Talk

The classic max-flow min-cut theorem states that in a network with one source and one sink, the amount of information that can be sent from the source to the sink is equal to the minimum capacity of a set of edges separating the source from the sink.

In dealing with big data, we often need to look at a small summary to get the big picture. Over recent years, many new techniques have been developed which allow important properties of large distributions to be extracted from compact and easy-to-build summaries.

Enterprise storage is an $30 billion a year industry dominated by spinning disks. Flash storage is poised to take a large chunk of the market, having grown significantly in capacity and production, driven by consumer electronics.

Web usage on mobile devices is exploding, and in many countries, mobile devices are the predominant means of accessing the Internet. But the mobile web is still incredibly slow; clearly the web was not designed for mobile networks.

Due to advances in semiconductor and communications technology, we are steadily moving towards a world filled with a plethora of embedded sensing devices as well as "virtual" sensors within devices -- with the potential to monitor the environment and to react to or even anticipate changes.

Software-defined networking (SDN) aims to provide a well-defined programming and automation interface to network devices.

Policymakers, ISPs, and users are increasingly interested in studying the performance of Internet access links. This talk will first present our findings on the the accuracy and overhead of state-of-the-art available bandwidth estimation tools to measure residential broadband throughput.

Prediction markets are emerging as a powerful and accurate method of aggregating information from populations of experts (and non-experts). Traders in prediction markets are incentivized to reveal their information through buying and selling "securities" for events such as "Romney to win Florida".

Energy and thermal management in the cloud has become a primary concern as the global footprint of large-scale compute systems reaches significant levels, and continues to increase with impressive pace, following the ever-increasing compute demand and data explosion.

Jane Street will be hosting a discussion about the design and architecture of Nile, a persistent message queue intended to be used as a core component in a heterogeneous environment of distributed applications, designed for scalability, redundancy, reliable failover, low latency, and high throughput