weekly-papers-2026-08-15

A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks (Codd, 1970)

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week. Area: Databases. Author: E. F. Codd (IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 1970, pp. 377–387 DOI: 10.1145/362384.362685 Why the paper still matters Codd’s paper is eight pages long, contains no system, no benchmark, and no evaluation section. It would very likely struggle to get past a modern program committee. It is also, by a wide margin, the most economically consequential paper in the history of computer science — the entire relational database industry, SQL, the query optimizer as a discipline, and by extension most of what we call “data infrastructure” descend from it....

The Synthetic Persona Pretraining pipeline: annotate, inject, evaluate

Synthetic Persona Pretraining: Alignment from Token Zero

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-15 CS paper digest. Area: AI / ML. Authors: Julian Minder, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Raghav Singhal (equal contribution), Difan Jiao, Andy Arditi, Shaobo Cui, Jannik Brinkmann, Ashton Anderson, Roland Aydin, Robert West, and others — EPFL, MATS, University of Toronto, Saarland University, Northeastern, SJTU, DFKI, Ontocord AI, Hereon/TUHH arXiv: 2608.13482 · PDF · Models & data TL;DR Every production language model today learns what the world is like during pretraining and only learns who it is supposed to be afterwards, during post-training....

Fair-window hit rates for LRU, LFU, static frequency and Belady across cache budgets

Who Should Own the Expert Cache? Kernel-Managed Tiering for Trillion-Parameter MoE Inference

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-15 CS paper digest. Area: Operating Systems / Systems. Authors: Yuan Si (University of Waterloo), Yufeng Lin (Independent), Daming Li (Independent), Jialu Zhang (University of Waterloo, corresponding) arXiv: 2608.12103 · PDF TL;DR A trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model routes each token through a small, input-dependent slice of its weights — in the production model studied here, an accepted token costs on average 1585 expert reads of 17....