papers-we-love / papers-we-love

Papers from the computer science community to read and discuss.

Papers We Love (PWL) is a community built around reading, discussing and learning more about academic computer science papers. This repository serves as a directory of some of the best papers the community can find, bringing together documents scattered across the web. You can also visit the Papers We Love site for more info.

Due to licenses we cannot always host the papers themselves (when we do, you will see a 📜 emoji next to its title in the directory README) but we can provide links to their locations.

If you enjoy the papers, perhaps stop by a local chapter meetup and join in on the vibrant discussions around them. You can also discuss PWL events, the content in this repository, and/or anything related to PWL on our Discord server.

Chapters

Let us know if you are interested in starting one in your city!

All of our meetups follow our Code of Conduct.

Past Presentations

Check out our YouTube channel for videos and video playlists.

Info

We're looking for pull requests related to papers we should add, better organization of the papers we do have, and/or links to other paper-repos we should point to.

Other Good Places to Find Papers

• 2 Minute Papers
• Bell System Technical Journal, 1922-1983
• Best Paper Awards in Computer Science
• Facebook
• Google Scholar (choose a subcategory)
• Microsoft Research
• Functional Programming Books Review
• MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab Publications
• MIT's Distributed System's Reading Group
• arXiv Paper Repository
• SciRate
• cat-v.org
• y-archive
• netlib
• Services Engineering Reading List
• Readings in Distributed Systems
• Gradual Typing Bibliography
• Security Data Science Papers
• Research Papers from Robert Harper, Carnegie Mellon University
• Lobste.rs tagged as PDF
• The Morning Paper

Please check out our wiki-page for links to blogs, books, exchanges that are worth a good read.

How To Read a Paper

Reading a paper is not the same as reading a blogpost or a novel. Here are a few handy resources to help you get started.

• How to read an academic article
• Advice on reading academic papers
• How to read and understand a scientific paper
• Should I Read Papers?
• The Refreshingly Rewarding Realm of Research Papers
• How to read a paper

Applications/Ideas built around Papers We Love

• Love a Paper - @loveapaper

Download papers

Open your favourite terminal and run:

$ ./scripts/download.sh

This will scrape markdown files for links to PDFs and download papers to their respective directories.

See README.md for more options.

Contributing Guidelines

Please take a look at our CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Copyright

The name "Papers We Love" and the logos for the organization are copyrighted, and under the ownership of Papers We Love Ltd, all rights reserved. When starting a chapter, please review our guidelines and ask us about using the logo.

papers-we-love's Issues

Papers We Love #6 - Erik Hinton on The Derivative of a Regular Type is its Type of One-Hole Contexts

@esmooov

• meetup
• video
• audio
• slides

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper The Derivative of a Regular Type is its Type of One-Hole Contexts by Connor McBride.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found here.

Add link to yarchive.

http://yarchive.net/comp/index.html

Security Papers

Not sure how many of these are interesting but there looks to be some interesting security topics: http://www.covert.io/security-datascience-papers/

CS education and pedagogy folder

i'd like to propose an education folder. spoke briefly with @videlalvaro in IRC and he suggested the comp_sci_fundamentals_and_history folder but the papers i am considering are neither fundamentals or history, which i think would make their discovery difficult if they were put in that category. additionally spoke to @zeeshanlakhani who said that there are education papers in the repo already- though, to me at least, it is unclear where they are, so if we did make new category, i'd be happy to volunteer seeking those out and moving them.

totally understand the desire to keep the categories limited, but i think this is an important and distinct one.

example papers:

• http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/fdpefinalweb.pdf
• http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1733912

Papers We Love #4 - Chas Emerick on A comprehensive study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types

• meetup
• slides

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper A comprehensive study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types by Marc Shapiro, Nuno Preguiça, Carlos Baquero, and Marek Zawirski.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

• Paper can be found in this here.

