- change - Mailing Lists

Re: [change] Systems and Networking Talks this week
by Tom Anderson 12 Apr '18

12 Apr '18

Revised, now with Ihsan's schedule and abstract. ---- With NSDI being local, we have a number of talks queued up this week, and most of the visitors will have time after/before to meet with us. Please sign up! Note that several of the talks have non-standard start times. Abstracts collected below. Wednesday, CSE 305, 1:30pm Vijay Chidambaram, UT Austin PebblesDB: Building Key-Value Stores Using Fragmented Log-Structured Merge Trees https://reserve.cs.washington.edu/visitor/week.php?year=2018 &month=04&day=11&room=3050&area=5 Thursday, CSE 305, 11am Mothy Roscoe, ETH Zurich Enzian: Research Computer https://reserve.cs.washington.edu/visitor/week.php?year=2018 &month=4&day=8&area=5&room=3080 Thursday, CSE 305, 12pm Ihsan Qazi, LUMS Understanding Internet Access in the Developing World https://reserve.cs.washington.edu/visitor/week.php?year=2018 &month=04&day=12&area=5&room=3113 Friday, CSE 305, 12:00pm Keith Winstein, Stanford Tiny Functions for Codecs, Compilation, and (maybe) Everything https://reserve.cs.washington.edu/visitor/week.php?year=2018 &month=4&day=8&area=5&room=3103 ---- PebblesDB: Building Key-Value Stores Using Fragmented Log-Structured Merge Trees Key-value stores such as LevelDB and RocksDB have become a fundamental part of the systems infrastructure. However, these stores suffer from high write amplification: for example, 45 GB of data written to RocksDB results in 1.8 TB (28x) written to storage. In this talk, I show that the write amplification problem is fundamental to the Log-Structured Merge Trees data structure that underlies these stores. I present a novel data structure that is inspired by Skip Lists, termed Fragmented Log-Structured Merge Trees (FLSM). FLSM introduces the notion of guards to organize logs, and avoids rewriting data in the same level. I will describe PebblesDB, a new key-value store that we built by modifying HyperLevelDB to use the FLSM data structure. I will briefly present our evaluation which shows that PebblesDB increases write throughput by 6.7x (compared to RocksDB and LevelDB) while simultaneously reducing write amplification by 2.4-3x. PebblesDB is open-source (https://github.com/utsaslab/pebblesdb) and I hope to convince some of you to incorporate it into new systems you build :) Enzian: Research Computer Academic research in rack-scale and datacenter computing today is hamstrung by lack of hardware. Cloud providers and hardware vendors build custom accelerators, interconnects, and networks for commercially important workloads, but university researchers are stuck with commodity, off-the-shelf parts. Enzian is a research computer developed at ETH Zurich in collaboration with Cavium and Xilinx which addresses this problem. An Enzian board consists of a server-class ARMv8 SoC tightly coupled and coherent with a large FPGA (eliminating PCIe), with about 0.5 TB DDR4 and about 600 Gb/s of network I/O either to the CPU (over Ethernet) or directly to the FPGA (potentially over custom protocols). Enzian runs both Barrelfish and Linux operating systems. Many Enzian boards can be connected in a rack-scale machine (either with or without a discrete switch), and the design is intended to allow many different research use-cases: zero-overhead run-time verification of software invariants, novel interconnect protocols for remote memory access, hardware enforcement of access control in a large machine, high-performance streaming analytics using a combination of software and configurable hardware, and much more. By providing a powerful and flexible platform for computer systems research, Enzian aims to enable more relevant and far-reaching work on future compute platforms. Understanding Internet Access in the Developing World In this talk, I will present my recent research on Internet access in developing countries. In the first half of my talk, I will present a study on the characteristics of mobile devices in developing regions. Using a dataset of 0.5 million subscribers from one of the largest cellular operators in Pakistan, I will present an analysis of cell phones being used based on different features (e.g., CPU, memory, and cellular interface). Our analysis reveals potential device-level bottlenecks for Internet access, which can inform infrastructure design for improving mobile web performance. (This work appeared in ACM IMC 2016) Another accessibility challenge in developing countries is the rise in Internet censorship events, which can have a substantial impact on various stakeholders in the Internet ecosystem (e.g., users, content providers, ISPs, and advertisers). In the second half of my talk, I will discuss how Internet censorship poses an economic threat to online advertising, which plays an essential role in enabling the free Web by allowing publishers to monetize their services. Then I will describe a system we designed that enables relevant ads while retaining the effectiveness of censorship resistance tools (e.g., Tor). (This work appeared in ACM HotNets 2017) Tiny Functions for Codes, Compilation, and (maybe) Soon Everything Networks, applications, and media codecs frequently treat one another as strangers. By expressing large systems as compositions of small, pure functions, we've found it's possible to achieve tighter couplings between these components, improving performance without giving up modularity or the ability to debug. I'll discuss our experience with systems that demonstrate this basic idea: ExCamera (NSDI 2017) parallelizes video encoding into thousands of tiny tasks, each handling a fraction of a second of video, much shorter than the interval between key frames, and executing in parallel on AWS Lambda. This was the first system to demonstrate "burst-parallel" thousands-way computation on functions-as-a-service infrastructure. Salsify (NSDI 2018) is a low-latency network video system that uses a purely functional video codec to explore execution paths of the encoder without committing to them, allowing it to closely match the capacity estimates from a video-aware transport protocol. This architecture outperforms more loosely-coupled applications -- Skype, Facetime, Hangouts, WebRTC -- in delay and visual quality, and suggests that while improvements in video codecs may have reached the point of diminishing returns, video systems still have low-hanging fruit. Lepton (NSDI 2017) uses a purely functional JPEG/VP8 transcoder to compress images in parallel across a distributed network filesystem with arbitrary block boundaries. This free-software system is in production at Dropbox and has compressed, by 23%, more than 200 petabytes of user JPEGs. Based on our experience, we propose an intermediate representation for interactive lambda computing, called cloud "thunks" -- stateless closures that describe their data-dependencies by content-hash, separating the specification of an algorithm from its schedule and execution. We have created a tool that extracts this IR from off-the-shelf software build systems, letting the user treat a FaaS service like a 5,000-core build farm with global memoization of results. Expressing systems and protocols as compositions of small, pure functions has the potential to lead to a wave of "general-purpose" lambda computing, permitting us to transform everyday time-consuming operations into large numbers of functions executing with massive parallelism for short durations in the cloud.

