It’s the beginning of a new year so I’m cleaning out some files in my drafts directory. This post was started on December 13, 2013.
- ~40 speakers
- ~440 attendees
- three cities
YOW! LambdaJam in May was excellent and this was pretty great too. The YOW! people seem to put on great conferences.
Day one
Jeff Hawkins on machine intelligence
The day kicked off with Jeff Hawkins (of Palm and Handspring fame) giving a keynote in which he described the neurologically-inspired approach to machine intelligence being developed by his current company (Grok Solutions) and others. The basis of this approach is in building learning systems with many of the properties of biological intelligence (universality, robustness, etc.) by modelling them on the operation of neural structures in the neocortex.
One of the key points was the use of representations which enable data storage and processing in ways which are efficient and accurate enough for machine intelligence. In particular, the use of sparse distributed representations (SDR) is key to the model of intelligence described. Dense representations (such as ASCII) use a very small number of bits to represent particular states but each bit is devoid of semantic information: the state of “bit 3” in an ASCII character conveys no useful information. An SDR uses many more bits, each representing a particular feature in the learning domain (e.g. a property of objects or a word in a corpus); as such, most bits in a particular SDR instance will be 0 (hence the “sparse” in the name).
SDRs have several properties which make them useful for learning tasks: similar objects have similar representations; they allow sub-sampling without losing all meaning; they behave well with union/membership and other set operations (an SDR is, in some sense, similar to a Bloom filter). According to Jeff:
“All intelligent machines will be based on sparse distributed representations.”
The cortical learning algorithm developed by Grok Systems and implemented in the Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing open source project (GPLv3) builds on these ideas and implements a learning system modelled on a cortical region to learn about “normal” inputs and then predict and detect anomalies from streaming input. Jeff described two applications in which this software has been deployed: monitoring and detecting anomalies in monitoring server metrics, and natural language processing.
The first example (built by Grok Systems and included in the NuPIC open source project) is used to monitor metrics from resources in Amazon Web Services and to detect anomalies in their behaviour. This approach can identify conditions which traditional (and, it must be said, much, much simpler) threshold-based approaches cannot.
The second example – developed by CEPT Systems – derives SDRs of words from Wikipedia pages and then deploys these SDRs in particular learning problems. This can be used to demonstrate the set-like properties of SDRs: sdr(apple) - sdr(fruit) = sdr(computer). A CLA trained on inputs like “ANIMAL VERB OBJECT” was able to make sensible predictions for new inputs it hadn’t seen before, including “fox” and “eat” yielding “rodent”.
This was a pretty great talk and got the conference off to a great start!
Charles Nutter on language engineering for the JVM
In the second session I saw Charles Nutter’s talk “Beyond JVM” in which he discussed the engineering issues which face JVM-targeting languages like JRuby. Charles discussed some of the pros and cons for targeting the JVM (many of the pros are also cons) and then jumped into four of the key challenges faced by the JRuby project: startup time, native interoperability, language performance, and the lack of flexibility in the JVM (the big ball of C++).
Charles discussed a number of ways to improve JVM and application startup time: tweaking JVM flags helps, but can be fragile in the face of different JVMs, JVM version changes, and typically impact later performance; keeping persistent JVM instances (using tools like Nailgun) can be cause problems cleaning up resources (memory leaks, background threads, etc); pre-loading JVMs with tools like Drip can improve performance while avoiding the cleanup problems with persistent JVMs.
The problem of native interoperability is a complex one with a range of solutions. The traditional approach used JNI which is horrible: you write code for both your intention (“I want to call getpid()”) and how to implement it. The JNR project provide a real foreign function interface on the JVM structured into a number of layers: jffi provides platform-specific FFI functionality, jnr-ffi defines structures, etc. to interface with jffi, jnr-posix exposes a range of POSIX APIs (the ones JRuby have needed so far) and jnr-constants defines a range of constants as defined on the host platform, and jnr-enxio implements Java NIO for arbitrary file descriptors (allowing a range of I/O functionality which can’t otherwise be expressed on JVM). JNR generates code which is as direct as possible for each particular case, resulting in very low overheads for each call.
