Utrecht

Utrecht chapter of Papers We Love

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.

There is a list of interesting papers in our GitHub repository. Feel free to open a PR if you would like a paper to be added.

Chapter details

Sign-up: Please RSVP for meetings via Meetup.com

Organizers: Adolfo Ochagavía, Arian van Putten and Laurens Duijvesteijn

Chapter Meetups

Why Functional Programming Matters

Date/Time: 2017-06-29 06:30pm Location: Bol.com - Utrecht

How should we structure complex and large software programs? How can we ensure they are modular and easy to maintain and reason about? Functional programming provides higher order functions and lazy evaluation. How can these features be used to write programs with these nice properties?

For this edition of Papers We Love, we are lucky to have João Pizani discuss a classic: John Hugues' "Why Functional Programming Matters".

Link to paper: https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/dat/miranda/whyfp90.pdf

Schedule

18:30 - Welcome with food and drinks 
19:00 - Opening
19:10 - Talk
20:00 - Announcements
21:00 - Fin

Talk Abstract

John Hugues' paper "Why Functional Programming Matters" was not the first FP (Functional Pogramming) paper that I read, but …

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Games and Ray Tracing

Date/Time: 2017-02-16 07:00pm Location: Infi - Utrecht

What does it take to generate realistic scenes in a game? What are the trade-offs faced by game studios when implementing algorithms to this end? Have there been any fundamental breakthroughs in recent years regarding scene rendering? This edition of Papers We Love will answer these and more questions. Jacco Bikker will tell us about his adventures with ray tracing and how a Ph.D. dissertation lured him from game programming to the academic world.

You can check out the following sources to prepare for the meetup:

• Ingo Wald: Realtime Ray Tracing and Interactive Global Illumination, Ph.D. thesis, 2004, Computer Graphics Group, Saarland University.

• Jacco Bikker: Real-time Ray Tracing through the Eyes of a Game Developer, RT '07 Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Interactive Ra…

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QuickCheck: a lightweight tool for random testing Haskell programs

Date/Time: 2016-12-12 07:00pm Location: The Hyve - Utrecht

Tired of writing unit tests by hand? Ever wondered if you could let the computer do that for you? Then this edition of Papers We Love is something that should get you excited! Wouter Swierstra will discuss QuickCheck, a library that helps you generate tests for your programs.

Find the paper here.

Title

QuickCheck: a lightweight tool for random testing Haskell programs

Abstract

QuickCheck is a tool which aids the Haskell programmer in formulating and testing properties of programs. It has been hugely successful and the underlying ideas have been ported to many different languages. In this talk, I want to present the original QuickCheck paper and say a bit about the field of research that it has sparked.

Speaker: Wouter Swierstra

Wouter Swierstra is a lecturer in the Software Technology group of the University of Utrecht. His PhD was on making programming languages with dependent …

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A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels

Date/Time: 2016-11-01 07:00pm Location: Channable - Utrecht

Crazy about concurrency, and love some linearizability? Then this edition of Papers We Love is something that should get you excited! Marco Rietveld will discuss all things ACID to give you a solid BASE of understanding about single node database systems.

Find the paper here.

Title

A Critique of ANSI SQL Isolation Levels

Abstract

ANSI SQL-92 defines Isolation Levels in terms of phenomena: Dirty Reads, Non-Repeatable Reads, and Phantoms. This paper shows that these phenomena and the ANSI SQL definitions fail to characterize several popular isolation levels, including the standard locking implementations of the levels. Investigating the ambiguities of the phenomena leads to clearer definitions; in addition new phenomena that better characterize isolation types are introduced. An important multiversion isolation type, Snapshot Isol…

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Meetup : TLA+ - a specification language for concurrent and distributed systems

Date/Time: 2016-09-19 07:00pm Location: Universiteit Utrecht, Marinus Ruppertgebouw, Zaal 136 - Utrecht

This is the second meetup of Papers we Love Utrecht. 

Behrooz Nobakht from HERE will give us a 30 minute presentation about TLA+, a specification language for concurrent and distributed systems. He will give an introduction to textbook examples of TLA+ and, if time allows, he will also show us real-world TLA+ specifications (e.g. the one for the raft consenus protocol).

We think it sounds very exciting and fits well with the last meetup's subject!

Links about the subject for ones who want to come prepared:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/tla/amazon.html

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Kickoff meetup: Paxos Made Simple

Date/Time: 2016-06-07 07:00pm Location: Universiteit Utrecht, Marinus Ruppertgebouw, Zaal 136 - Utrecht

This is the first meetup of Papers we Love Utrecht. We will discuss the Paxos Made Simple paper. For extra context you can also refer to Paxos Made Live and The Part-Time Parliament, but it is not strictly necessary.

Schedule
19:00 - Welcome
19:15 - Laurens Duijvesteijn will present the paper
20:00 - Discussion + social

This meetup is the first in a series about distributed systems. Possible future topics are:
* <a>Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed­ Database</a>
Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store
* The Raft consens…

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