Papers We Love #5 - Aysylu Greenberg on One VM to Rule Them All

@aysylu

• meetup
• video
• audio
• slides

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper One VM to Rule Them All by Thomas Wurthinger Christian Wimmer, et al.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found here.

url_checker_pwl

Hello!

borgified/url_checker_pwl has found the following bad link(s):

./papers-we-love/computer_graphics/README.md
404 Not Found http://x86.cs.duke.edu/courses/cps124/fall09/notes/16_rendering/p143-kajiya.pdf

Papers We Love #10 - Chris Martens on The Event Calculus as a Linear Logic Program

• @chrisamaphone
• meetup

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper The Event Calculus as a Linear Logic Program by Vladimir Alexiev.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found here.

Description

The event calculus is a system for reasoning about time-indexed truth, i.e. what propositions hold at which times, given a collection of events happening at various times and descriptions of their causal influence.

Alexiev presents a critique of the use of negation-as-failure in the traditional Prolog program implementing the event calculus. He then shows how to use linear logic, a logic of resource use, to implement the calculus in a purely-logical fashion.

A blog post with more detail is here (Part II is still in the works though). Code for my tinkering: https://github.com/chrisamaphone/interactive-lp/tree/master/examples. The relevant files are sec*.clf.

Bio

Chris Martens (@chrisamaphone) is a grad student at CMU, studying proof theory and type theory for programming languages. Her thesis project is a logic programming language for designing games and interactive stories.

PWLSF Meeting #3

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper Bimodal Multicast paper by Kenneth P. Birman, Mark Hayden, Oznur Ozkasap, Zhen Xiao,. Mihai Budiu, and Yaron Minsky.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found here. Link to the meetup event is here. The meetup will be streamed and the video will be available immediately after.

Enable wiki for coordination with organizers

Want to enable the wiki so we can use it as a place to share information with organizers? It would be handy to start documenting things better so people know what to do to start one.

PWLSF Meeting #4 - Joel VanderWerf on Calvin

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the Calvin papers.

Modularity and Scalability in Calvin, IEEE 2013 by Alexander Thomson, Thaddeus Diamond, Shu-Chun Weng, Kun Ren, Philip Shao, and Daniel J. Abadi.

Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems, SIGMOD 2012

Consistency Tradeoffs in Modern Distributed Database System Design, Abadi, 2012

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Add Thorough Contributing.MD

Things it should cover:

• Cover naming conventions/formatting (folder/paper)
• Be specific to the fact that this is a papers repo... do not include books or the like
• Mention that any and all papers that have notices that do not allow for digital distribution should be removed before PR review
• Two-Thumbs-Up minimum from PWL organizers/collaborators

Should we link to articles like this?

http://web.archive.org/web/20111218093802/http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/02/26/10-papers-every-programmer-should-read-at-least-twice

http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every-programmer-should-read-at-least-twice/

re: https://twitter.com/fogus/status/454698907873054720

Papers We Love #2 - Brandon Bloom on Programming with Algebraic Effects and Handlers

@brandonbloom

• meetup
• audio
• slides

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper Programming with Algebraic Effects and Handlers by Andrej Bauer and Matija Pretnar, which will be presented on March 17, 2014.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found in this repo or here.

CS Education

Would anyone find this useful?

I've got collections of papers, though I'll have to filter for which are sharable..

PWLBOS #1 => Christopher Meiklejohn on "A Note on Distributed Computing"

This is a forum for questions/comments/resources related to the PWLBOS meetup.

• MEETUP: http://www.meetup.com/Papers-We-Love-Boston/events/196397902/
• PAPER: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~waldo/Readings/waldo-94.pdf
• SLIDES: https://speakerdeck.com/cmeiklejohn/a-note-on-distributed-computing
• VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z79mjsLdkpY&feature=youtu.be

-/-

DESCRIPTION:

We will look at A Note on Distributed Computing, a technical report published at Sun Microsystems in November of 1994. This paper specifically focuses on the idea that attempting to provide a unified view of objects, whether they are local or remote, is mistaken. We will briefly discuss the history of this model, starting with the remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism, discuss the differences between non-distributed and distributed objects, and finally provide an example of lessons learned given the problems in Sun’s Network File System (NFS).

BIO:

Christopher Meiklejohn is a Senior Software Engineer with Basho Technologies, Inc. and a graduate student in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.

