Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From My Biased Coin
Retirement
No, not for me. But Harvard has announced its plans to encourage faculty to retire. I won't call it an "early retirement" package, since it is for people over...
From My Biased Coin
Tight Thresholds for Cuckoo Hashing via XORSAT
As I promised sometime back, we now have a paper (up on the arxiv) giving the thresholds for cuckoo hashing, a problem that had been open and was part of my survey...
From The Noisy Channel
Search User Interfaces and Data Quality
One of the many things I’ve enjoyed in my first few weeks of working at Google is the opportunity to talk with many people who care about user interfaces and think...
From The Noisy Channel
Fun with Google, Bing, and Yahoo
Web search is a fiercely competitive space–as Google points out, “competition is just one click away“. In practice, I take that claim with a grain of salt–but I...
From My Biased Coin
4-Year Masters
Harvard, like many other places, has an option by which students (with "Advanced Standing" from AP classes) can obtain a Master's (in some programs) as well as...
From The Noisy Channel
Can We Learn From Anti-Social Users?
One of the interesting challenges we face as both developers and consumers of search technology is that social signals are a double-edged sword. On one hand, social...
From My Biased Coin
In Reverse
The Crimson is reporting that the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences will plan to decrease the size of the faculty* in response to budget woes. The key point...
From My Biased Coin
Job Advice?
Not for me, thank goodness. A very talented graduating senior (who may or may not be Harvard...) has obtained a number of job offers, and asked me if I had any...
From The Noisy Channel
Exploring Explortatory Search
Google’s recently released Image Swirl is slick. But I’ve been struggling to figure out whether it’s useful or simply a showcase for cool technology.
From My Biased Coin
Conference Reviewing Update
A few weeks ago, I talked about the reviewing process for NSDI and LATIN. I suppose now is a reasonable time for an update.LATIN is nearing the end of the reviewing...
From The Noisy Channel
An Ad-Supported Model With Teeth?
Apple recently filed for technology to deliver a rather compelling ad-supported business model. Or perhaps the better word is compulsory. You can read an analysis...
From My Biased Coin
Surveys
This post is about surveys. It's motivated by one of my tasks last night, as I has to spend some time going over the final proofs for the survey Hash-Based Techniques...
From The Noisy Channel
Week 1 at Google: Information Overload!
As you might imagine, it’s quite a switch to go from criticizing Google from the outside to being on the inside. Jeff Jarvis, who was gracious enough not to make...
From My Biased Coin
Graduate School? How to Decide...
What do people think about students going to work for a year or two and then applying to graduate school? Or applying but then deferring to work for a year or...
From The Noisy Channel
The Noisy Noogler: A Quick FAQ
I’m barely 24 hours into my new life as a Googler, and I’ve already gotten lots of questions!
From My Biased Coin