ResNetLab bi-weekly Reading Parties

[yiannisbot]

Description

It is very important to keep track of (new and old) academic papers in the areas of interest to one's work. For this reason, at ResNetLab, we have decided to start bi-weekly reading parties, a well-known method of "reading" several papers in a short period of time. The sessions are open to the community of our collaborators and beyond.

The ultimate purpose of reading parties is to gather knowledge of as many papers as possible by sharing insights in a sync session. Each paper chosen to be read is presented for ~15-20mins max, including Q&A in an informal setup. When reading a paper to the group, focus on:

1. Brief summary of problem, gap the paper fills and the solution it proposes.
2. Why and how it is related to some aspect of DWeb, IPFS, libp2p, Filecoin, content-addressable networks. Papers unrelated to these areas are also welcome - "thinking above and beyond" is more than welcome here!
3. Which concepts (if any) are worth investigating further for your project(s).

As initial topic areas, we have collected a bunch of papers in the areas of: i) DHT Performance, ii) DHT Security and Privacy, iii) NAT Traversal, iv) PubSub in Permissionless Blockchains and v) Decentralised Data Delivery Markets (3DMs) - aka Filecoin Retrieval Market.

Papers in other areas are more than welcome.

Notes and rough structure of reading sessions

• Reading sessions are informal, not recorded or streamed live.
• They are scheduled to last ~60mins.
• Those that have been picked (by the moderator, @yiannisbot) or volunteered will read a paper and briefly present it to the rest of us during the session.
• Approximate slot per paper is ~15-20mins, including a few mins for Q&A. The purpose is not to do a comprehensive review of every aspect of the paper, or start a discussion/brainstorming around it, but rather inform others of approaches that can be of interest to their projects.
• No slides need to be prepared, although of course you can do if you want.
• Write a short summary of the paper you have read (template and doc provided below). This is optional but highly encouraged.
• You won't have to be reading and presenting papers for every session. The idea is that people take turns so that participating is not adding more to your heavy workload.
• Reading parties are supposed to be informative and fun!

In this discussion thread, we should be following up and continuing the discussion async for papers where there was more appetite for Q&A than the slot allowed.

Where and When

• Bi-Weekly Slot: every other Friday at 4pm UTC, starting 5th of March 2021.
• Zoom link: ping resnetlab [ at ] protocol.ai to be added to the calendar invite.

Ideal Outcomes:

• Get inspired: If a paper is of direct interest to any aspect of our work, continue the Q&A here, create an action item out of it, sign up to give a longer presentation to the group at another instance, or spin up a project to work on it!
• Dig deeper: If a paper deserves more attention, we can read it async in more detail, and give a longer presentation to the group.

Resources

• Reading Material Folder
• Paper Tracker Spreadsheet
• Paper Summaries Doc

Steps

Presenters are picked from the moderator (@yiannisbot) - feel free to volunteer.

1. Pick the paper you want to read
2. Add a copy to the folder, or a link to the discussion below.
3. Add it to the paper tracker
4. Add the summary to the summaries doc
5. Come read it to the group!
6. Participate in the discussion below by asking and answering questions.
7. Suggest ideas to improve the ResNetLab Reading Parties.

[yiannisbot]

TEMPLATE: When asking a question about a paper, please include the info below.

Session date: DD-MM-YYYY
Paper Title: < paper title >

Q: < add your question >

[willscott]

Session date: 05-03-2021
Paper Title: Talek: a private publish-subscribe protocol

The distributed point functions mentioned can be seen applied in Express and are well described in Riposte

[yiannisbot]

@petar it's worth adding here the argument you had during the discussion last Friday, so that we capture the whole range of opinions and hopefully continue some discussion here :)

[yiannisbot]

Session date: 19-03-2021

Paper Title: Verifiable Capacity Bound Functions
Presenter: @lucaniz

Paper Title: XIA: Efficient Support for Evolvable Internetworking
Presenter: @adlrocha

Paper Title: Hierarchical DHT-based name resolution for information-centric networks
Presenter: Pedro Akos Costa

[yiannisbot]

Paper Title: Hierarchical DHT-based name resolution for information-centric networks
Presenter: Pedro Akos Costa

Related to the presentation of this paper is a talk I gave some time ago on three ICN architectures and their technical details. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbLioc1h9dg