Report from PODC 2009 (Guest Post, Aaron Sterling)

Aaron Sterling reports from PODC:

I'm in Calgary, where PODC 2009, the Twenty-Eighth Annual ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, has just ended. Lorenzo Alvisi was the Program Chair and Srikanta Tirthapura was the General Chair. However, the clear consensus was that the heroes of the conference were Local Arrangement Chairs Lisa Highman and Philipp Woelfel, who ensured the event ran smoothly, and raised a large amount of money from Canadian sources. This, for example, allowed the organizers to reduce the student registration to $120, and provide significant student support on top of that. Impressive.

My favorite talk of the program was by invited speaker Bruce Hendrickson, who argued for the position that we are in a brand new situation with regard to parallelism in computing -- and not because of "multicore." Rather, he foresaw a growing demand for scientific computation by disciplines (like economics and sociology) that study graphs with fundamentally different structures from the physics-type problems that has previously been the bread and butter of scientific computing. This will require creation of architectures that relate to memory significantly differently, because, to paraphrase Hendrickson, "Computation is limited by memory access, not by processor speed." At the same time, he saw a brand new situation in terms of desktop architecture and programming, because, for the first time ever, "Silicon is essentially free" -- meaning, a chip designer could encode circuitry used by everyone and still have enough space left over to lay down circuitry that would only be used by a small fraction of users, like customers interested in scientific computing. Hendrickson claimed adding this additional functionality would not significantly increase production cost, meaning we are in a brand-new period of architecture design.

Both Hendrickson and invited speaker Robbert van Renesse advocated teaching undergraduates much more about parallelism than is currently in the curriculum. Renesse presented a new method for explaining consensus algorithms step-by-step. The third invited speaker, Sarita Adve -- who also gave a superb presentation -- called more explicitly for the creation of new tools. In particular, she stated the need for new parallel programming languages that would, for example, prevent programmers from constructing data races.

Moving to the refereed program, Christoph Lenzen presented "Tight Bounds
for Clock Synchronization," which won the Best Paper Award. This is joint work with Thomas Locher and Roger Wattenhofer, and is a tour de force, providing tight upper and lower bounds for (both global and local) clock synchronization in a network, finally solving a problem many authors have been working on, in some sense, since the 1980s. Keren Censor won the Best Student Paper Award for "Max Registers, Counters, and Monotone Circuits." This is joint work with Jim Aspnes and Hagit Attiya. I thought Censor gave the best presentation of the conference, out of all the refereed submissions. Her takeaway message was, "Lower bounds do not always have the last word," because she was able to "beat" a lower bound by investigating the proof, and then modifying the shared objects she used so they no longer had the problem the proof technique took advantage of.

Given the blog I'm guestposting on, I cannot resist telling this story. Christoph and I met at DISC 2008, where we both presented papers. We hit it off, and learned that we both intended to submit to STOC 2009, so we laid down a friendly challenge that we would next see each other at STOC. As I posted here previously, my STOC submission was rejected, I upgraded it, submitted it elsewhere, and was quite happy with the result. Christoph's STOC submission was rejected also, and, sure enough, he resubmitted to PODC and won Best Paper for it. So, once again, rejection from a conference is far from the end of the world.

The business meeting was animated. The least controversial
agenda item was the elections. Andrjez Pelc is the new Steering
Committee chair (replacing Faith Ellen), and Jennifer Welch is the new
Steering Committee Member-at-Large (replacing Michel Raynal). There
was extensive discussion on nonbinding votes to give direction to the
Steering Committee. Perhaps of most interest to readers of this blog,
the business meeting voted overwhelmingly that full proofs of results
should be included in future PODC submissions, in an appendix if
appropriate. There was (unresolved) debate over whether to publish
abstracts along with the list of accepted papers. Some people from
industry were opposed to this, because they thought it might start the
"patent clock" a few months earlier. Lastly, I will mention that
there was discussion about whether to separate PODC from the ACM,
because of concerns that ACM was not providing value for the amount of
money they were charging the conference. No consensus was reached
here, but there were definitely strong opinions.

PODC 2010 will be organized by Roger Wattenhofer in Zurich.
I'm sure it will be great, but he has a tough act to follow.

