QAnon is a conspiracy theory born in the underbelly of the internet. While easy to disprove, these cryptic ideas captured the minds of many people and (in part) paved the way to the 2021 storming of the US Capital. This is a contemporary conspiracy which came into existence and grew in a very digital way. This makes it possible for researchers to study this phenomenon in a way not accessible in previous conspiracy theories of similar popularity. This episode is not so much a debunking of this de...
Mar 22, 2021•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Karthick Shankar, Masters Student at Carnegie Mellon University, and Somali Chaterji, Assistant Professor at Purdue University, join us today to discuss the paper "JANUS: Benchmarking Commercial and Open-Source Cloud and Edge Platforms for Object and Anomaly Detection Workloads" Works Mentioned: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9284314 “JANUS: Benchmarking Commercial and Open-Source Cloud and Edge Platforms for Object and Anomaly Detection Workloads.” by: Karthick Shankar, Pengcheng...
Mar 15, 2021•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hal Ashton, a PhD student from the University College of London, joins us today to discuss a recent work Causal Campbell-Goodhart’s law and Reinforcement Learning. "Only buy honey from a local producer." - Hal Ashton Works Mentioned: “Causal Campbell-Goodhart’s law and Reinforcement Learning” by Hal AshtonBook “The Book of Why” by Judea PearlPaper Thanks to our sponsor! When your business is ready to make that next hire, find the right person with LinkedIn Jobs. Just visit LinkedIn.com/DATASKEPT...
Mar 05, 2021•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Yuqi Ouyang, in his second year of PhD study at the University of Warwick in England, joins us today to discuss his work “Video Anomaly Detection by Estimating Likelihood of Representations.” Works Mentioned: Video Anomaly Detection by Estimating Likelihood of Representations https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.01468 by: Yuqi Ouyang, Victor Sanchez...
Mar 01, 2021•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nirupam Gupta, a Computer Science Post Doctoral Researcher at EDFL University in Switzerland, joins us today to discuss his work “Byzantine Fault-Tolerance in Peer-to-Peer Distributed Gradient-Descent.” Works Mentioned: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.12316 Byzantine Fault-Tolerance in Peer-to-Peer Distributed Gradient-Descent by Nirupam Gupta and Nitin H. Vaidya Conference Details: https://georgetown.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0sc-2grDwjEtfnLI0zPnN-GwkDvJdaOxXF...
Feb 22, 2021•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mikko Lauri , Post Doctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg, Germany, comes on the show today to discuss the work Information Gathering in Decentralized POMDPs by Policy Graph Improvements . Follow Mikko: @mikko_lauri Github https://laurimi.github.io/...
Feb 15, 2021•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Balaji Arun, a PhD Student in the Systems of Software Research Group at Virginia Tech, joins us today to discuss his research of distributed systems through the paper “Taming the Contention in Consensus-based Distributed Systems.” Works Mentioned “Taming the Contention in Consensus-based Distributed Systems” by Balaji Arun, Sebastiano Peluso, Roberto Palmieri, Giuliano Losa, and Binoy Ravindran https://www.ssrg.ece.vt.edu/papers/tdsc20-author-version.pdf “Fast Paxos” by Leslie Lamport https://li...
Feb 05, 2021•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Maartje ter Hoeve, PhD Student at the University of Amsterdam, joins us today to discuss her research in automated summarization through the paper “What Makes a Good Summary? Reconsidering the Focus of Automatic Summarization.” Works Mentioned “What Makes a Good Summary? Reconsidering the Focus of Automatic Summarization.” by Maartje der Hoeve, Juilia Kiseleva, and Maarten de Rijke Contact Email: m.a.terhoeve@uva.nl Twitter: https://twitter.com/maartjeterhoeve Website: https://maartjeth.github.i...
Jan 29, 2021•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Brian Brubach, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Wellesley College, joins us today to discuss his work “Meddling Metrics: the Effects of Measuring and Constraining Partisan Gerrymandering on Voter Incentives". WORKS MENTIONED: Meddling Metrics: the Effects of Measuring and Constraining Partisan Gerrymandering on Voter Incentives by Brian Brubach, Aravind Srinivasan, and Shawn Zhao...
Jan 22, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Aside from victory questions like “can black force a checkmate on white in 5 moves?” many novel questions can be asked about a game of chess. Some questions are trivial (e.g. “How many pieces does white have?") while more computationally challenging questions can contribute interesting results in computational complexity theory. In this episode, Josh Brunner, Master's student in Theoretical Computer Science at MIT, joins us to discuss his recent paper Complexity of Retrograde and Helpmate Chess ...
Jan 15, 2021•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Eil Goldweber, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, comes on today to share his work in applying formal verification to systems and a modification to the Paxos protocol discussed in the paper Significance on Consecutive Ballots in Paxos . Works Mentioned : Previous Episode on Paxos https://dataskeptic.com/blog/episodes/2020/distributed-consensus Paper: On the Significance on Consecutive Ballots in Paxos by: Eli Goldweber, Nuda Zhang, and Manos Kapritsos Thanks to our sponsor: Nord V...
Jan 11, 2021•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today on the show we have Adrian Martin, a Post-doctoral researcher from the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He comes on the show today to discuss his research from the paper “ Convolutional Neural Networks can be Deceived by Visual Illusions .” Works Mentioned in Paper: “ Convolutional Neural Networks can be Decieved by Visual Illusions .” by Alexander Gomez-Villa, Adrian Martin, Javier Vazquez-Corral, and Marcelo Bertalmio Examples: Snake Illusions https://www.illusionsindex.or...
