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
Hidden Figures
Yesterday in our tradition of seeing math movies on Christmas, we saw Hidden Figures, the story of African-American women who worked as "computers" at NASA in...
From Computational Complexity
Moneyball for Academics
MIT and Tel Aviv business school professors Dimitris Bertsimas, Erik Brynjolfsson, Shachar Reichman and John Silberholz wrote an intriguing paper Tenure Analytics...
From Computational Complexity
Freedom of Speech
Bill and I have always strongly believed in the principle of freedom of speech, guaranteed to us by the constitution of the United States. The government block...
From Computational Complexity
Fixing the Academic Job Market
Last month I posted about the craziness of the computer science academic job market due mainly to the decentralized nature of our field. Here are some ideas ofSingle...
From Computational Complexity
A Few Interesting Computer Science Papers
Probabilistic Rank and Matrix Rigidity by Josh Alman and Ryan Williams Leslie Valiant outlined an approach to proving circuit lower bounds from matrix rigidity...
From Computational Complexity
Music Theory for Theorists
I fully completed and passed my first MOOC, Fundamentals of Music Theory, a Coursera course out of the University of Edinburgh. I played the tuba in college and...
From Computational Complexity
Computer Science Academic Hiring
My faculty recruiting season in 2016 never stopped. The spring recruiting season bled through summer right into various fall recruiting activities. How I envy my...
From Computational Complexity
Our Role and Responsibility
It's Trump but not just Trump. Brexit. Right-wing politicians gaining power in France, Netherlands, Austria and beyond. We worry about the future of our country...
From Computational Complexity
Do We Still Need Great Minds?
An anonymous comment on a recent post on alternate histories. As far as science is concerned I don't believe that the great minds are needed anymore. They only...
From Computational Complexity
Get Ready
My daughters, now in college, never knew a time when they couldn't communicate with anyone instantaneously. Molly, now 18, takes pride having the same birth year...
From Computational Complexity
Alternate Histories
Imagine if we had a machine that let us change some earlier moment in history and see what developed. We wouldn't actually change history--that would lead to paradoxes...
From Computational Complexity
2016 Fall Jobs Post
The weather cools down, the leaves change color and you start thinking about what you plan to do after you graduate. As a public service every year about this time...
From Computational Complexity
Typecasting from Avi's 60th Celebration
Lance: Live from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Bill and I are doing a typecast from the Avi Wigderson 60th Birthday Celebration. Hi...
From Computational Complexity
Who's Afraid
The playwright Edward Albee passed away earlier this month at the age of 88. I had never actually seen any of his plays so I took the opportunity to watch theWho's...
From Computational Complexity
Boris Trakhtenbrot (1921-2016)
I woke up this morning to two pieces of news. Subhash Khot has just been named a MacArthur Fellow, the "genius" award, for his work on unique games. But I also ...
From Computational Complexity
Academic Rankings Foster Competition
This week US News and World Report released their undergraduate rankings earlier this week. A time for schools to brag. US News and World Report used to publish...
From Computational Complexity
Noam Nisan wins the Knuth Prize
Noam Nisan will receive the 2016 Donald E. Knuth Prize, the highest honor in theoretical computer science, for his work in computational complexity and algorithmic...
From Computational Complexity
Why I Don't Believe in ET
Is there life on other planets? The naive answer is "of course, why should Earth be special." What makes a lottery winner special? We could have just won the life...
From Computational Complexity
The Letter
Guest post by Molly Fortnow, incoming member of the University of Chicago class of 2020. On January 24, 2011, a miraculous thing happened. I was published on the...
From Computational Complexity