game-learning
Part I. Characterization of the model and its parameters" authored by Donald Michie and published in an 1963 issue of The Computer Journal.
View the abstract and download the full contents here: https://academic.oup.com/comjnl/article/6/3/232/360077
• What to bring
• Important to know
…The Correctness-Security Gap in Compiler Optimization
Alex Denisov will be presenting "The Correctness-Security Gap in Compiler Optimization" by Vijay D’Silva, Mathias Payer, and Dawn Song.
Link to the paper: https://nebelwelt.net/publications/files/15LangSec.pdf
There will be food and drink at the meetup this time! Location, food and drink sponsored by METRO. Thanks METRO!
…Papers We Will Love & A Model for Reasoning About JavaScript Promises
For an introduction, Martin Kavalar will be discussing how dynamic mediums can improve scientific publishing in a talk titled "Papers We Will Love."
The second presentation at this month's meetup will be about the paper "A Model for Reasoning About JavaScript Promises" by Magnus Madsen, Ondrej Lhotak, and Frank Tip. The paper is available here: http://www.franktip.org/pubs/oopsla2017promises.pdf and a brief summary/write-up can be found here: https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/11/10/a-model-for-reasoning-about-javascript-promises/
If you are interested in presenting a paper, please get in touch, because we'll have another meeting next month as well. Thanks!
Food sponsors also welcome. :)
…#2 => Programming concepts pioneered by McCarthy's 1960 paper on Lisp
At this Papers We Love Berlin Meetup we will have Marijn Haverbeke (https://twitter.com/marijnjh) presenting the original Lisp paper "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine" by John McCarthy.
PDF: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf
Thanks to Soundcloud for hosting this event!
Abstract:
There are works that, rather than continuing in an existing research tradition, invent a whole new direction. John McCarthy's original paper on Lisp is definitely one such work. It obviously set the stage for the various Lisps and Lisp-inspired languages, but it also pioneered a number of concepts, ranging from garbage collection to the call stack, that are deeply ingrained in today's programming reality. This talk will…
#1 => Erik Michaels-Ober on Soft Typing
For the very first Papers We Love Berlin Meetup, we will have Erik Michaels-Ober from SoundCloud presenting the paper Soft Typing by Robert Cartwright and Mike Fagan.
This is particularly interesting for Rubyists, because Ruby 3.0 might ship with such a type system.
Abstract:
This paper presents a soft type systems that retains the expressiveness of dynamic typing, but offers the early error detection and improved optimization capabilities of static typing. The key idea underlying soft typing is that a type checker need not reject programs containing "ill-typed" phrases. Instead, the type checker can insert explicit run-time checks, transforming "ill-typed" programs into type-correct ones.