A few weeks ago, my advisor and I made the arduous 10 mile journey to the Googleplex to give a talk about our work on understanding complex systems. This was part of Google’s lecture series called Tech Talks. Alex actually gives the presentation, but I take the blame for the crudely drawn slides. Here’s the abstract:
We propose a method for identifying the sources of problems in complex production systems where, due to the prohibitive costs of instrumentation, the data available for analysis may be noisy or incomplete. In particular, we may not have complete knowledge of all components and their interactions. We define influences as a class of component interactions that includes direct communication and resource contention. Our method infers the influences among components in a system by looking for time-correlated divergence from models of individual component behavior. We summarize the strength and directionality of shared influences using a Structure-of-Influence Graph (SIG). This talk explains how to construct a SIG and use it to isolate performance bugs, and presents both simulations and an in-depth case study using data from two autonomous vehicles.
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May 17th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
For the record, when I teach place value to my 5th graders, we talk about The Googleplex. Mostly the number, but the corporate headquarters also makes a cameo appearance.