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
New Paper: Information Asymmetries in Pay-Per-Bid Auctions
I'm happy to announce a new paper that answers, among other questions, how I spent a huge chunk of my winter holiday break. The paper is by me, John Byers, and...
From My Biased Coin
How Much Grading Should Professors Do?
One of the outcomes of the Harvard budget crisis is that the budget for Teaching Assistants has been brought into line. At Harvard, we've been ridiculously spoiled...
From My Biased Coin
New Year's Again
It's time for the annual New Year posting. Last year, I talked about the potential power of affirmations -- in the sense of thinking about concrete goals you hope...
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New Result : Tight Asymptotic Bounds for the Deletion Channel with Small Deletion Probabilities
Posting will be light over winter break, in part because so little is going on, but more because I'm busy working on papers for upcoming deadlines. I'll describe...
From My Biased Coin
Text-book Algorithms at SODA (Guest Post, Mikkel Thorup)
Mikkel Thorup sent in the following guest post:Text-book algorithms at SODAThis is a pitch for promoting good text-book algorithms at SODA. Erdos promoted book...
From My Biased Coin
Avoiding Travel
I'm spending the morning as part of the committee for a thesis defense over in Europe. I'm watching the talk over Skype; we're using a conference call for sound...
From My Biased Coin
LiveBlogging NSDI PC Meeting
My post today is live-blogging the NSDI PC Meeting -- with a delay for security purposes, of course.My take on the reviews (and from past experience) is that the...
From My Biased Coin
Harvard Governance
Harry Lewis (and Fred Abernathy) take a stand against the Harvard Corporation. Required reading for anyone associated with Harvard, or interested in its current...
From My Biased Coin
News Items
The people at Microsoft Research New England are excited to announce that Boaz Barak will be joining them. I imagine the situation is similar to their hiring of...
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TSA Oops
You may have heard on the news that the TSA (temporarily) put up their Screening Management Standard Operating Procedure on the web. As pointed out on this blog...
From My Biased Coin
Faculty Ratios
Perhaps the most basic breakdown one can make of a college faculty is into the categories Natural Sciences / Social Sciences / Humanities. (Yes, one could naturally...
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Retirement
No, not for me. But Harvard has announced its plans to encourage faculty to retire. I won't call it an "early retirement" package, since it is for people over...
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Tight Thresholds for Cuckoo Hashing via XORSAT
As I promised sometime back, we now have a paper (up on the arxiv) giving the thresholds for cuckoo hashing, a problem that had been open and was part of my survey...
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4-Year Masters
Harvard, like many other places, has an option by which students (with "Advanced Standing" from AP classes) can obtain a Master's (in some programs) as well as...
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In Reverse
The Crimson is reporting that the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences will plan to decrease the size of the faculty* in response to budget woes. The key point...
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Job Advice?
Not for me, thank goodness. A very talented graduating senior (who may or may not be Harvard...) has obtained a number of job offers, and asked me if I had any...
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Conference Reviewing Update
A few weeks ago, I talked about the reviewing process for NSDI and LATIN. I suppose now is a reasonable time for an update.LATIN is nearing the end of the reviewing...
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Surveys
This post is about surveys. It's motivated by one of my tasks last night, as I has to spend some time going over the final proofs for the survey Hash-Based Techniques...
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Graduate School? How to Decide...
What do people think about students going to work for a year or two and then applying to graduate school? Or applying but then deferring to work for a year or...
From My Biased Coin