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
Papers to Teach This Year
This fall I'm again teaching my "introductory" graduate class loosely centered on the themes of big data and communications/networks, Algorithms at the End of the...
From My Biased Coin
Back from Travels
The slowdown in posting for the past month has been primarily due to travel. For the last month, I've been in England, based primarily at the Computer Science. ...
From My Biased Coin
The 2050 Calculator
As regular blog-readers know, I'm a tremendous fan of David MacKay, who has gone from being a leader in the general area of Bayesian inference (author of Information...
From My Biased Coin
Teaching Time Conflicts
As the semester ominously approaches, we've noticed that we're facing a number of class time-slot collisions in computer science.This is unsurprising. Until recently...
From My Biased Coin
"I Understood Your Talk"
Often, after I give a talk, the feedback I hear back is "I understood your whole talk," or something near that. I take it as a compliment (although I don't think...
From My Biased Coin
New Paper: Popularity is Everything
Another new paper announcement: Popularity is Everything: A New Approach to Protecting Passwords from Statistical-Guessing Attacks, which will appear next month...
From My Biased Coin
Facebook Movie Preview
It's nice to see Harvard finally getting some recognition in the mainstream media, with the upcoming Facebook/Zuckerburg movie the Social Network (based on BenThe...
From My Biased Coin
Arxiv Paper: Heapable Sequences and Subsequences
I haven't been blogging much; consider me on extended vacation. It's helping me prepare for giving up the blog soonish. But I thought I'd mention our newly posted...
From My Biased Coin
(n)On Vacation
Despite appearance, the blog hasn't yet disappeared. I was on family vacation somewhere tropical. Even though I was on vacation, it didn't always feel like vacation...
From My Biased Coin
Colocating Conferences -- What Will It Take?
In the ongoing future of STOC debate, one possibility that seems to have significant support is that we should do more colocation of conferences. (See Suresh's...
From My Biased Coin
ISIT Day 2 (2010)
First, finishing up day 1, the banquet was, as expected, a fairly nondescript affair involving chicken of some sort, which I happily got to spend with a group of...
From My Biased Coin
Fly-By Conferences (ISIT edition)
I'm writing this from ISIT (Int'l Symposium on Inf. Theory) in Austin. In fact, I'm sitting in on the session on for "Coding for Memories", a topic I did someweb...
From My Biased Coin
"Area Dean" : What's That Mean
In a few weeks, I "officially" take on my new job as "Area Dean" (read, "Chair") of CS. What will in entail?Formally, there appear to be a number of responsibilities...
From My Biased Coin
Cherry Murray appointed to oil spill panel
Dean of Harvard's SEAS, Cherry Murray, is to be appointed to President Obama's oil spill panel.
From My Biased Coin
Crimson Article on SEAS
This article from the Crimson on the state of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from a couple of weeks ago serves as a good primer for me on...
From My Biased Coin
Hectic Week, Finally Over!
Co-located conferences make for a hectic week! Again, my thanks to the Microsoft local arrangement team (especially Paul Oka) for setting up STOC, which I thought...
From My Biased Coin
STOC/FOCS Opinion : Guest Post by Boaz Barak
Boaz Barak asked to give a guest post on the recent STOC/FOCS issue and the question of accepting more papers. So I hand the floor over to Boaz:Do we really need...
From My Biased Coin
Branding Your Research (and Yourself)
In honor of being at EC, a post on branding. In theory, your research will be judged and appreciated based on its intrinsic quality, and your scientific reputation...
From My Biased Coin
EC Day 1
EC is an interesting mix of theory/AI/economics and many other things as well (data mining, social computing, user interfaces....) Definitely a bit of a hodgepodge...
From My Biased Coin