Zürich Chapter

Do you want to talk about a recent paper that you are excited about? Do you want to explain fundamental papers of your field to a wider audience? Do you want to (re-)discover important research works in computer science? Do you have this really cool paper you want to tell us about? Present the papers that you love, tell us about how you've implement them and use them, or simply listen and discuss!

We follow the Papers We Love Code of Conduct.

We keep a list of papers that we would like to talk about. Send us pull requests to add your own!

Chapter details

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Chapter Meetups

Frank McSherry - Skew Strikes Back: New Developments in [...] Join Algorithms

Date/Time: 2019-05-02 06:15pm Location: ETH Zürich / Zentrum / CAB G 51 - Zürich

We're really happy to have Frank McSherry as our speaker for our next meet up! Frank is well known for his work on Differential Privacy and on Timely Dataflow.

Frank is going to talk new developments in relational joins by guiding us through the excellent "Skew Strikes Back: New Developments in the Theory of Join Algorithms" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.3314v2.pdf)

This time we'll meet at ETH, like the old times, and you'll get to network and chat about research over pizza and beer!

Paper abstract:

Evaluating the relational join is one of the central algorithmic and most well-studied problems in database systems. A staggering number of variants have been considered including Block-Nested loop join, Hash-Join, Grace, Sort-merge for discussions of more modern issues). Commercial database engines use finely tuned join heuristics that take into account a wide variety of factors including the…

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Nikolas Göbel: Out of the tar pit

Date/Time: 2019-03-26 06:00pm Location: Google Zurich - Zürich

Papers We Love: Zürich is back!

We are grateful to Google for hosting us! Please make sure to RSVP here *and* sign up using the Google registration form (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeEi3pmNkS_Le4EMaWsCFyGkMm7JxBDfU2NmrIw1VpPMWgYJg/viewform) - you'll receive a visitor badge at the event. Please fill in the form BY MARCH 24TH.

Nikolas Göbel is going to talk software complexity by guiding us through a classic, "Out of the tar pit" by Ben Moseley and Peter Marks. (https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/design/out-of-the-tar-pit.pdf)

Here's Nikolas' abstract for the talk:

In 2006, Ben Moseley and Peter Marks explored something that many of us are familiar with: the creeping …

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Natallie Baikevich on Automatic Construction of Inlining Heuristics using ML

Date/Time: 2017-09-14 06:30pm Location: ETH Zurich / Zentrum / CAB H53 - Zürich

PWL Zürich returns from summer vacations with a compilers paper: Automatic Construction of Inlining Heuristics using Machine Learning by S. Kulkarni, J. Cavazos, C. Wimmer, D. Simon (2013) (pdf).

Method inlining is a very important but also dangerous compiler optimization: an inlining decision might lead to significant speedup or performance degradation and has to be constructed carefully. The paper compares various features and inlining techniques, in particular neuro-evolution. We will also discuss how having an idea about inlining traps and benefits might come useful in the "real-world", where not everybody is a compiler developer.

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Animesh Trivedi on Raft: In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm

Date/Time: 2017-06-29 06:30pm Location: ETH Zurich / Zentrum / CAB H 52 - Zürich

PWL: Zürich is back! Animesh Trivedi is going to tell us about Raft!

This time around we are going to discuss the Raft distributed consensus algorithm from Diego Ongaro and John Ousterhout. The paper was originally published at USENIX ATC'14 and was awarded the best paper. Since then, the algorithm has been a part of teaching at many universities, has had many open-sourced implementations in multiple languages, and has found its way into production-level codes. This instantaneous acceptance into the systems building community raises an interesting question about what makes Raft so approachable than in comparison to others options, most notably Paxos? I will present my impressions of the paper and what makes it an interesting read.

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The implementation of the Cilk-5 multithreaded language.

Date/Time: 2017-04-27 06:30pm Location: ETH Zurich / Zentrum / CAB G 52 - Zürich

This time we are going to talk about an older paper. Published in 1998 by Matteo Frigo, Charles E. Leiserson, and Keith H. Randall,  The implementation of the Cilk-5 multithreaded language (pdf)  is about expressing parallel programs and building a run-time system that efficiently executes them. The paper is strongly motivated by theory, but also very practical. Many of the techniques and approaches used in the paper are (I think) still relevant today.

Presenter: Kornilios Kourtis <kkourt _at_ kkourt _dot_ io>

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Naiad: A Timely Dataflow System

Date/Time: 2017-03-23 06:30pm Location: ETH Zurich / Zentrum / CAB H 52 - Zürich

I'm very excited for the first meetup of PWL: Zürich!

Andrea Lattuada will tell us all about Naiad: A Timely Dataflow System by Derek G. Murray, Frank McSherry, Rebecca Isaacs, Michael Isard, Paul Barham, and Martín Abadi.

This paper proposes a very powerful computational model for dataflow programming designed to minimise unnecessary synchronisation. The idea is to have a system that can be the foundation for various data-processing frameworks that can interoperate. There is an open-source implementation in rust (https://github.com/frankmcsherry/timely-dataflow) by one of the authors. It was awarded a best paper award at SOSP 2013.

Please RSVP, so that we have an idea of what to expect.

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