Hello & Welcome to The Prophet!

This article was originally published in The Prophet -- a journal created by and for the students at the Boston University School of Theology (BUSTH) to amplify the voices of STH students by promoting and sharing a range of perspectives on matters of concern including, but not limited to, spiritual practices, faith communities and society, the nature of theology, and current affairs. It serves as a platform for STH students to share their academic work, theological reflections, and life experiences with one another and the wider community.Welcome to the Boston University School of Theology’s student journal – The Prophet

Write for the Prophet this Fall!

This article was originally published in The Prophet -- a journal created by and for the students at the Boston University School of Theology (BUSTH) to amplify the voices of STH students by promoting and sharing a range of perspectives on matters of concern including, but not limited to, spiritual practices, faith communities and society, the nature of theology, and current affairs. It serves as a platform for STH students to share their academic work, theological reflections, and life experiences with one another and the wider community.Call for article submissions for the BU Prophe

Polymatroid Prophet Inequalities

Consider a gambler and a prophet who observe a sequence of independent, non-negative numbers. The gambler sees the numbers one-by-one whereas the prophet sees the entire sequence at once. The goal of both is to decide on fractions of each number they want to keep so as to maximize the weighted fractional sum of the numbers chosen. The classic result of Krengel and Sucheston (1977-78) asserts that if both the gambler and the prophet can pick one number, then the gambler can do at least half as well as the prophet. Recently, Kleinberg and Weinberg (2012) have generalized this result to settings where the numbers that can be chosen are subject to a matroid constraint. In this note we go one step further and show that the bound carries over to settings where the fractions that can be chosen are subject to a polymatroid constraint. This bound is tight as it is already tight for the simple setting where the gambler and the prophet can pick only one number. An interesting application of our result is in mechanism design, where it leads to improved results for various problems

DC-Prophet: Predicting Catastrophic Machine Failures in DataCenters

When will a server fail catastrophically in an industrial datacenter? Is it possible to forecast these failures so preventive actions can be taken to increase the reliability of a datacenter? To answer these questions, we have studied what are probably the largest, publicly available datacenter traces, containing more than 104 million events from 12,500 machines. Among these samples, we observe and categorize three types of machine failures, all of which are catastrophic and may lead to information loss, or even worse, reliability degradation of a datacenter. We further propose a two-stage framework-DC-Prophet-based on One-Class Support Vector Machine and Random Forest. DC-Prophet extracts surprising patterns and accurately predicts the next failure of a machine. Experimental results show that DC-Prophet achieves an AUC of 0.93 in predicting the next machine failure, and a F3-score of 0.88 (out of 1). On average, DC-Prophet outperforms other classical machine learning methods by 39.45% in F3-score.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, accepted by 2017 ECML PKD

El artista en el laboratorio: una cooperación razonablemente traicionera

El títol d'aquest article utilitza la noció de col·laborador en el sentit de col·laboracionista, és a dir, de «cooperar a traïció, com ara amb la força d'ocupació enemiga al propi país». La idea del col·laborador entra immediatament en conflicte; introduiré breument maneres en les quals les col·laboracions entre art i ciència es poden considerar cooperacions a traïció, tant per als àrbitres del gust de les arts com per als de les de les ciències. En resum, suggeriré que abans no hi pugui haver un acostament, necessitem una comprensió més matisada de les divisòries que s'estableixen entre l'art dels nous mitjans, l'art contemporani majoritari i l'art científic o sciart. L'article, basat en les meves pròpies experiències com a artista que ha exposat (amb més o menys èxit) en els tres circuits, procurarà delimitar aquesta terra de ningú, aquesta divisòria. La meva intenció és explorar la naturalesa d'aquesta divisòria entre els discursos de l'art contemporani majoritari, l'art dels nous mitjans i l'art científic per a poder-la travessar més bé.The title uses collaborator in its less popular sense: "To cooperate treasonably, as with an enemy occupation force in one's country". The notion of the collaborator is immediately problematized and I will briefly introduce ways in which art-science collaborations can be seen as treasonable co-operations, by arbiters of taste from both the arts and the sciences. In brief, I will suggest that before rapprochement can take place, we need a more nuanced understanding of the gaps between art made with new media, mainstream contemporary art and sciart. My paper, drawing on my own experiences as an artist who has exhibited in all three circuits (with greater and lesser success) will seek to map this no man's land, this gap. My intention is to explore the nature of the gap between the discourses of mainstream contemporary art, new media, and sciart in order that we might better traverse it.El título de este artículo utiliza la noción de colaborador en el sentido de colaboracionista, es decir, de «cooperar a traición, como por ejemplo con la fuerza de ocupación enemiga en el propio país». La idea del colaborador entra en conflicto de inmediato, e introduciré brevemente modos en los que las colaboraciones entre arte y ciencia pueden considerarse cooperaciones a traición, tanto para los árbitros del gusto de las artes como para los de las de las ciencias. En resumen, sugeriré que antes de que se pueda producir un acercamiento, necesitamos una comprensión más matizada de las brechas que se establecen entre el arte de los nuevos medios, el arte contemporáneo mayoritario y el arte científico o sciart. El artículo, basado en mis propias experiencias como artista que ha expuesto (con mayor o menor éxito) en los tres circuitos, procurará delimitar esta tierra de nadie, esta brecha. Mi intención es explorar la naturaleza de esta brecha entre los discursos del arte contemporáneo mayoritario, el arte de los nuevos medios y el arte científico para poder atravesarla mejor

On being a Teaching Fellow

This article was originally published in The Prophet -- a journal created by and for the students at the Boston University School of Theology (BUSTH) to amplify the voices of STH students by promoting and sharing a range of perspectives on matters of concern including, but not limited to, spiritual practices, faith communities and society, the nature of theology, and current affairs. It serves as a platform for STH students to share their academic work, theological reflections, and life experiences with one another and the wider community."One of my former discussion group students asked me to write for the Prophet about what it’s like being a Teaching Fellow at STH... " [EXCERPT

The Evolution of a DTN Routing Protocol - PRoPHETv2

Research within Delay- and Disruption Tolerant Networks (DTN) has evolved into a mature research area. PRoPHET is a routing protocol for DTNs that was developed when DTN research was in its infancy and which has been studied by many. In this paper we investigate how the protocol can evolve to meet new challenges that has been identified through research and practical experience. We propose some minor modifications to the routing metric cal- culations done in PRoPHET which has potential to alleviate some issues and improve the performance of the protocol. Using these modifications, we define an updated version of the protocol called PRoPHETv2. We run simulations to verify the operation of the protocol and compare its performance against the original version of the protocol as well as some other routing protocols. The evalua- tions are done using both traces from an existing DTN deployment and a synthetic mobility model. Since the basic mechanisms of the protocol remain the same, migrating existing implementations to the new version of PRoPHET is possible with limited effort