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
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...
From My Biased Coin
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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CAEC: First Cambridge Area Economics and Computation Day
Giorgos suggested I remind people about CAEC, which will be next week (November 18).Still time to sign up and register.Here's the link.
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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...
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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...
From My Biased Coin