Papers We Love #3 - David Greenberg on Sparrow: Distributed, Low Latency Scheduling

@dgrnbrg

• meetup
• video
• audio

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper Sparrow: Distributed, Low Latency Scheduling by Kay Ousterhout, Patrick Wendell, Matei Zaharia and Ion Stoica.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

• Paper can be found in this here.

Add cat-v.org's archive of papers.

http://doc.cat-v.org

PWL#7 => Armon Dadgar on SWIM

Armon Dadgar from Hashicorp presents the SWIM: Scalable Weakly-consistent Infection-style Process Group Membership Protocol paper by Abhinandan Das, Indranil Gupta, and Ashish Motivala.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper. For this particular meetup we will try a round of moderated discussions. Pre-submit any topics in this thread.

The meetup is scheduled for Thursday, September 25, 2014 @ 6:30pm - RSVP here > http://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love-too/events/176288712/

Re-categorize Bloom's Input/Papers

Computer Science Education papers?

CS Education is one of the most integral parts of Computer Science's community's growth, but it's often trivialized compared to the more technical aspects of the discipline. Still, I'd argue that the only thing harder than comprehending pointers is teaching them to someone else. Could we consider adding a section on CS Education? I'd be happy to add in some papers myself if there's interest.

PWL#6 => Peter Alvaro: Using Reasoning about Knowledge to Analyze Distributed Systems

Peter Alvaro from UC Berkeley will present the paper "Using Reasoning about Knowledge to Analyze Distributed Systems" by Joseph Halpern.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper. For this particular meetup we will try a round of moderated discussions. Pre-submit any topics in this thread.

Thursday, August 21, 2014 - RSVP information here - http://www.meetup.com/papers-we-love-too/events/168821902/

Why do we love this paper?

First, I want to say I've really been enjoying this repository. Thanks for the hard work. I would find it useful to see why a paper is included. After all, this is Papers we Love, not just Papers. Maybe this sort of information could be included in the per-directory README as mentioned in #47? The two motivations for this I have are:

1. keeping the quality high
2. helping people understand why a paper is important.
3. gets really interesting I think. A paper might be interesting because it spawned a new domain, it was exceptionally well-written, or perhaps it was completely wrong about something.

Thoughts?

Papers We Love #1 - Michael Bernstein on A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection

@mrb

• meetup
• video
• audio
• slides

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection by Bacon, Cheng, Rajan.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

• Paper can be found in this repo or here.

consider adding some of these misc links to books/articles/papers/etc

While these aren't all technically "research papers", they are still amazing, exotic and free educational reading resources i've collected over the last few years, so I'll link them just in case you guys want to display some of them.

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP)

Unixca's historical links archive

Programming UNIX Sockets in C - Frequently Asked Questions

C Craft

Ken Thompson Q&A

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

What every programmer should know about memory

Linux Technology Reference

1024cores

switch

command center

asktog

The Art of Unix Programming

stitz zeager math books

That should be enough for right now. I still have a bunch more, so if you guys want me to post more interesting links just let me know you guys are interested via a reply in this issue's comments.

Have README's in folder list all papers, either linking to pdf in repo or to url

Based on conversation w/ @newsomc, and he's right.

PWL-SF Meeting #1

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure by Benjamin H. Sigelman, Luiz André Barroso, Mike Burrows, Pat Stephenson, Manoj Plakal, Donald Beaver, Saul Jaspan and Chandan Shanbhag.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found in this repo or here.

Figure out to remove previous fork altogether.

Arc90 deleted the original repo, which should have removed the fork altogether. Instead, we're now forked from somewhere else (a team using the fork of the old, original repo). I emailed github and hope we can process in the best way.

Create an automated way of refuting PDF submissions for papers with strict licensing

Soliciting ideas.

We need a list of publishers that do not allow redistribution of papers. We can then parse PDFs with this list and a simple python script, and reject files that appear to be under copyright.

• create a list of publishers
• write a python script to parse pdfs with list
• add to post commit hook to reject files that appear to be under copyright

Papers We Love #9 - Camille Fournier on The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems

@skamille

• meetup
• video
• audio
• slides

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems by Mike Burrows.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found here or in the repo.

