Have you ever wanted to hear what an earthquake sounds like? Today on the show we have Omkar Ranadive, Computer Science Masters student at NorthWestern University, who collaborates with Suzan van der Lee, an Earth and Planetary Sciences professor at Northwestern University, on the crowd-sourcing project Earthquake Detective. 

Email Links:
Suzan: suzan@earth.northwestern.edu 
Omkar: omkar.ranadive@u.northwestern.edu

Works Mentioned: 

Paper: Applying Machine Learning to Crowd-sourced Data from Earthquake Detective
https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.04740
by Omkar Ranadive, Suzan van der Lee, Vivan Tang, and Kevin Chao
Github: https://github.com/Omkar-Ranadive/Earthquake-Detective
Earthquake Detective: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/vivitang/earthquake-detective

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Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is a desirable property in a distributed computing environment. BFT means the system can survive the loss of nodes and nodes becoming unreliable. There are many different protocols for achieving BFT, though not all options can scale to large network sizes.

Ted Yin joins us to explain BFT, survey the wide variety of protocols, and share details about HotStuff.

Kyle shared some initial reactions to the announcement about Alpha Fold 2's celebrated performance in the CASP14 prediction.  By many accounts, this exciting result means protein folding is now a solved problem.

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Above all, everyone wants voting to be fair. What does fair mean and how can we measure it? Kenneth Arrow posited a simple set of conditions that one would certainly desire in a voting system. For example, unanimity - if everyone picks candidate A, then A should win!

Yet surprisingly, under a few basic assumptions, this theorem demonstrates that no voting system exists which can satisfy all the criteria.

This episode is a discussion about the structure of the proof and some of its implications.

Works Mentioned