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
ITCS, Day 1
I spent much of today at ITCS (Innovations in Computer Science) 2012, over at MIT. Justin gave an excellent talk on our work (with Graham Cormode) on Practical...
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Chernoff-Hoeffding Bounds for Markov Chains
We (Kai-Min Chung, Henry Lam, Zhenming Liu and myself) have a STACS paper on Chernoff-Hoeffding bounds for Markov chains (arxiv version here). Such bounds areLarge...
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Pointer, to Cash for Citations
I'm disturbed to find that nobody is offering to pay me large sums just to have me affiliated with them for the purposes of raising their citation count. WhatCrooked...
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New Year's Thanks
There are many things I'm thankful for this year. Perhaps most notably, the new year marks the halfway point of my 3-year stint as "Area Dean for Computer Science"...
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Cross-Cultural Learning Curve: Sending a Paper to Science
We decided to submit our paper on MIC and MINE to Science it's a venue that my co-authors were familiar with and very interested in applying to. I was happy to...
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Some of The Fun of Collaborating...The Other People
One of the things I enjoy most about working in algorithms is the breadth of work I get to do. And while I've worked on a variety of things, almost all have been...
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Wasted Hour(s)
Last night I was running some code for a queuing simulation related to some research I'm doing. This is the Nth time I've used this code; I wrote up the basic...
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MIC and MINE, a short description
I thought I should give a brief description of MIC and MINE, the topic of our Science paper. Although you're probably better off, if you're interested, looking...
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Congratulations to Hanspeter Pfister
Despite our really very good track record for the last decade or so, there are some people out there who remain under the misimpression that it's impossible toHanspeter...
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This Week, I Am A Scientist
This week, I am a scientist; I know this, because I have an article in Science. It's nice to have something to point to that my parents can understand. I don't...
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Consulting
As I've probably mentioned, I generally enjoy my consulting work. Besides the obvious remunerative aspects, consulting provides challenges, insights, and experiences...
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Grading
Some folks at the NSDI meeting were nice enough to say that it was nice that I was blogging again. Sadly, I've been under-the-gun busy for the last several weeks...
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Plane Work
I dislike flying, but I have a few flights coming up.I find that engaging in "real thinking" about problems while on a plane is generally beyond me. (I'm jealous...
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The End (of the Semester) is Nigh
If you've missed it (which probably means you're not a theorist and/or a blog-reader), you should check out the (entertaining) controversies of the last week or...
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Letters of Recommendation Time. Ugh.
I don't mind writing letters of recommendation for students. It's part of the job. It's a good thing to do. I just mind dealing with the new e-application sites...
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Round Two Reviewing : An Exercise in Conditional Probabilities
We're in "round 2" of reviews for NSDI, and it's brought up a problem for me I've noticed before. I worry that, subconsciously, I'm inclined to give papers I read...
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Public University Budgets
Another topic that arose in conversations during my visit to Wisconsin was the issue of budgets, and in particular the large-scale cuts that many of the best US...
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Yes, We Are Hiring (2012)
Harvard CS will be hiring this year.One tenure-track position is geared toward systems, very broadly defined.A second tenure-track position is in Applied Math,link...
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Public Salary Information
While visiting Wisconsin last week (enjoying very pleasant company and conversation), various issues came up.For one, I was reminded (or recalled) that as a public...
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