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
Programming for Non-Programming Exercises
One of the exercises I assigned last week proved interesting: Consider n points on a circle, labeled clockwise from 0 to n-1. Initially a wolf begins at 0 and...
From My Biased Coin
A Tale of Talks
A bunch of talks today.Carla Gomes gave a talk at CRCS (Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society) to talk about her work on computational sustainability...
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Funny E-mail of the Day
I've having some issues getting straight answers over e-mail from an administrator in some Harvard office I'm dealing with. This morning, I found the following...
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This Week, We Were Doing Security
If you look on Yelp's engineering blog (http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2011/10/output-filtering-failure.html), you'll see Yelp's VP of Engineering, Michael Stoppelman...
From My Biased Coin
Lisa Randall on the Daily Show
Last night's Daily Show (link to full episode) was on fire.The first segment was focused on SCIENCE! The part with Aasaf Mandvi was simultaneously hysterical and...
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Students are Awesome(ly Productive Right Now)
What's the use of a blog if you can't brag about your students? And my students have all been doing great stuff, so I'm excited to let others know about theirarxiv...
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An Exceptional Exponential Embedding
This week in class I get to teach one of my favorite probability arguments, which makes use of a very unusual embedding. Here's a short description (for the longer...
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ITCS Review
The list of accepted papers for ITCS (Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science) is up. Some thoughts:1) I have expressed reservations in the past about ITCS...
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An Apple a Day
Reviewing papers for a conference is a slow, time-consuming process. Suppose you had 20 reviews due and about 4 weeks to do them. What's your approach?I take...
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John Byers on WBUR
Listening to my co-author, John Byers, streamed live on WBUR, discussing our work on Groupon. Ben Edelman is another participant in the show.Here's the link. ...
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Listen
A colleague outside theory (but inside computer science) recently brought up an interesting question with me that seemed like a possible research-level issue. LogP...
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Reading Confidence Men
My current spare time reading* is Confidence Men, Ron Suskind's book on Wall Street and the Presidency. Without "taking sides" with regard to Larry Summers, IMockingjay...
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Submissions, A Comparison
I just got my set of NSDI papers to review, and have been looking them over.One thing that immediately strikes me as I give them a first quick pass is how nice...
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Goodbye to Steve Jobs
My Mac laptop froze today. It was an unusual occurrence; I turned the machine off, and for a minute it wouldn't turn back on again. I was in a panic. Then it...
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New York Times
Our work on daily deals is mentioned and linked to in Sunday's New York Times business section. (John Byers even got a quote in!) It was also mentioned in this...
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Allerton Part 2 : Venue Change?
Yesterday, I thought the best talks I saw were by Devavrat Shah and Dina Katabi.Dev was talking about how to track where rumors start. The model is you have aproject...
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Allerton 2011
I woke up at an absurdly early hour this morning to get on a plane and go to the Allerton conference. I'm giving a talk this afternoon on Invertible Bloom Lookup...
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Set Competition
As an applied probability exercise, I had my class compute empirically the probability of a game failing on the nth round for the game of Set. (See my previous...
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Beyond Worst Case Analysis Workshop
I'm just off a plane coming home from the Beyond Worst Case Analysis Workshop at Stanford. It went really well, and I really enjoyed it.I think a variety of things...
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