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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 Theorist Goes to SOSP
Monday I attended the 24th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, the lead conference for computer systems research. Why would a nice theorist go to SOSP? Trying...
From Computational Complexity
Andrzej Mostowski (1913-1975)
Andrzej Mostowski was born 100 years ago today. While Mostowski worked in many areas of logic, including early fundamental work on model theory, for our readers...
From Computational Complexity
Science and Humanities
David Hollinger, a historian, wrote a recent Chronicle Review article The Wedge Driving Academe's Two Families Apart: Can STEM and the human sciences get along?...
From Computational Complexity
2013 Fall Jobs Post
Time again for the annual fall jobs post. As always the best places to look for academic CS positions are the job sites at the CRA and the ACM. Also check out the...
From Computational Complexity
Shut Down
The NSF core proposal in theoretical computer science, or Algorithmic Foundations as the NSF calls it hs three deadlines this academic year: Medium proposals (...
From Computational Complexity
Celebrating Maths in Oxford
This week I'm in Oxford for the opening of the new Andrew Wiles Mathematical Institute building and the Clay Research Conference including on workshop on New....
From Computational Complexity
Complexity and FOCS
The Conference on Computational Complexity Call for Papers is out, deadline November 27. The deadline for early registration and hotel for the FOCS conferenceavailable...
From Computational Complexity
Dealing with Death
Mary Jean Harrold, a professor of software engineering at Georgia Tech, passed away last week. Mary Jean was 67 and still quite active before the cancer struck....
From Computational Complexity
tl;dr
Every now and then we need new words and phrases come into our lexicon, like the unfortunate "twerking", but here's another "tl;dr", short for "too long; didn't...
From Computational Complexity
Cryptography and the NSA
Back at Northwestern I occasionally taught an undergraduate cryptography class since I was the local expert in the field (a statement not even remotely true atAdvanced...
From Computational Complexity
Myhill Nerode versus Pumping Lemma
I have seen some recent backlash against the pumping lemma for showing that languages are not regular and as I am now teaching regular languages I had to choose...
From Computational Complexity
The Dream
I have this theory that everybody's notion of "recent history" starts not from their memories but from their birth date. Case in point: Billy Joel's We Didn't Start...
From Computational Complexity
P = NP and the Weather
In the Beautiful World, my science fiction chapter of The Golden Ticket where P = NP in a strong way, I predicted that we could predict weather accurately enough...
From Computational Complexity
Flash Gordon
We watched the movie Ted last week but this post isn't about that movie. The movie has several references to the 1980 movie Flash Gordon including an extended cameo...
From Computational Complexity
Don't Have an End Game
As a young professor, I wrote a grant proposal and took it to a senior theory professor for comments. He told me to take out the line "The ultimate goal of computational...
From Computational Complexity
Why is Multiplication Hard?
Quick. What is 879544 * 528045? Unless you used a calculator or was some sort of savant you it would take you a couple of minutes to figure out a solution. Of course...
From Computational Complexity
Ph.D. Attrition
Leonard Cassuto writes in the Chronicle an article Ph.D. Attrition: How Much Is Too Much? He presupposes the answer with the subtitle "A disturbing 50 percent of...
From Computational Complexity
AltaVista versus Google
Today Yahoo is closing AltaVista, the best search engine before Google. The news caught me by surprise, AltaVista still existed? A number of commentators attribute...
From Computational Complexity
Computability in Europe
Bill and I are both in Europe this week. I'm in Milan at Computability in Europe and Bill is 500 miles away in Budapest for the Paul Erdős Centenary. The US 4th...
From Computational Complexity