Isaiah Weiner on Self-Stabilizing Systems

​Main: Isaiah Weiner on Dijkstra's "Self-stabilizing Systems in Spite of Distributed Control"

​Abstract: The synchronization task between loosely coupled cyclic sequential processes (as can be distinguished in, for instance, operating systems) can be viewed as keeping the relation “the system is in a legitimate state” invariant. As a result, each individual process step that could possibly cause violation of that relation has to be preceded by a test deciding whether the process in question is allowed to proceed or has to be delayed. The resulting design is readily—and quite systematically—implemented if the different processes can be granted mutually exclusive access to a common store in which “the current system state” is recorded.

​Bio: As CTO of DATAMOB, Isaiah helps leading enterprise customers operate at the forefront of technology while saving money on infrastructure. Ask him about real-time distributed systems, fault injection mechanisms, and the world’s fastest filesystem.

​Mini: Kendall Willetts on "Opportunistic data structures with applications"

​Abstract: We address the issue of compressing and indexing data. We devise a data structure whose space occupancy is a function of the entropy of the underlying data set. We call the data structure opportunistic since its space occupancy is decreased when the input is compressible and this space reduction is achieved at no significant slowdown in the query performance...The result is an indexing tool which achieves sublinear space and sublinear query time complexity.

​Bio: Kendall is a data infrastructure engineer at Cardlytics. He previously developed the data platform for Zynga, worked on analytics and experimentation at Microsoft and Yammer, and audience estimation and delivery for Samsung Ads.