Jan 01, 2021•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Have you ever wanted to hear what an earthquake sounds like? Today on the show we have Omkar Ranadive, Computer Science Masters student at NorthWestern University, who collaborates with Suzan van der Lee, an Earth and Planetary Sciences professor at Northwestern University, on the crowd-sourcing project Earthquake Detective. Email Links: Suzan: suzan@earth.northwestern.edu Omkar: omkar.ranadive@u.northwestern.edu Works Mentioned: Paper: Applying Machine Learning to Crowd-sourced Data from Earthq...
Dec 25, 2020•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is a desirable property in a distributed computing environment. BFT means the system can survive the loss of nodes and nodes becoming unreliable. There are many different protocols for achieving BFT, though not all options can scale to large network sizes. Ted Yin joins us to explain BFT, survey the wide variety of protocols, and share details about HotStuff ....
Dec 22, 2020•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kyle shared some initial reactions to the announcement about Alpha Fold 2's celebrated performance in the CASP14 prediction. By many accounts, this exciting result means protein folding is now a solved problem. Thanks to our sponsors! Brilliant is a great last-minute gift idea! Give access to 60 + interactive courses including Quantum Computing and Group Theory. There's something for everyone at Brilliant. They have award-winning courses, taught by teachers, researchers and professionals from MI...
Dec 11, 2020•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Above all, everyone wants voting to be fair. What does fair mean and how can we measure it? Kenneth Arrow posited a simple set of conditions that one would certainly desire in a voting system. For example, unanimity - if everyone picks candidate A, then A should win! Yet surprisingly, under a few basic assumptions, this theorem demonstrates that no voting system exists which can satisfy all the criteria. This episode is a discussion about the structure of the proof and some of its implications. ...
Dec 04, 2020•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the public (or at least those with Twitter accounts) are sharing their personal opinions about mask-wearing via Twitter. What does this data tell us about public opinion? How does it vary by demographic? What, if anything, can make people change their minds? Today we speak to, Neil Yeung and Jonathan Lai, Undergraduate students in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, and Professor of Computer Science, Jiebo-Luoto to discuss their ...
Nov 27, 2020•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Niclas Boehmer, second year PhD student at Berlin Institute of Technology, comes on today to discuss the computational complexity of bribery in elections through the paper “On the Robustness of Winners: Counting Briberies in Elections.” Links Mentioned: https://www.akt.tu-berlin.de/menue/team/boehmer_niclas/ Works Mentioned: “On the Robustness of Winners: Counting Briberies in Elections.” by Niclas Boehmer, Robert Bredereck, Piotr Faliszewski. Rolf Niedermier Thanks to our sponsors: Springboard ...
Nov 20, 2020•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Clement Fung, a Societal Computing PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, discusses his research in security of machine learning systems and a defense against targeted sybil-based poisoning called FoolsGold. Works Mentioned: The Limitations of Federated Learning in Sybil Settings Twitter: @clemfung Website: https://clementfung.github.io/ Thanks to our sponsors: Brilliant - Online learning platform. Check out Geometry Fundamentals! Visit Brilliant.org/dataskeptic for 20% off Brilliant Premium...
Nov 13, 2020•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Simson Garfinkel, Senior Computer Scientist for Confidentiality and Data Access at the US Census Bureau, discusses his work modernizing the Census Bureau disclosure avoidance system from private to public disclosure avoidance techniques using differential privacy. Some of the discussion revolves around the topics in the paper Randomness Concerns When Deploying Differential Privacy . WORKS MENTIONED: “ Calibrating Noise to Sensitivity in Private Data Analysis ” by Cynthia Dwork, Frank McSherry, K...
Nov 06, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Computer Science research fellow of Cambridge University, Heidi Howard discusses Paxos, Raft, and distributed consensus in distributed systems alongside with her work “Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?” She goes into detail about the leaders in Paxos and Raft and how The Raft Consensus Algorithm actually inspired her to pursue her PhD. Paxos vs Raft paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05074 Leslie Lamport paper “part-time Parliament” https://lamport.azurewebsites....
Oct 30, 2020•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Linhda joins Kyle today to talk through A.C.I.D. Compliance (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability). The presence of these four components can ensure that a database’s transaction is completed in a timely manner. Kyle uses examples such as google sheets, bank transactions, and even the game rummy cube. Thanks to this week's sponsors: Monday.com - Their Apps Challenge is underway and available at monday.com/dataskeptic Brilliant - Check out their Quantum Computing Course, I highly rec...
Oct 23, 2020•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Patrick Rosenstiel joins us to discuss the The National Popular Vote .
Oct 16, 2020•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Yudi Pawitan joins us to discuss his paper Defending the P-value .
Oct 12, 2020•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ivan Oransky joins us to discuss his work documenting the scientific peer-review process at retractionwatch.com .
Oct 05, 2020•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Derek Lim joins us to discuss the paper Expertise and Dynamics within Crowdsourced Musical Knowledge Curation: A Case Study of the Genius Platform .
Sep 21, 2020•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Neil Johnson joins us to discuss the paper The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views .
Sep 14, 2020•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mashbat Suzuki joins us to discuss the paper How Many Freemasons Are There? The Consensus Voting Mechanism in Metric Spaces . Check out Mashbat’s and many other great talks at the 13th Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT 2020)
Sep 07, 2020•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Steven Heilman joins us to discuss his paper Designing Stable Elections . For a general interest article, see: https://theconversation.com/the-electoral-college-is-surprisingly-vulnerable-to-popular-vote-changes-141104 Steven Heilman receives funding from the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation....
Aug 31, 2020•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sami Yousif joins us to discuss the paper The Illusion of Consensus: A Failure to Distinguish Between True and False Consensus . This work empirically explores how individuals evaluate consensus under different experimental conditions reviewing online news articles. More from Sami at samiyousif.org Link to survey mentioned by Daniel Kerrigan: https://forms.gle/TCdGem3WTUYEP31B8...
Aug 24, 2020•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
