Quick Bits from Speakerconf

You know how one of the best parts of any conference is the "hallway track?" Speakerconf is designed to maximize that experience: conversation shaped by talks, but with more opportunity for many-to-many communication.

The speakers are diverse and so are the topics. I thought I would share some of the more interesting references that came up during our discussions.

  • LEDBAT (RFC 6817). "Lower-than-best-effort" data transfer reduces congestion by deliberately adding latency. - libutp - The uTorrent transport protocol library, which implements LEDBAT.
  • Iranian weavers deshredding documents from the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, and the DARPA challenge from 2011.

  • crazyegg - a service for heat mapping overlays on web pages.
  • Computational Tree Logic
  • an extension of first-order predicate logic to cover future universes. Quantifiers include "there exists at least one universe in which!"
  • As We May Think
  • An enormously influential essay by Vannevar Bush. - Generalizing Monads to Arrows - One of John Hughes' many excellent papers about abstraction. - Probabilistic Graphical Models
  • A method for integrating uncertain beliefs to estimate likelihood of outcomes, like Bayesian networks on steroids.
  • Composing Contracts - A paper by Simon Peyton-Jones on using combinators in a functional language to model financial instruments.
  • Five flavors of logic: miniKanran, cKanran, alphaKanran, and a couple more that I can't remember.

As you can imagine, it was a stimulating week. Thanks to Jay Fields and Josh Graham for organizing it, and a special thanks to the sponsors Forward, innoQ, and DRW Trading who make it possible.

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