**Note that this meetup has MOVED to Datadog at 620 8th Ave (across from Port Authority)!
You _must_ have your real name on your account _and_ provide a photo ID at the entrance to attend, per the venue rules.**
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We've got a special edition of Papers We Love tonight as we round up a gang of speakers for Lightning Talks! Each speakers will present for 15 - 20m on a topic dear to their heart related to computers. We're still filling out the list of talks but you can see some of them below:
* Talk: Approximation Algorithms for Lawn Mowing & Milling - http://www.ams.sunysb.edu/~jsbm/papers/lawn-mow-cgta.pdf
Many manufacturing processes, from milling, to embroidery, to mowing a lawn, involve filling in a polygon with a brush-like object, such as a drill, thread, or a lawn mower, with minimal overlap. The problem can be formalized as finding a tour over the points within the shape at a regular interval (a grid-graph), which is NP hard because finding a Hamiltonian circuit in grid-graphs is NP hard. Considering that a polygon with n edges & N interior points, the paper presents an approximation algorithm that has a tour that is at most 6N/5 steps long in O(n) time using a set of rules for how to move in a square grid.
Catherine Holloway almost completed a PhD in experimental quantum optics at the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing but dropped out to work at a few robotics & quantum computing startups. She currently lives in Manhattan & is an SRE at Bloomberg.
* Talk: Branch Prediction & the Performance of Interpreters - Don't Trust Folklore (Erven Rohou, Bharath Narasimha Swamy, Andr Seznec, 2015). https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01100647/document
In this lightning talk, we'll see how CPU branch prediction hardware works & what the implications are for making interpreted languages fast. We'll follow the paper as it tells the story of the silent rise & fall of an important optimization for bytecode interpreters. Finally, we'll remind ourselves of some unpleasant facts about the way we write, maintain, & talk about software.
Max Marrone is a recent computer science graduate whose other interests include aviation & design. He aspires to someday be able to transfer laundry from the washer to the dryer without accidentally dropping wet clothing all over the dirty floor
* Talk: Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them: An Experimental Study of DRAM Disturbance Errors (Yoongu Kim, Ross Daly, Jeremie Kim, Chris Fallin, Ji Hye Lee, Donghyuk Lee, Chris Wilkerson, Konrad Lai, Onur Mutlu) - http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~yoonguk/papers/kim-isca14.pdf
Modern computers rely on fast & more compact DRAM for performance. While the stated specifications have advanced over time, manufacturers have had to perform ever greater tricks to ensure reliability as circuits become smaller & more densely packed. This has created an environment where DRAM failures are not well understood in day to day usage. This paper explores memory failures in practice, the consequences of controlled failures, & creates the groundwork for the "Rowhammer" series of exploits.
Andrew Gross graduated with a degree in Applied Physics & the knowledge that he did not want to pursue a career in it. He currently lives in Queens & works as a Staff Engineer at YipitData.
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Venue:
Datadog
620 8th Ave, 45th Floor
New York, NY 10018 USA
7pm
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**Talks are always recorded on video & released ~2 weeks after the meetup.**
We hope that you'll read some of the papers & references before the meetup, but don't stress if you can't. If you have any questions, thoughts, or related information, please visit #pwlnyc (https://paperswelove.slack.com/messages/pwlnyc/) on slack (http://papersweloveslack.herokuapp.com/), our GitHub repository (https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love), or add to the discussion on this event's thread.