One of the key motivations for JRuby is language performance. While the JVM
specification made mention of non-Java languages, it didn’t go out of it’s way
to actually support them. The relatively new invokedynamic bytecode allows
language implementers to customise invocation mechanisms to suit the specifics
of their language. The JVM will cache and optimise the results of dynamic
invocations as normal. This can result in plain ruby code run on JRuby being
faster than using a native extension under CRuby (redblack tree benchmark).
Finally, Charles discussed approaches that language implementors can use to deal with the inflexibility of the JVM internals. The Graal project allows language implementors to customise the way that their implementations are optimised and emit the ASM/HotSpot intermediate representation appropriate for the particular language’s constructs. Truffle, a framework built on top of Graal, allows you to implement an interpreter for your language (structured and annotated in a particular way) and to automatically derive a JIT for it. (This sounds a little like the second Futamura projection to me.)
This talk was very well presented and very informative. If I’d known it was “about” JRuby I probably wouldn’t have gone but I’m glad I did!
Julien Verlaguet on Facebook’s static typing for PHP
Julien Verlaguet is an engineer at Facebook and spoke about the work they’ve done to improve on the PHP language with HHVM and “Hack” - a statically typed version of PHP which was the primary subject of the talk.
Contrary to Facebook’s earlier attempts at improving the deployment and runtime story for PHP (the HipHop compiler translated PHP code into C++ which compiled into a native binary), HHVM is a fairly traditional virtual machine with a JIT. The HHVM blog has a bunch of interesting posts about the development of the VM and the JIT both, go read it!
HHVM supports two source languages: normal PHP and Hack. Hack (the code name might change) is a statically typed variant of PHP which is compatible with PHP, uses the same run-time representations within the VM and was designed for incremental adoption (a necessity when dealing with massive codebases like Facebook.com).
The static typing for Hack requires that the programmer add type annotations to class members, function parameters and return values and infers all other types. The types supported include the basic types built-in to PHP, collections and generics. It also distinguishes the types of nullable and non-nullable values. PHP was not designed for type checking, so the type checker must make several allowances. The most interesting is, perhaps, the delay of type unification to call sites rather than function definitions.
The Hack type checker is implemented as a daemon which listens for file system events on the code base and communicates with a client to “run” a check and present errors. The errors are designed to give specific, useful feedback to the programmer including references to each annotation which resulted in the error (“it tells a story”). The checker is also able to output coloured “coverage” style reports of code showing which code is checked/unchecked.
Conversion of existing PHP to Hack has happened in two ways: organic adoption by developers as they and their teams take up Hack; and automatic conversion using tools to analyse, refactor and monitor changes in the code base. This includes support for “soft” conversions, which are monitored but not enforced until they are known to be accurate.
Hack and HHVM sound like great improvements over PHP. I never got around to trying HPHP before it went away but perhaps I’ll give HHVM a go.
Kevlin Henney deconstructed the SOLID principles
I’m not really one for talks about methodologies and such, but Kevlin’s talk “the SOLID Design Principles Deconstructed” was entertaining and not a little informative.
Gilad Bracha on Dart and Newspeak
Gilad Bracha is an engineer at Google where he works on Dart. He spoke about Dart and Newspeak.
Joe Albahari on concurrency in .NET
Joe Albahari spoke about concurrency in C# 5.
Scott Hanselman on the web platform
Scott Hanselman works on Azure and ASP.NET for Microsoft.
Day Two
Philip Wadler reprised the first monad tutorial
Aaron Bedra on behaviour and reputation based security controls
Sam Newman on microservice architecture
Functional programming in industry
Kornelis Sietsma, Michael Neale and Jed Wesley-Smith gave a set of three talks about the adoption and use of functional programming languages at three different companies.
Jay Fields on adopting Clojure
Daniel Spiewak on modules and the expression problem
Stewart Gleadow on mobile app and their APIs
Sponsors and Exhibitors
Sponsors include Suncorp, DiUS, ThoughtWorks, Mashery,