Description

Distributed consensus is often discussed in terms of algorithms: Paxos, ZAB, RAFT, etc. But while the algorithms may be more or less mind-bending, for me the more interesting aspect of distributed consensus is creating systems that support it for the general use case. This paper, on Google's Chubby lock service, is the story of happens when a system stops being a polite theory, and starts getting real-world use.

To anyone who has worked in depth as a distributed systems engineer, Chubby is a beautiful paper. It is not a paper about algorithms and their limits, or a toy fringe system created by grad students to test a hypothesis. It is a paper that describes the real tradeoffs that real systems engineers make when designing something to solve a large set of problems well enough. This paper shows the key insights that the authors had as to how such a system might be used, and awareness of what it should do well, and what it should not try to do well. It details how Chubby was designed, but then goes further to describe how it ended up being used when released to the wild, and the surprises and consequences of these design decisions.

Bio

Camille Fournier (@skamille) is the CTO at Rent the Runway. In her limited spare time, she works on various open source projects including Apache ZooKeeper.

Link Broken for "Vijay D'Silva in README.md

Link Broken for "Vijay D'Silva in README.md

PWL#5=> Henry Robinson on Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process by Fischer, Lynch and Patterson.

Henry will be focusing on the JACM version of the paper, not the PODS version. The JACM version is linked in the paper title above and you can also find it at: http://macs.citadel.edu/rudolphg/csci604/ImpossibilityofConsensus.pdf.

If anyone really wants extra reading, you might consider the following:

• The FLP proof walkthrough I wrote up on my blog a few years ago (http://the-paper-trail.org/blog/a-brief-tour-of-flp-impossibility/)
• Lynch's '100 impossibility results for distributed computing' (http://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/MIT-LCS-TM-394.pdf)
• Chandra and Toueg's 'The weakest failure detector for solving consensus' (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~lorenzo/corsi/cs380d/papers/p685-chandra.pdf)

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Investigate citation-style-language/schema to create citations

https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema

Papers We Love #7 - Leif Walsh on The LCA Problem Revisited

@leifwalsh

• meetup
• video
• audio

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper The LCA Problem Revisited by Michael A. Bender and Martin Farach-Colton.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found here.

How to read an academic paper

It may be nice to have a brief paragraph on how to read academic papers. It may not be completely straightforward to everyone attending.

Here are a few useful links:

• http://organizationsandmarkets.com/2010/08/31/how-to-read-an-academic-article/
• http://www4.ncsu.edu/~akmassey/posts/2012-02-15-advice-on-reading-academic-papers.html
• http://violentmetaphors.com/2013/08/25/how-to-read-and-understand-a-scientific-paper-2/

Thanks for starting this group, it was the kick in the pants I was looking for ❤️

need url checking?

hello all

i come over as a contributor from another project (https://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books) and seeing the similarities of the format of both repos, i wondered if you have a need for a semi automated url check of all the submitted papers.

i wrote this https://github.com/borgified/url_checker which i'm currently using to weed out all the broken urls from the vhf/free-programming-books repo. i'm volunteering to adapt my script to help you check for broken urls in your project too, if there is such a need.

how it might work:

1. run the script. (it sends output to STDOUT about broken links found)
2. i copy the output and create an issue here for someone to confirm the problem (in case of false negatives) and they can make changes to your repo accordingly.
3. repeat, more frequently if there are a lot of new additions

Whatsapp

Update README titles within sub-directories & main README for URLs

@bowmanb said he would take this on and we're grateful :).

Tasks

• Update main README.md to mention URL-approach for papers that disallow distribution
• Update sub-directory README.md's with proper titles

Add link to the Bell System Technical Journal archive.

http://www3.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/

60 years of papers galore!

Writing script for name-cleanup and title from pdf if possible

References the conversation from #18 (comment).

Codex

This repository could provide some value by creating a codex of symbols/notation commonly used in mathematics/computer science papers. When reading a paper, I need to look up what specific symbols mean, finding that information isn't always easy. Having a codex might help ease deciphering code/examples.

I realize that symbols may take on different meaning depending on the paper. Hoping for other perspectives on this.

Papers We Love DC #1 => Caitie McCaffrey on Orleans

. @CaitieM20

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper Orleans: Distributed Virtual Actors for Programmability and Scalability

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found here: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/210931/Orleans-MSR-TR-2014-41.pdf

Description

High-scale interactive services demand high throughput with low latency and high availability, difficult goals to meet with the traditional stateless 3-tier architecture. The actor model makes it natural to build a stateful middle tier and achieve the required performance. However, the popular actor model platforms still pass many distributed systems problems to the developers.

The Orleans programming model introduces the novel abstraction of virtual actors that solves a number of the complex distributed systems problems, such as reliability and distributed resource management, liberat- ing the developers from dealing with those concerns. At the same time, the Orleans runtime enables applications to attain high performance, reliability and scalability.

This paper presents the design principles behind Orleans and demonstrates how Orleans achieves a simple programming model that meets these goals. We describe how Orleans simplified the development of several scalable production applications on Windows Azure, and report on the performance of those production systems.

Bio

Caitie McCaffrey is a Backend Brat, Distributed Systems Diva, and Tech Lover. She is currently a Software Engineer at HBO, and prior to that worked at 343 Industries. Her focus is on Web Services, Distributed Systems, and Big Data. She is passionate about creating fun, social, and collaborative entertainment experiences. Caitie has a degree in Computer Science from Cornell University, and has worked on several video games including Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3, and most recently Halo 4. She currently is working at HBO on the HBO Go services. She maintains a blog at CaitieM.com and frequently discusses technology and entertainment on Twitter @CaitieM20

Feature request: audio for papers on papers-we-love

It would be awesome if some tracheally-gifted community volunteers would put up some recordings of papers-we-love papers on SoundCloud or similar. Would it be a violation of the authors' rights to do so? Some entrepreneurial spirit could throw together a podcast and slap some ads on it... I'd listen to it during my commute!

PWLSF Meeting #2

This issue has been created to start/spark/organize a conversation on the paper The Akamai Network: A Platform for High-Performance Internet Applications by Erik Nygren, Ramesh K. Sitaraman, and Jennifer Sun.

Please offer up questions, comments, or additional information regarding this paper.

Paper can be found here.

Unclear license: Organizing Programs without Classes

Link to paper: http://cs.au.dk/~hosc/local/LaSC-4-3-pp223-242.pdf

This is listed in Fogus' blog post: http://blog.fogus.me/2011/09/08/10-technical-papers-every-programmer-should-read-at-least-twice/ but it has a dead link. I went out and found it but am unsure of the license, and therefore unclear if I should PR it.

Thoughts?

a-solution-to-the-network-challenges-of-data-recovery-in-erasure-coded-distributed-storage-systems-a-study-on-the-facebook-warehouse-cluster.pdf (File name too long)

error: unable to create file distributed_systems/a-solution-to-the-network-challenges-of-data-recovery-in-erasure-coded-distributed-storage-systems-a-study-on-the-facebook-warehouse-cluster.pdf (File name too long)

Add link to netlib

http://www.netlib.org

Traits: A Mechanism for Fine-Grained Reuse

I think this is a good candidate for inclusion. The problem is that I can't tell if the license applies? This is what it says:

  Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is
  granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or direct commercial
  advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along
  with the full citation. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be
  honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers,
  to redistribute to lists, or to use any component of this work in other works requires prior specific
  permission and/or a fee. Permissions may be requested from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., 1515
  Broadway, New York, NY 10036 USA, fax:
  + 1 [phone], or [email protected].
  C 2006 ACM 0164-0925/06/0300-0331 $5.00

If that is good enough I can submit a PR with a PDF included.

Services Engineering Reading List

https://github.com/mmcgrana/services-engineering

General Code of Conduct for PWL meetups.

I saw that @tavisrudd added a code-of-conduct section for the Vancouver meetup he's running.

I'm thinking that we may want to have a general one for our set of meetups. Thoughts, draft-ideas @Randommood, @papers-we-love?