Friday Hacks #147, February 2
Posted on by Julius
Date/Time: Friday, February 2 at 7:00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 3, NUS School of Computing (COM1-0212)
Paper Electronics: Better for Electrons, Better for Expression
Talk Description:
Paper is an amazing medium. Cheap and ubiquitous, we use it every day to take notes, fold into origami, or fold into boxes to carry stuff. It’s also a planar substrate with a predictable dielectric constant that natively supports comments, which makes it an excellent choice for prototyping circuits. In this talk, Jie and Bunnie will explore the new expressive and technical capabilities unlocked by merging our two favorite things: paper and electronics.
Speaker Profile
Jie Qi is cofounder and creative director of Chibitronics. She is obsessed with paper, technologies and combining the two to make magical experiences. She recently completed her PhD at the MIT Media Lab and is currently a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang is a hardware engineer at Chibitronics. He is an open-source activist and a hardware hacker, and is the author of “Hacking the Xbox”, “The Hardware Hacker”, and “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen”. He enjoys outrigger canoeing.
3 Projects on Computer System Performance
Talk Description:
This talk describes 3 current projects on the performance of computer systems:
- Database: Replacing TPC benchmarks by synthetic scaling of application-specific datasets.
- Memory: A scientific study of the balance between recency (e.g. LRU) and frequency (i.e. popularity) in cache replacement policies.
- Networking: Replacing Google’s probe-based estimation of minimum round-trip time and bottleneck bandwidth for their BBR transport protocol.
Speaker Profile
Prof Tay Yong Chiang received his BSc degree from the University of Singapore and his PhD degree from Harvard University. He is a professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics, and a Resident Fellow at Tembusu College. His main research interests are performance modeling and database systems. He is the author of “Analytical Performance Modeling for Computer Systems”.