Speaker: Dr. Tim Harris, Oracle Labs Cambridge Seminar Title: HiPEDS Seminar - Big graphs on big machines Abstract: Oracle's largest SPARC M7 system provides 4096 hardware threads spread over 16 sockets in one cache-coherent address space. I will talk about our experience tuning graph analytics workloads to run well on this system, and how we went from an implementation that stopped scaling... Read more »

Upcoming lecture by Raja Appuswamy, Postdoctoral Researcger in the DIAS lab at EPFL, on data management systems Abstract The design of data management systems has always been driven based on two aspects, namely, underlying hardware and applications requirements. The past few years have, however, witnessed dramatic changes in both these aspects. On the hardware front,... Read more »

HiPEDS CDT Seminar Series with Giorgio Orsi, Senior Research Scientist at Meltwater. Abstract: Data acquisition plays an important role in modern organisations and is a strategic business process for data-driven companies such as insurers, retailers, and search engines. Data acquisition processes range from manual data collection and purchase, to cheaper but often technically challenging methods... Read more »

Abstract: In 1987, Jim Gray and Gianfranco Putzolu introduced the five-minute rule for trading memory to reduce disk I/O using the then-current price-performance characteristics of DRAM and Hard Disk Drives (HDD). Since then, the five-minute rule has gained wide-spread acceptance as an important rule-of-thumb in data engineering. In the first part of this talk, we... Read more »

Abstract: Formal verification of software has finally started to become viable: we have examples of formally verified microkernels, realistic compilers, hypervisors etc. These are huge achievements and we can expect to see even more impressive results in the future but the correctness proofs depend on a number of assumptions about the Trusted Computing Base that... Read more »

Abstract: Large technology companies rely on collecting data from their users to understand their interests, and better customize the company's products. Increasingly, this must be done while preserving individual users' privacy.  Recently, techniques based on radomization and data sketching have been adopted to provide data collection protocols which optimize the privacy accuracy trade-off.  In this talk, I'll... Read more »

Abstract: I will present an overview of some of the open challenges and opportunities for structured data management that are especially relevant for today’s world of Big Data and the Cloud. In the second half of the talk, I will discuss in depth one of the opportunities - approximate query processing - and reflect on... Read more »

Abstract: Many new and exciting things are coming for TensorFlow, to be announced at the Developer Summit on 3/30 in Mountain View. Since this event will have just finished by the time I make it out the UK, I thought it'd be helpful to give a quick summary / overview of these new features and... Read more »

Abstract: What use is machine learning unless we can turn predictions into decisions? In this talk I'll explain how this idea motivates our strategy at PROWLER.io. I'll explain how different research teams at the company are attacking different parts of decision theory, and focus on outputs from the probabilistic modelling team. I'll show how probabilistic... Read more »

Title: Building Computer Vision Systems That Really Work Speaker: Andrew Fitzgibbon, Microsoft  Andrew Fitzgibbon has been shipping advanced computer vision systems for twenty years. In 1999, prize-winning research from Oxford University was spun out to become the Emmy-award-winning camera tracker “boujou”, which has been used to insert computer graphics into live-action footage in pretty much... Read more »