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Mothy Roscoe and Ihsan Qazi Talks
by Justin Chan 11 Apr '18

11 Apr '18

Reminder that Mothy Roscoe and Ihsan Qazi will be giving talks tomorrow. Please sign up to meet with them! Thursday, CSE 305, 11am Mothy Roscoe, ETH Zurich Enzian: Research Computer https://reserve.cs.washington.edu/visitor/week.php?year= 2018&month=4&day=8&area=5&room=3080 Thursday, CSE 305, 12pm Ihsan Qazi, LUMS Understanding Internet Access in the Developing World https://reserve.cs.washington.edu/visitor/week.php?year=2018 &month=04&day=12&area=5&room=3113 ------ Enzian: Research Computer Academic research in rack-scale and datacenter computing today is hamstrung by lack of hardware. Cloud providers and hardware vendors build custom accelerators, interconnects, and networks for commercially important workloads, but university researchers are stuck with commodity, off-the-shelf parts. Enzian is a research computer developed at ETH Zurich in collaboration with Cavium and Xilinx which addresses this problem. An Enzian board consists of a server-class ARMv8 SoC tightly coupled and coherent with a large FPGA (eliminating PCIe), with about 0.5 TB DDR4 and about 600 Gb/s of network I/O either to the CPU (over Ethernet) or directly to the FPGA (potentially over custom protocols). Enzian runs both Barrelfish and Linux operating systems. Many Enzian boards can be connected in a rack-scale machine (either with or without a discrete switch), and the design is intended to allow many different research use-cases: zero-overhead run-time verification of software invariants, novel interconnect protocols for remote memory access, hardware enforcement of access control in a large machine, high-performance streaming analytics using a combination of software and configurable hardware, and much more. By providing a powerful and flexible platform for computer systems research, Enzian aims to enable more relevant and far-reaching work on future compute platforms. Understanding Internet Access in the Developing World In this talk, I will present my recent research on Internet access in developing countries. In the first half of my talk, I will present a study on the characteristics of mobile devices in developing regions. Using a dataset of 0.5 million subscribers from one of the largest cellular operators in Pakistan, I will present an analysis of cell phones being used based on different features (e.g., CPU, memory, and cellular interface). Our analysis reveals potential device-level bottlenecks for Internet access, which can inform infrastructure design for improving mobile web performance. (This work appeared in ACM IMC 2016) Another accessibility challenge in developing countries is the rise in Internet censorship events, which can have a substantial impact on various stakeholders in the Internet ecosystem (e.g., users, content providers, ISPs, and advertisers). In the second half of my talk, I will discuss how Internet censorship poses an economic threat to online advertising, which plays an essential role in enabling the free Web by allowing publishers to monetize their services. Then I will describe a system we designed that enables relevant ads while retaining the effectiveness of censorship resistance tools (e.g., Tor). (This work appeared in ACM HotNets 2017)

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Tomorrow: data ethics discussion at Data Science Studies meeting
by Anissa Tanweer 10 Apr '18

10 Apr '18

*Please join us in the Data Science Studio (6th Floor of the Physics and Astronomy Tower <http://www.washington.edu/maps/#!/pat>) on Wednesday, April 11th from 2:30-3:30 pm for a discussion seminar about ethics in data science. Harm and beyond: What the data science community is doing to address ethical concerns … and why it’s necessary but insufficientIn recent years, it has become increasingly hard to ignore the propensity for data-intensive computational technologies to do harm by violating privacy, codifying bias, and facilitating malfeasance. In this session, Bernease Herman <http://www.berneaseherman.com/>, a data scientist who specializes in interpretable machine learning, will help us understand recent developments in data science tools, techniques, and norms that address some of these concerns. From algorithmic audits to differential privacy to statistical definitions of fairness, Bernease will explain what these approaches are capable of doing, and what their limitations are. Then, Anna Lauren Hoffman <http://annaeveryday.com/>, a scholar of technology, culture and ethics, will help us see why all those developments are necessary, but insufficient. Anna looks beyond the materialization of specific harms and invites us to think more broadly about how the underlying logics of data-intensive computational systems perpetuate cultural violences against marginalized communities. At the bottom of this email, you’ll find more detailed previews of their talks. As usual, we’ll reserve a decent chunk of the hour for a group discussion following the presentation. Hope to see you there!AnissaTalk by Bernease HermanCountering Harm: Computational Approaches to a More Ethical Data Science Bernease Herman will give an accessible primer for select computational methods popular in the Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning (FATML) community that address data science ethics. She'll present advantages, disadvantages, and current efficacy of each method as practiced today.Talk by Anna Lauren HoffmanAmplifying Harm: When Data, Algorithms, and Cultural Violence Collide Many conversations around data and discrimination focus on problems of biased datasets or unfair algorithms that produce unjust material outcomes. But we also need better ways of grappling with cultural violences - that is, discursive and symbolic harms reproduced and amplified by researchers. Hoffmann argues that these harms are not secondary or even concurrent with other forms of discrimination; rather, they are foundational, as they create the social conditions against which other harms can occur. Just like physical violence in the real world, this kind of violence - dubbed ‘data violence’ - occurs as the result of choices that underwrite other harmful or even fatal outcomes produced by data-driven, algorithmically-mediated systems.*

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Change Seminar TODAY 12-1 Room EEB 037 Lunch Provided, Beth Kelko
by Lia Golden 10 Apr '18

10 Apr '18

Hi All, This is a friendly reminder for our Change seminar today, 12-1pm, where we will have the pleasure of hearing Beth Kelko speak about the process of building and launching Shift Labs, a company that aims to create low cost medical devices for austere environments. Thank you all for your time and we look forward to seeing to you today! Best, Your Change Seminar Team [cid:35754bed-94f1-4ae9-9e4e-0e3712b7e341] -- Lia M. Golden DNP, BSN, RN International Nursing Program (INP) Director Assistant Director of Nursing Services at UW INTERSECT University of Washington Medical Center http://www.inp.washington.edu

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Fwd: Consultancy opportunity: I-TECH Zimbabwe data-management system review
by Kurtis Heimerl 10 Apr '18

10 Apr '18

The International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH), housed in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington, is seeking short-term consultant(s) to: · Conduct a review of the program monitoring and reporting system for its PEPFAR-funded HIV testing and treatment program in Zimbabwe and to make recommendations to improve the system. · Conduct a review of a tablet-based mobile application that collects aggregate- and individual-level HIV-related data in health facilities in Zimbabwe. Interested individuals can apply for one or both of these consultancy opportunities. Please send all materials before April 20, 2018 to Marleyse Borchard: borchard(a)uw.edu Please address technical questions to Dr. Stefan Wiktor: wiktors(a)uw.edu Professor, Department of Global Health, University of Washington, Seattle WA, USA Technical Advisor, HIV Testing and Treatment Program, I-TECH Zimbabwe Nancy Puttkammer, MPH, PhD Research and Evaluation Advisor, International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH) Acting Assistant Professor, Department of Global Health, University of Washington 325 Ninth Ave, Box # 359932 Seattle, WA 98104 Tel: +1 (206) 616-5139 FAX: +1 (206) 221-4945 Skype ID: nancy.puttkammer Website: http://www.go2itech.org *I-TECH envisions a world in which all people have access to high quality, compassionate, and equitable health care.*

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Thursday 12:00 in CSE305: Ihsan Qazi - Understanding Internet Access in the Developing World
by Matthew Johnson 09 Apr '18

09 Apr '18

Understanding Internet Access in the Developing World Ihsan Qazi (LUMS) Host: Anderson Thursday, April 12, 2018, 12:00 pm CSE305 Maps and directions <https://www.cs.washington.edu/visitors/getting_here> Abstract In this talk, I will present my recent research on Internet access in developing countries. In the first half of my talk, I will present a study on the characteristics of mobile devices in developing regions. Using a dataset of 0.5 million subscribers from one of the largest cellular operators in Pakistan, I will present an analysis of cell phones being used based on different features (e.g., CPU, memory, and cellular interface). Our analysis reveals potential device-level bottlenecks for Internet access, which can inform infrastructure design for improving mobile web performance. (This work appeared in ACM IMC 2016) Another accessibility challenge in developing countries is the rise in Internet censorship events, which can have a substantial impact on various stakeholders in the Internet ecosystem (e.g., users, content providers, ISPs, and advertisers). In the second half of my talk, I will discuss how Internet censorship poses an economic threat to online advertising, which plays an essential role in enabling the free Web by allowing publishers to monetize their services. Then I will describe a system we designed that enables relevant ads while retaining the effectiveness of censorship resistance tools (e.g., Tor). (This work appeared in ACM HotNets 2017)

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Change Seminar This Tuesday: Beth Koliko on Unconventional innovation: launching a counter-intuitive product
by Lia Golden 09 Apr '18

09 Apr '18

Hi All, This is a friendly reminder for our Change Seminar this Tuesday. We are honored to have Beth Koliko, founder of Shift Labs, be speaking about how her company built and launched a low-cost medical device. On a shoestring budget they navigated getting FDA clearance, a CE mark, patents, and enthusiastic customers. Please join us for lunch and to hear her remarkable story. Talk: Unconventional innovation: launching a counter-intuitive product Who: Beth Koliko When: Tuesday April 8th, 2018; 12-1pm Where: EEB 037 Thank you for your interest in advance and we look forward to seeing you all on Tuesday. Best Wishes, Change Seminar Team -- Lia M. Golden DNP, BSN, RN International Nursing Program (INP) Director Assistant Director of Nursing Services at UW INTERSECT University of Washington Medical Center http://www.inp.washington.edu

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Help Puerto Rico use tech for social good
by Yosem Companys 08 Apr '18

08 Apr '18

Dear friends and colleagues, - How should the Puerto Rican government use technology to improve quality of life and socioeconomic development, especially in the poorest and most vulnerable communities? I would appreciate your emailing me as soon as possible one-sentence proposed actions in the format of "Do X with Y to achieve Z." Feel free to share links to any case studies or articles that may show their successful implementation elsewhere. Your proposed actions could apply to any societal sector including and not limited to: - Accountability; - Affordable access to Internet, Web, mobile, or mesh, among others; - Agriculture; - Disaster relief; - Economic growth and development; - Education and training, whether primary, secondary, higher education, vocational, or online; - Entrepreneurship; - Environment; - Food; - Health; - Housing that's affordable but can resist storms; - Jobs; - Manufacturing; - Open data; - Open governance; - Pharma/Biotech; - Privacy; - Public safety; - Security, physical or cyber; - Transportation; and, - Water. Please share with your closest 1-million friends, post on all your social media accounts, or email to all your other lists. I truly appreciate your help. Thanks, Yosem

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OpenMRS Community paid positions posted
by Jan Flowers 05 Apr '18

05 Apr '18

Hi All, I’m excited to share that the OpenMRS Community has posted two paid key positions for hire. We really are eager to find some enthusiastic, passionate folks for helping to lead and support the community. Find the postings here: https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/RES/Director+of+Community https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/RES/OpenMRS+Technical+Project+Manager If you, or anyone you know, are interested in the job – apply today! Jan Jan Flowers, MS HPL Health Informatics, Health Policy & Law, and Global Health Clinical Informatics Research Group (CIRG), Director of Global Health Informatics University of Washington School of Nursing, Clinical Faculty OpenMRS, Board of Directors and Leadership Team OpenELIS, Board of Directors

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Talk by P Anandan on Wadhwani Institute for AI in India (Monday, April 9 at 4:30 PM in CSE 691)
by Richard Anderson 04 Apr '18

04 Apr '18

On Monday, April 9 at 4:30 PM in CSE 691, P Anandan, CEO of the Wadhwani Institute of Artificial Intelligence (https://wadhwaniai.org/) will give an overview talk describing the new research institute. P Anandan was the Founding Managing Director of the Microsoft Research India. The Wadhwani Institute of Artificial Intelligence was launched on Feb 18 with a focus on social good and betterment. It was founded by technology entrepreneurs Romesh and Sunil Wadhwani, to bring the immense promise of AI to bear upon large-scale social problems. The Government of Maharashtra and the University of Mumbai have provided space in the heart of Mumbai for the institute. The Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence will: * Develop solutions in agriculture, health, education, financial inclusion, language, and infrastructure. * Be a hub for AI scientists from top global institutions to collaborate with social-sector organizations. * Explore questions of ethics and guidelines for AI in development. P Anandan will give a brief talk about the institute followed by a discussion of the goals and opportunities of Wadhwani AI.

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