Uncertainty propagation in data processing systems

Uncertainty propagation in data processing systems Manousakis et al., SoCC’18

When I’m writing an edition of The Morning Paper, I often imagine a conversation with a hypothetical reader sat in a coffee shop somewhere at the start of their day. There are three levels of takeaway from today’s paper choice:

  • If you’re downing a quick espresso, then it’s good to know that uncertainty can creep into our data in lots of different ways, and if you compute with those uncertain values as if they were precise, errors can compound quickly leading to incorrect results or false confidence.
  • If you’re savouring a cortado, then you might also want to dip into the techniques we can use to propagate uncertainty through a computation.
  • If you’re lingering over a latte, then the UP (Uncertainty Propagation) framework additionally shows how to integrate these techniques into a dataflow framework.

We implement this framework in a system called UP-MapReduce, and use it to modify ten applications, including AI/ML, image processing, and trend analysis applications to process uncertain data. Our evaluation shows that UP-MapReduce propagates uncertainties with high accuracy and, in many cases, low performance overheads.

Are you sure?

Uncertainty can arise from a number of Continue reading

How to Avoid Being the Network Turkey

In honor of the Thanksgiving holiday, we’ve put together a few handy tips on how to avoid becoming the network turkey. While many may enjoy it at the family dinner table, nobody wants to be the turkey at work, causing disruptions for their coworkers and organization.

Fast Google Fonts with Cloudflare Workers

Fast Google Fonts with Cloudflare Workers

Google Fonts is one of the most common third-party resources on the web, but carries with it significant user-facing performance issues. Cloudflare Workers running at the edge is a great solution for fixing these performance issues, without having to modify the publishing system for every site using Google Fonts.

This post walks through the implementation details for how to fix the performance of Google Fonts with Cloudflare Workers. More importantly, it also provides code for doing high-performance content modification at the edge using Cloudflare Workers.

Google fonts are SLOW

First, some background. Google Fonts provides a rich selection of royalty-free fonts for sites to use. You select the fonts you want to use, and end up with a simple stylesheet URL to include on your pages, as well as styles to use for applying the fonts to parts of the page:

<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans|Roboto+Slab"
      rel="stylesheet">
<style>
body {
 font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif;
}
h1 {
 font-family: 'Roboto Slab', serif;
}

Your visitor’s browser fetches the CSS file as soon as the HTML for the page is available. The browser will request the underlying font files when the browser does layout for the page and discovers that it needs Continue reading

Philippines Department of ICT Sets the Multistakeholder Model into Action

Early this year, we embarked on an initiative with the Philippines Department of ICT (DICT) to co-develop the country’s National ICT Ecosystem Framework (NIEF) in a multistakeholder fashion. The NIEF, which succeeds the Philippine Digital Strategy, will guide the course of ICT use and development, as well as the priority areas for government, until 2022.

Our collaboration builds upon the success of the Philippine Chapter’s work with key stakeholders to advance open Internet development in the country, particularly in the policy sphere, and DICT’s sustained drive to expand avenues for participation in its policy formulation. Just last year, DICT and the Chapter, together with the Foundation for Media Alternatives, spearheaded the first Philippine Internet Governance Colloquium, which has been scaled up to a countrywide roadshow this year to help address pertinent Internet issues in different localities.

Having formalized our partnership in a memorandum of understanding, signed in July by DICT’s Secretary, Eliseo M. Rio, and the Internet Society’s Regional Bureau Director for Asia-Pacific, Rajnesh D. Singh, we pledged to support the DICT in embedding the multistakeholder approach not only in the framework’s development but in its implementation. Our engagement was complemented by an Internet Governance training workshop Continue reading

Africa Needs Its Internet Institutions More Than Ever, Especially AFRINIC

At the recent African IGF in Khartoum, on November 5, participants of the workshop on “Strengthening the Institutional Capacity of Critical African Internet Institutions” hailed the achievements of African Internet institutions in bringing connectivity and broadening access in the last decades. They also recognized their shortcomings and stressed the need to address them so that they continue to serve the continent amidst the potential challenges that it will be facing in the future, as the African Internet grows and more users come online. The workshop was organized by AFTLD, the African Union Commission, and the Internet Society.

Fifteen years ago, Africa had less than 3% Internet penetration and was trailing far behind the rest of the world. Today, with a third of its population connected to the Internet, Africa’s connectedness is still behind but in a much better position than before, since the gap in Africa and the rest of the world has been shrinking. In fact, some countries in Africa have connectivity levels comparable to those of developed countries – something unimaginable fifteen years ago!

The progressive increase in Internet penetration in Africa could not happen without its regional Internet organizations, known as Af*, and the various NOGs (Network Continue reading

I’m back, again.


It’s been over 3 years since I last shared my thoughts here.  It’s been that long since I left an amazing 19 year journey at Bloomberg, at the helm of the team that developed the financial industry’s most prominent IP network.  A network that I took great pride in and gave so much of my personal life for.  I am grateful to have had the opportunity to build what I did there and learn many things along the way.

Three years ago I decided to go from building mission-critical global networks to building network technologies with the team at Juniper Networks.  Two very different worlds.  It wasn’t easy, but I have evolved.  For the record, my heart is still that of a network operator.  20+ years at the front lines doesn’t wash off Continue reading

Why did Oracle acquire an SDN firm?

Every now and then, the industry gets hit with a “huh?” acquisition, like Facebook buying virtual reality headset maker Oculus or chipmaker Broadcom acquiring mainframe software vendor CA.Last week’s news from Oracle was also up there, with the announcement it plans to acquire Talari Networks, a software-defined networking (SDN) specialist, by the end of the year.It would seem an odd pairing, but Oracle has a considerable communications software business of mostly brokers, controllers, and monitors. In announcing the deal, the company said Talari would complement Oracle’s Session Border Controller (SBC) and network management infrastructure by adding high availability, Quality-of-Experience (QoE) connectivity, and cloud application access across any IP network with the reliability and predictability of private networks.To read this article in full, please click here

Why did Oracle acquire an SDN firm?

Every now and then, the industry gets hit with a “huh?” acquisition, like Facebook buying virtual reality headset maker Oculus or chipmaker Broadcom acquiring mainframe software vendor CA.Last week’s news from Oracle was also up there, with the announcement it plans to acquire Talari Networks, a software-defined networking (SDN) specialist, by the end of the year.It would seem an odd pairing, but Oracle has a considerable communications software business of mostly brokers, controllers, and monitors. In announcing the deal, the company said Talari would complement Oracle’s Session Border Controller (SBC) and network management infrastructure by adding high availability, Quality-of-Experience (QoE) connectivity, and cloud application access across any IP network with the reliability and predictability of private networks.To read this article in full, please click here

History Of Networking – JR Rivers – Linux Routing

In this History of Networking episode, JR Rivers joins Network Collective to talk about the history of the open source/Linux based routing stack.
JR Rivers
Guest
Russ White
Host
Donald Sharp
Host

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

The post History Of Networking – JR Rivers – Linux Routing appeared first on Network Collective.

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