Communications of the ACM
Refine your search:
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
Best Written Paper
Daniel Lemire pointed to an article on bad writing in science (here if you care to see, not CS-specific), which got me to thinking: do we (in whatever subcommunity...
From My Biased Coin
A Brief Comment on Conference Software
I'm currently juggling serving on two PCs. One uses HotCRP. One uses EDAS. In my humble opinion, HotCRP hugely dominates EDAS. Perhaps EDAS isn't actually so...
From My Biased Coin
Housing Day Midterm
As a sign I just must be getting old, I don't get an issue some students have with me.Since I've been professing, I hold the midterm for my class the Thursday before...
From My Biased Coin
Pointers, Not Papers
Having just crammed everything we could of a 10 page paper into 5 pages for a workshop paper, I admit that besides (once again) being annoyed by having to go through...
From My Biased Coin
Making a Midterm is No Fun
I think one of most challenging parts of teaching a course is setting up exams. There are a lot of constraints:You want to cover, as reasonably as possible, all...
From My Biased Coin
Inaccessible
The major reason for my lack of blog posts recently is that I was cut off from the Internet for a week.* Surprisingly, the experience was not so bad. I actually...
From My Biased Coin
Technology Diffusion (Guest Post from Zhenming Liu)
My student, Zhenming Liu, writes about some of his recent work:Sharon Goldberg and I recently submitted a paper about technology diffusion in the context of communication...
From My Biased Coin
Advantages of a Bigger Class
I'm several weeks into the super-sized class this semester. Mostly, I find it's going fine -- indeed, there are some advantages, I'm finding, to the larger class...
From My Biased Coin
Using Piazza
My TAs forced me to "get with the program" and use Piazza as our mechanism for student questions. In the past I've simply used a central e-mail address that got...
From My Biased Coin
A Systems Complaint
I think of myself as a person who works both in systems and theory. And I've found that's often a challenging position. I've been vocal before that I think theory...
From My Biased Coin
Class Size Incentives
There's an interesting story in today's Crimson about a possible rise in "limited enrollment" classes at Harvard. (See this older Crimson article as well.) There...
From My Biased Coin
Citation Circles on FSP
Sorry I haven't blogged much. Life's been busy. But here's an interesting post by FemaleScienceProfessor discussing the appearance of "citation circles", people...
From My Biased Coin
A Good Problem to Have
Last year's enrollment for CS 124 was 53. So far, current enrollment for this year: 119. I imagine a few are still just taking a look and might drop. But a doubling...
From My Biased Coin
Faculty Applications
An anonymous commenter asked how we evaluate faculty applications. While it's a little late, it's a valid question, so here are some high-level thoughts. Here...
From My Biased Coin
Collective Coordination of Conferences?
Around this time of year, I get a number of messages from students: I want to take your class, but there's a conflict with this other class I want to take, what...
From My Biased Coin
January Flying By...
I'm enjoying a relatively snow-free January, but despite the extra time I've had on my hands from not having to shovel, I've had little time for blogging. Reasons...
From My Biased Coin
ITCS, Day 2
I stopped a while by ITCS, before having to deal with other meetings. I saw fellow blogger Claire Mathieu, who told me my post on day 1 was negative. To be clear...
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin