About
The Morning Paper: a short summary of an important, influential, topical or otherwise interesting paper in the field of CS every weekday. The Morning Paper started out as a twitter project (#themorningpaper), then it became clear a longer form was also necessary because some papers just have too much good content to get across in a small batch of 140-character tweets!
The daily selection will still be tweeted on my twitter account (adriancolyer), with a quote or two to whet your appetite. Any longer excerpts or commentary will live here.
Why ‘The Morning Paper?’ (a) it’s a habit I enjoy, and (b) if one or two papers catch your attention and lead you to discover (or rediscover) something of interest then I’m happy.
So now there are several ways to take your morning paper:
- by following me, adriancolyer, on twitter
- by visiting this blog,
- by RSS subscription to this feed, and
- NEW: by subscription to The Morning Paper mailing list
If you know someone you think would enjoy the morning paper, please help to spread the word.
Thanks, Adrian.
About me: I was CTO of SpringSource, then CTO for Apps at VMware and subsequently Pivotal. I’m now a Venture Partner at Accel Partners in London, working with early stage and startup companies across Europe. If you’re working on an interesting technology-related business I’d love to hear from you: you can reach me at acolyer at accel dot com. For anything else, adrian at acolyer dot org works too. Thanks for reading The Morning Paper!
I found this blog today, searching for the title of one of my papers. I feel honored that you talked about it. And the blog went directly to my RSS reader, when I found some fantastic references to read. Great job.
My pleasure, glad you like the feed! Thanks, Adrian.
Adrian, really enjoy your blog. Would it be possible to do a series on security?
Hi Lu, thanks! I try to avoid papers that are heavily mathematical in order to keep the morning paper easily digestible. That still leaves plenty of scope for security-related material though. I’ll see if we can schedule something in for the 2nd half of the year – I don’t know the body of work in this area very well at all, but that’s a good reason to start reading!
Regards, Adrian.
I really enjoy reading the papers you find. Where and how to do you find new papers to summarize? I’m looking for more from the ICSE, but their website only seems to list titles of papers w/out any hyperlinks. Have any resources you can share?
Hi Gabriel,
There’s a paragraph in the middle of this post that describes some of the ways I source papers: https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/01/07/reflections-on-100-editions-of-themorningpaper/.
I agree with you though that the ICSE website this year is very unhelpful! ICSE is on my list of conferences to keep an eye on, so I persevered, but couldn’t find any better process than looking to see what titles sounded interesting, googling for pdf copies of those papers, and whittling things down from there. It would have been much more useful to have had at least the abstracts on the website – often I’ve found great papers hiding behind innocuous looking titles… I downloaded maybe 15 papers in order to find the 5 I eventually selected for last week.
Regards, Adrian.
Best CS blog I’ve seen.
Congrats, Adrian. Never seen a clearer picture of where tech is heading. Keep it up.
Very good! I am now looking into some interesting projects on graph computing and other similar big data applications, and I have a team working on GPU and FPGA accelerators.
Stay tuned!
This looks good but 1 Q. What is CS??
CS = Computer Science!
Thanks. I thought there was a deeper, spiritual, quantum mechanical meaning!
Hi Adrian, this is great blog and I’ve been following for a month or so now, thanks!
I was wondering what hardware/software you use to create the freehand diagrams and notes that often accompany your summaries? Are they drawn using a graphics tablet?
Hi Alistair,
Many of them are just drawn with pen and paper and then scanned. More recently I’ve been experimenting with Notability (and sometimes Paper) using the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil…
Regards, Adrian.
Hi Adrian,
I follow your paper reviews every morning…. Just too good.
My question: How much time do you spend per review and writeup. As a graduate student I find myself struggle reading one paper a day, and writing a review is currently not even on the priority agenda. So what are the techniques that you follow that will help fellow grad students like me to improve reading/writing skills.. A blog post just on this aspect will be truly beneficial for all.
Hi ‘testuser’,
Many thanks for your kind words about the blog! I wrote a little about the process I use to read papers, and how long it takes (about 2-4 hours per paper, typically 2.5) here: https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/03/30/end-of-term-and-how-i-read-a-paper/ . Everyone is different, but for me the act of writing up notes on the paper really helps – otherwise I find I my retention of what I’ve read is not that great. And even with the notes, I often have to go back and re-read them (at least that’s quicker than re-reading the whole paper again!) when I’m thinking about a subject area.
The only other thing I will say is that it does get easier with practice, both (a) you get better at quickly extracting and synthesising the key information in a paper, and (b) the more you read, the more of the background you already have which helps a lot too.
All the best, Adrian.
Dear Adrian, I just stumbled upon your blog via a retweet by raspberry pi. I subscribed immediately. Great blog! Thank you for the effort.
Adrian, Thank you for your blog. I have really found it useful.
Dear Adrian, it has already been some time since I started reading your blog. It is now becoming a habit of mine to check themorningpaper every time I get to the office in the morning while having my coffee. Your blog ranks along with Scott Aaronson’s blog, Shtetl-Optimized, in my list of personal favorites. I admire the discipline you have developed through reading and understanding papers with varying range of content complexity, almost every single day. I have not gone through all your previous reviews though but one thing I’d like to ask is, if possible, could you write a post about how you review papers? Do you have an outline maybe? I suppose after reviewing some considerable amount of paper you have some how come up with a personal guideline on how to write an effective review.
Thanks Adrian.
Many thanks for the kind words! I wrote a short overview of my paper reviewing process last year, which you can find here: https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/03/30/end-of-term-and-how-i-read-a-paper/
Thanks, Adrian.
Thank you Adrian. I will then read through it.
Hi Adrian, I found your blog a couple days ago. Soon it became my daily reading together with HN and etc. What I really admire is your discipline (as mentioned in the previous comment). At first I couldn’t believe there could be someone keep writing reports everyday, but you truly did. My respect to you, man!
Adrian, I have a request for you. Looking for some blog post related to Smell technology for example http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6676916/?section=abstract
Hi Adrian, I really enjoy your blog. Please keep it up! Given your interests in databases I wonder what you think about the work of Alvin Cheung et al on combining programming language techniques and databases?
Thank you! I haven’t read any of his work – sounds like I should🙂. Is there a particular paper you’d recommend?
Hm I’m not sure. Maybe their work on converting ordinary java code to spark? (along with their earlier work on compiling fortran to halide using similar techniques)