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
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 The Noisy Channel
LinkedIn Faceted Search Now Out Of Beta
LinkedIn started rolling out a beta version of faceted people search back in July. Now it’s officially out of beta, as announced on their blog. I’ve re-posted the...
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 The Noisy Channel
Karaoke: A Hotbed for Micro-IR?
I’m a karaoke junkie and proud to admit it. But one of the challenges I regularly face, especially when I go to an unfamiliar karaoke joint, is finding a song I...
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From The Noisy Channel
Search User Interfaces and Data Quality
One of the many things I’ve enjoyed in my first few weeks of working at Google is the opportunity to talk with many people who care about user interfaces and think...
From The Noisy Channel
Fun with Google, Bing, and Yahoo
Web search is a fiercely competitive space–as Google points out, “competition is just one click away“. In practice, I take that claim with a grain of salt–but I...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From The Noisy Channel
Can We Learn From Anti-Social Users?
One of the interesting challenges we face as both developers and consumers of search technology is that social signals are a double-edged sword. On one hand, social...
From My Biased Coin
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...
From My Biased Coin