Skype as a Research Tool

Yesterday, I used Skype on three different research projects to synch up with my collaborators. I hadn't realized Skype was becoming a basic research tool for me, but I suppose that's the sign that it is.

Generally I wasn't even using the video features. Most of what I do with Skype I could do as well on the phone. The conference call feature is very nice and easy to use, moreso than the standard phone system, but I still experience more drops on Skype than I would on a phone.

Somehow, the real value of Skype is that it's running on my computer, where I'm doing the research work as well. I can look through relevant old e-mails or read relevant documents while Skype continues managing the conversation. Somehow, it all works more conveniently than using the phone and the computer. I expect that "long-distance" research will continue to become easier and constitute more of my research time.

Harvard Group Wins Expeditions Grant

It's now public that Harvard has won one of the latest rounds of Expeditions grants with a engineering/computer science team to build RoboBee. It's an exciting project that highlights the diversity and collaborative spirit of the faculty in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. While I'm not involved in the project several of my colleagues are, and I congratulate them all. Here's the high level description:

"A multidisciplinary team of computer scientists, engineers, and biologists at Harvard received a $10 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions in Computing grant to fund the development of small-scale mobile robotic devices. Inspired by the biology of a bee and the insect's hive behavior, the researchers aim to push advances in miniature robotics and the design of compact high-energy power sources; spur innovations in ultra-low-power computing and electronic "smart" sensors; and refine coordination algorithms to manage multiple, independent machines."

When talking to two of my colleagues about RoboBee, I quietly expressed that my only concern was that this is how Skynet started. Strangely, neither of them got the reference. Which only makes me more concerned.

SiGCOMM Papers Are Up

The SIGCOMM conference takes place next week, and if you want to look at the papers, here they are, nicely available online.

Since I was on the PC, it might be impolitic to provide detailed comments, but here's a few thoughts. First, the key words for this year's conference seem to be "Data Center". There are a lot -- a LOT -- of data center papers. I leave the implications for next year's submission strategy to you. Second, I feel scooped by the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison group for their PLUG paper, on how to implement flexible high-speed lookup modules in hardware. It's an idea I've been batting about for a while, but the devil is in the details of the implementation. Congrats on the paper! Third, congrats to Matt Welsh (of Harvard) for his paper on "White Space Networking".

Sadly, I won't be going... while I love the city of Barcelona, it seemed like a ways to go given that I've already read most of the papers. Perhaps it was a trip I should have made and brought the family along. Especially since next year's SIGCOMM is in New Delhi, which makes traveling to Barcelona seem easy by comparison.

Publishing Goals - Diversity

For the first time, I'm a co-author on a graphics paper; the paper Real-Time Parallel Hashing on the GPU, with co-authors Dan Alcantara, Andrei Sharf, Fatemeh Abbasinejad, Nina Amenta, Shubhabrata Sengupta, and John D. Owens of University of California, Davis, was (conditionally) accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2009. More on the paper in a later post.

This post is about why I'm excited about having a graphics paper, when I've never had one before. Early in your career, when you are just starting to write papers, the goal for a typical student is to aim to get papers in the top conferences in your area: theorists aim for FOCS/STOC/SODA, networking people aim for SIGCOMM, systems people aim for SOSP/OSDI, and so on. It's the way to establish your professional reputation.

The downside of this is that as a student you become focused on both the style and problem spaces of your "home" community. Some (most?) researchers become entrenched in their home community, and never really leave it. My biased view, though, is that when I look at the great computer scientists and mathematicians that I think of as role models, they've had a broad impact across multiple areas, and have crossed boundaries to publish outside what might be considered their comfort zone.

For quite some time, I've tried to follow that lead. So one of the goals I have is to publish in a variety of different conference areas -- really, as many as I can. (I realize it's taking the logic the wrong way -- great scientists didn't necessarily set out to do things in many fields, but their work was so great it naturally had impact in lots of places.) It's an apparently strange goal, in that I haven't heard others voice it, but it's one I enjoy. I optimistically like to think that I can make contributions in multiple areas, and it gives me the chance to get some insight into things going on in different areas. It also leads to fun collaborations.

Of course, just publishing a paper in a conference does not make you part of that conference community. While I've found it rewarding to write a paper for a new conference I've never been to, I've also found that when I have a stronger interest, I can get more out of a longer relationship. My personal rule of thumb is that once I've had three papers at a conference, I can consider myself part of that conference community; at that point, generally I'll know people, and they'll know me, and there's a feeling that my work is really part of a larger scientific picture going forward. (I've also found that's about the point where people start asking you to serve on the program committee...) So my goal is not just to publish single papers in as many conferences as I can, but also to explore and find interesting communities to work with.

Overall, I feel this path has served me well. I feel like I have several research home communities (in theory, networking, and information theory), and when I visit someplace to give a talk or interview a candidate, there is often an unusual connection to be found. I think I've created a positive feedback loop -- because I'm known to have a wide array of interests, people feel free to approach me with new problems, which I'm happy to encourage! [This graphics paper arose entirely because Nina Amenta wrote to ask me about what's known about doing "modern" hashing on "modern" parallel architectures such as GPUs...] But there's certainly potential downsides. I know that, as I was coming up for tenure, this "lack of focus" (if one wants to label it negatively) was, at least for some, a problem to be overcome rather than a positive virtue. Graduate students and junior faculty may need to keep in mind how such forays will be viewed -- usually it seems to me a very small number is seen as a positive, but a large number isn't necessarily seen as a good thing.

I understand for most people the goal is to publish FOCS/STOC papers, or to publish SIGCOMM papers, or publish SOSP/OSDI papers -- that's what it means for them to do great work, and that works for them. My approach is different, so I'm excited by the novelty of having a SIGGRAPH Asia paper. While I wouldn't prescribe how people should do research, I'd encourage people to look for opportunities to work a bit outside their home community. And I think there's value in that that tenure and hiring committees should recognize and acknowledge.

And by the way, I've never had a SOSP or OSDI paper -- if anyone has any good ideas of how that might be rectified, feel free to let me know.

STOC/FOCS complete versions [Guest Post by Mikkel Thorup]

STOC/FOCS complete versions
Guest Post by Mikkel Thorup

I would like to congratulate PCs that have requested authors to submit appendices with complete proofs. I would like to suggest going one step further. For accepted papers, I think these complete proofs should be posted as reports on a place like ArXiv.

My basic interest is the case where STOC/FOCS deals with problems that are so important that we actually want them solved (contrasting cases that are just about exchanging conceptual ideas). In that case, the most damaging conference abstract is one that claims a solution but with an incomplete sketch of a proof that can neither be verified, nor falsified, and where the authors never themselves provide the details. Since the credit is already given out, there is no incentive left to really solve the problem. I have seen good research areas killed this way. The situation is much better when a paper has a clear bug, for then it is well-justified to look for a true solution. This is why I would like the complete proofs posted on ArXiv. It is OK that they are not so well-written. The important thing is that we have a place where people can go and check the details if in doubt.

I think this would have some positive side-effects. First of all, I do not think people should claim solutions to important problems if they do not have some complete proofs. The PC may not have time to read the complete versions, but knowing that your complete version will be public will most likely make people think twice before submitting (I think this is positive).

Having the first complete versions along with comments and questions should also pave the way for more and better journal versions.

Blogging for August

A commenter noted I haven't posted much to the blog for July. Happily, there's no dark secret underlying the slow pace of posting -- things are simply quieter (no students, faculty disappearing), and yet at the same time busier (research!), over the summer. There's plenty of stuff in the pipeline to eventually write about, but many things aren't quite ripe enough to post about yet. (Those of you reviewers sitting on my journal submissions and revisions, which it seems like you've had for a loooong time, please try to get through them, so I have one more thing to blog about...)

Indeed, this summer has, if anything, seemed busier with research than I remember from summers past. Like all faculty, I dread going through the explanations to neighbors/friends/relatives/people you meet at a barbeque who ask what you're doing during the off time in the summer, since summer is actually the time when, as I like to tell the undergraduates, the "real work get done." (I leave it to the students to decide how seriously to interpret the statement.) Summer is always filled with the opportunity to start new projects and learn new things, finish off journal versions that have languished too long, and tie up things in time for summer and early fall deadlines. This summer has been filled with all of the above; we'll see what interesting comes out of it all, hopefully soon.

