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jess unrein
jess unrein

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Papers We Love!

What is Papers We Love?

Papers We Love is a community that reads and discusses academic computer science papers. It's a meetup group with an international presence and a yearly conference.

We're not exactly a chapter since we don't meet, but @hoelzro and I thought it would be fun to start a PWL-like discussion group here on DEV.to.

What kinds of things would folks here like to read and talk about for our initial "meeting"? The papers repository collects an intimidating number of papers and topics to choose from, but I thought we could maybe start with one of these three broad categories:

Please comment or react if you want to participate so we can gauge interest, and if one of these three topics speaks to you (or there's something else you really want to read and talk about), please vote in the comments below. @hoelzro will announce our first paper and open the discussion thread on Monday.

Top comments (26)

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jvanbruegge profile image
Jan van Brügge

I really like papers about type systems or programming languages, recently I read Extensible Records with Scoped Labels which is really good (I actually made it the basis of my bachelors thesis).

As a side note (and a shameless plug :D), together with a few fellow students, I co-authored a paper about the control software of our satellite that will launch in 11 days! The paper was presented an published at EUCASS

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phlash profile image
Phil Ashby

waves hello fellow satellite engineer :)

I'm going to vote for Distributed Systems and Gamification, I used to work with a research team in BT looking at massive scale online games..

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thejessleigh profile image
jess unrein

So we have three votes for ethics, two for gamification, and one for distributed systems so far. I was looking at the PWL ethics category and the pickings are pretty slim - just one paper from 1984, which I suspect might not be terribly relevant right now. I found several free papers on Academia.edu that seem promising, but not having read them yet, I can't vouch for quality. Here are a few general topics and themes that popped up in an initial search:

  • Logic and Ethics
  • Privacy and the Internet of Things
  • Examination/overview of the field of cyberethics
  • Ethics and concerns of social networking
  • Utilization of personal health data
  • Video game design and identity
  • Ethics of publishing data
  • Deterrence in cyberspace
  • AI/Machine Learning/Fake Data

Gamification and Distributed Systems have more robust options available in the PWL repo, which is nice because they've already been vetted by the PWL community.

Let me know if any of the above topics particularly sticks out, and I'll link a few papers here and we can narrow down what we'd like to focus on for our first discussion.

Also, if you have ideas on how better to choose a paper as a group, lmk.

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hoelzro profile image
Rob Hoelz

So I just noticed that the ethics paper in the PWL repo is "Reflecting on Trusting Trust", which, IMO, has a few things going for it:

  • It's only three pages long, so it's a nice little way to dip our toes in the water
  • Even though the paper is 34 years old, I would say it's still relevant - the Rust compiler team was dealing with the issue described in the paper only two years ago!

If we wanted to pick a gamification paper, I think "Defining Gamification - A Service Marketing Perspective" would be a good start, since it's also quite short, and defining the term we're reading about would be a good foray into the topic, I think =)

Among the topics you posted above, the following stick out to me as being particularly interesting:

  • Privacy and the Internet of Things
  • Ethics and concerns of social networking
  • Video game design and identity
  • Ethics of publishing data
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ash1eyish profile image
Ashley Maria

Ethics and concerns of social networking and Utilization of personal health data seem interesting just going from the title.

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jesusgollonet profile image
jesús gollonet

I know this is an old thread, but in case there's anyone thinking of reviving this, I'm totally in. I don't have a CS education and have only glanced at a few papers, but would like to do more of that and especially discuss with other folks.

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sergix profile image
Peyton McGinnis

Agreed!

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speculative profile image
Jeffrey Tao

I'm slowly getting into reading more distributed systems papers, and I love them! I never took any distributed systems classes in university, but academic/industry papers are how I've been exposing myself to the subject.

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shiling profile image
Shi Ling

Ethics!

Was recently chatting with @picocreator on what kind of developer education is missing, and the big one is ethics.

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kaelscion profile image
kaelscion • Edited

I like distributed systems, parallelism, web Scraping and aggregation, cloud computing, and things of that sort. My interest in web Scraping also has caused a fascination with bot architecture and design along with thinking about how a bot to keep bots out could be designed better than bots that try to get in.

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thejessleigh profile image
jess unrein • Edited

I think I can probably scare one up :)

Edit: I've definitely found at least a couple

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

This is awesome. @shubheksha had some posts summarizing papers which were great. (Not like, viral hits, it's not exactly an easy read, but great nonetheless)

I think the social discussion aspect is awesome. I would definitely come for this kinds of chats and probably ask some dumb questions. 😄

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Super interested!

I vote for distributed systems or ethics!

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rhymes profile image
rhymes

Distributed Ethics?

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kaelscion profile image
kaelscion

Yah like Facebook. You "distribute" the ethics to other people so that when they get caught with the customer data you've also distributed to them, you can wag your finger at them, and watch them go bankrupt. That's distributed ethics right? 😋😋

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Jess, @hoelzro , are you going to use the #pwl tag? Or if you go with something else, just let me know and I’ll make you mods of the tag.

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thejessleigh profile image
jess unrein

The #pwl tag makes sense to me. Unless we can come up with something better, I think we should use that. It's unique and easy to remember.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Works for me (I’ve learned not to overthink this)

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jess profile image
Jess Lee

@hoelzro and @thejessleigh , ya'll are now the moderators of #pwl. To support the tag, visit dev.to/t/pwl/edit!