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
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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.
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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. ...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin