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
Housing Day Midterm
As a sign I just must be getting old, I don't get an issue some students have with me.Since I've been professing, I hold the midterm for my class the Thursday before...
From The Noisy Channel
Making Love with Data: Avinash Kaushik
Just watch the presentation, which stole the show at Strata 2012. The written word cannot do justice to Avinash’s passion and his extraordinary ability to communicate...
From My Biased Coin
Pointers, Not Papers
Having just crammed everything we could of a 10 page paper into 5 pages for a workshop paper, I admit that besides (once again) being annoyed by having to go through...
From The Noisy Channel
Humans, Machines, and the Dimensions of Microwork
As per my previous post, I had a great time at the O’Reilly Strata Conference. It was a delight to participate in such a fantastic gathering of folks who work with...
From My Biased Coin
Making a Midterm is No Fun
I think one of most challenging parts of teaching a course is setting up exams. There are a lot of constraints:You want to cover, as reasonably as possible, all...
From My Biased Coin
Inaccessible
The major reason for my lack of blog posts recently is that I was cut off from the Internet for a week.* Surprisingly, the experience was not so bad. I actually...
From The Noisy Channel
Strata 2012: Big Data is Bigger than Ever!
I spent the last three days at the O’Reilly Strata Conference, an assembly of two thousand people focused on data science and its applications. While I’m wary of...
From My Biased Coin
Technology Diffusion (Guest Post from Zhenming Liu)
My student, Zhenming Liu, writes about some of his recent work:Sharon Goldberg and I recently submitted a paper about technology diffusion in the context of communication...
From My Biased Coin
Advantages of a Bigger Class
I'm several weeks into the super-sized class this semester. Mostly, I find it's going fine -- indeed, there are some advantages, I'm finding, to the larger class...
From My Biased Coin
Using Piazza
My TAs forced me to "get with the program" and use Piazza as our mechanism for student questions. In the past I've simply used a central e-mail address that got...
From My Biased Coin
A Systems Complaint
I think of myself as a person who works both in systems and theory. And I've found that's often a challenging position. I've been vocal before that I think theory...
From The Noisy Channel
Enjoying Seattle
My excursion to Seattle was delightful, and I thought I’d share some details with readers. I spent most of Friday at the University of Washington, meeting with...
From My Biased Coin
Class Size Incentives
There's an interesting story in today's Crimson about a possible rise in "limited enrollment" classes at Harvard. (See this older Crimson article as well.) There...
From My Biased Coin
Citation Circles on FSP
Sorry I haven't blogged much. Life's been busy. But here's an interesting post by FemaleScienceProfessor discussing the appearance of "citation circles", people...
From My Biased Coin
A Good Problem to Have
Last year's enrollment for CS 124 was 53. So far, current enrollment for this year: 119. I imagine a few are still just taking a look and might drop. But a doubling...
From My Biased Coin
Faculty Applications
An anonymous commenter asked how we evaluate faculty applications. While it's a little late, it's a valid question, so here are some high-level thoughts. Here...
From The Noisy Channel
LinkedIn @ CMU
As regular readers know, I have a deep affection for Carnegie Mellon University, where I did my graduate work. I’m happy to announce that two of my colleagues (both...
From My Biased Coin
Collective Coordination of Conferences?
Around this time of year, I get a number of messages from students: I want to take your class, but there's a conflict with this other class I want to take, what...
From The Noisy Channel