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 Computational Complexity
A Tale of Three Rankings
In the Spring of 2018 the US News and World Report should release their latest rankings of US graduate science programs including computer science. These are the...
From Computational Complexity
Advice for the Advisor
A soon-to-be professor asked me recently if I could share some ideas on on how to advise students. I started to write some notes only to realize that I had already...
From Computational Complexity
Matching and Complexity
Given a group of people, can you pair them up so that each pair are Facebook friends with each other? This is the famous perfect matching problem. The complexity...
From Computational Complexity
2017 Fall Jobs Post
You're finishing up grad school or a postdoc and ask yourself what should I do for the rest of my life? We can't answer that for you but we can help you figureCRA...
From Computational Complexity
The Amazon Gold Rush
Unless you have hidden under a rock, Amazon wants to build a second headquarters in or near a large North American city. Amazon put out a nice old fashioned...
From Computational Complexity
Lessons from the Nobel Prizes
We've had a big week of awards with the Nobel Prizes and the MacArthur "Genius" Fellows. The MacArthur Fellows include two computer scientists, Regina Barzilay and...
From Computational Complexity
Monty Hall (1921-2017) and His Problem
Monty Hall passed away yesterday, best known for co-creating and hosting the game show The Price is Right, a show I occasionally watched as a kid. To the best...
From Computational Complexity
Tragic Losses
I'd like to remember two young people who's lives were taken way too early. I didn't know either well but both played large roles in two different communities...
From Computational Complexity
Random Storm Thoughts
It's Monday as I write this post from home. Atlanta, for the first time ever, is in a tropical storm warning. Georgia Tech is closed today and tomorrow. I'm just...
From Computational Complexity
Rules and Exceptions
As a mathematician nothing grates me more than the expression "The exception that proves the rule". Either we bake the exception into the rule (all primes are odd...
From Computational Complexity
NOT So Powerful
A monotone circuit has only AND and OR gates, no NOT gates. Monotone circuits can only produce monotone functions like clique or perfect matching, where addingFavorite...
From Computational Complexity
Kurtz-Fest
Stuart Kurtz turned 60 last October and his former students John Rogers and Stephen Fenner organized a celebration in his honor earlier this week at Fenner's...
From Computational Complexity
The Crystal Blogaversity
A joint post from Lance and Bill This blog started fifteen years ago today as "My Computational Complexity Web Log". Bill came on permanently in 2007 after Lance...
From Computational Complexity
The World is Not for Me
I wanted to address diversity after the Google memo controversy but that shouldn't come from an old white man. I asked my daughter Molly, a college student trying...
From Computational Complexity
Wearable Tech and Attention
Remember the Bluetooth craze where it seemed half of all people walked around with a headset in their ear. Now you rarely do. Remember Google Glass. That didn't...
From Computational Complexity
What Makes a Great Definition
Too often we see bad definitions, a convoluted mess carefully crafted to make a theorem true. A student asked me though what makes for a great definition in theoretical...
From Computational Complexity
Peter Wegner (1932-2017)
Peter Wegner passed away yesterday morning at the age of 84. As a child he escaped Stalinist Russia and Nazi-occupied Austria the latter via the Kindertransport...
From Computational Complexity
Lessons from Norway
For the last two weeks, the wife and I took a vacation to beautiful Norway to see the fjords and the North Cape, effectively the northernmost point in Europe. It...
From Computational Complexity
The Complexity of Rubik's Cube
In my book I use Rubik's Cube as an example of a puzzle we can computationally solve efficiently (as opposed to Sudoku or Rush Hour). How does this square with...
From Computational Complexity