So I'll start trying to work on producing more posts, but in the meantime, have a look at this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, which has yet more on the Gates affair, a commentary on the University of California cuts (well, focused on Chinese history, but still), and news about the BU students who just a judgment of $675,000 handed down against him for illegal music downloads. Or check out those NSF deadlines, medium grants for CISE cross-cutting programs, CNS, and CCF are all at the end of August! (Yikes! Grant proposals -- the other job of summer...)

Implications of a Microsoft-Yahoo Deal for Research?

After months of speculation, the news today is full of reports of a Microsoft-Yahoo deal for search. Here is a CNN article, and I'm sure you can find others.

One thing I've read about the deal is that by using Bing, Yahoo will save on research and other expenses for its own search. Similarly, since Yahoo will focus on the advertising network to monetize the search, perhaps Microsoft will invest less on research there. Of course this is speculative; while I'm sure cost savings will come to mind, I imagine engineering and infrastructure are more obvious place for cost saving cuts than research.

But I am certainly hoping this will not adversely affect the research going on these places, especially at Yahoo, which seems to me to be more at risk (given the company's financial issues over the last several years), and which has really been doing a lot interesting and visible research lately. For example, check out their research blurb on their success at KDD/SIGMOD/PODS. Or check out their blurb on their current featured research project, Similarity Caching.

Let's be clear -- I'm very biased here. My past student Adam Kirsch did a summer internship at Yahoo; my past mentor Andrei Broder is there; I've received some research funding from Yahoo Research and written several papers with researchers there. From what I've seen, I think they're an impressive research organization. Two of their main focus areas are Search and Web Mining and Computational Advertising. I hope that nothing in the deal lessens the importance to Yahoo of supporting and developing research in these areas.

Various Harvard threads

Richard Bradley, author of Harvard Rules as well as other books, has plenty of Harvard related things to write about, including the Henry Louis Gates affair (which I've heard about seemingly nonstop for several days) and the Vanity Fair article, on his blog. And then there's a new Newsweek article on the months-old story of the student who was not allowed to graduate at the ceremony this year because of a purported connection (the nature of which is not, as far as I know, publicly known) to a murder that took place at a Harvard dorm.

The only "positive" news I've seen about Harvard lately is its portrayal as a hotbed of high tech activity in Harvard graduate Ben Mezrich's new book, the Accidental Billionaires, about the building of Facebook. Of course, even that's somewhat tainted, since Mezrich, according to several articles, essentially made up portions of the book.

At this point, I'm hoping that Harvard stops showing up in the press for a while. (And then starts showing up in a more positive light.)

California Update Part 2

I spent the rest of my California trip visiting Yahoo, Google, and Stanford.

At Yahoo, I got the chance to hang out with my mentor, the ever-busy Andrei Broder, and talk research with Ravi Kumar and Flavio Chierichetti. Flavio is a graduate student of Alessandro Panconsei's; he previously visited Harvard and I got him to work on codes for flash memory, and we've also collaborated on the recent KDD paper On Compressing Social Networks. Flavio's been doing a lot of outstanding work primarily in applied algorithms; he'll be looking for a job/postdoc soon, and I suggest everyone keep their eye out for him.

At Google, I was hosted by Gagan Aggarwal, and gave the talk on An Efficient Rigorous Approach for Identifying Statistically Significant Frequent Itemsets. Slides (ppt) are here; they were designed by Favio Vandin and passed to me by Eli Upfal. Highlights included seeing Deborah Weisser (another Berkeley grad school alum who overlapped with me) and Pei Cao (who always asks lots of interesting questions). And one of my TAs from last year -- interning at Google for the summer -- came to the this talk too. OK, I admit, lunch was also a real highlight. Unlike last year, the sushi line was short (indeed, the whole place was quieter than last year -- maybe I came on a less busy day), and they still had a freezer full of specially Google-branded It's It sandwiches.

Finally, I gave the Open Questions in Cuckoo Hashing talk at Stanford, after a nice talk with my always-interesting host, Tim Roughgarden. Sadly, I'd come down with a cold the night before, so it wasn't my best performance, but the audience peppered me with good questions. Again, another TA showed up -- this one just started her PhD in Statistics at Stanford.

Thanks to everyone who came to the talks, and I hope to be out again soon...

Vanity Fair's Article on Harvard

I'm writing this on my flight back from California, where I've just been reading the August Vanity Fair article on Harvard's endowment situation. (It does not appear to be available online currently.) The cover blurb is Harvard's Big, Dumb Financial Train Wreck, and the actual title seems to be Rich Harvard, Poor Harvard, so you have some idea where it's coming from.

The article has its ups and downs, its mild exaggerations and understatements. But overall it's interesting reading. One interesting point is that it starts and ends with none other than our own Michael Smith, computer science professor currently on loan as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The article begins with Mike calmly addressing undergraduates and trying to forthrightly explain the financial situation. (Of course, the undergraduates are up in arms, insisting on things like no layoffs, as one would expect undergraduates everywhere to do, regardless of the actual situation.) The article ends with Mike talking to the reporter on the way back to Mike's car at the end of the day; the reporter describes a lack of success in otherwise getting information or meetings with Harvard's standard PR organization. (Strangely, I've also multiple times caught Mike heading for home, and chatted with him about various Harvard happenings at those times. He needs to change his car routine.) While this impromptu chat didn't seem to reveal significantly novel information -- Mike's smart enough to keep his cards close to his vest as needed -- it shows Mike talking more openly than one might naturally expect from a Dean in his situation. He's not a "no comment" kind of guy.

This, to me, highlights some of Michael Smith's strengths as a leader. He talks, and he listens. He sees the numbers, and doesn't hide from them, but thinks clearly and calmly about where we go from here. I'm happier knowing Mike's helping steer the ship here. (And I continue to wish him the best of luck.)

The article nails some things squarely. The fall in the endowment will have significant effects. Fewer TAs, fewer support staff, closed libraries, fewer perks all-around for students and faculty, and less money for all sorts of projects and initiatives. All this is, naturally, not good, but perhaps the article overstates the effects all this will have on Harvard as an educational institution. I, for instance, was a Harvard undergraduate in what must now appear to be the dark, dreary days of 1987-1991, when Harvard's endowment was just over 1/10 th the size it was before the crash, and I still liked the place and thought I received a good education. Harvard's resources are still remarkable, and I feel lucky to teach here; I'm sure we'll still manage to provide a high-quality education.

In terms of the question of how we got to this point, the article considers two main thrusts: the Harvard management company and how the endowment was run, and Harvard's unsustainable spending spree as the endowment increased. The first I don't feel qualified to talk about; it seems that Harvard's investment portfolio has become more risky over the years, but it's not clear to me how far the risk-reward ratio was out of whack, or that performance was out of line with other institutions. (It's hard to know what the right comparison is, given the flaws that seem to have been underlying the financial system of the last several years, of which there are several victims beyond Harvard.) It seems to me that more information is needed, and the article suggests that Harvard is not particularly transparent about these sorts of things.

On the spending side, I think it's clear Harvard went too far too fast in its spending plans, particularly under Larry Summers, who I think if anything gets insufficient blame in this article. It was under Summers Harvard dramatically increased spending on new buildings (financed by debt, and sometimes without getting sponsorship from donors first), faculty size increased, and financial aid plans zoomed. I have to admit, all of these things, particularly at the time, I thought of positively, at least in theory. Of course (duh), increasing space/faculty/aid money all always sound good. But it was also fairly clear at the time (and much clearer in retrospect) that Harvard was doing too much too fast and assuming the money would come from somewhere down the line. While my standing far outside the inner circles of Harvard administration means I can't claim to know who holds responsibility for this, from my standpoint Summers seemed to be leading the call for an overly ambitious agenda, never mind the costs.

(Indeed, the most rankling part of the article for me was the following quote: "The fact that they fired him is a symptom of everything that's wrong with Harvard," one of Harvard's big donors told me. "He's not politically correct or diplomatic -- he's incredibly provocative. What he really got fired for was attacking waste and abuse in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences." I don't think this donor knows what he/she is talking about, and no evidence in the article suggests otherwise. First, Larry Summers wasn't fired, he resigned. The faculty does not have the power to fire him; we did take a vote of no confidence, which had no formal power, but was a statement of how the faculty as a whole felt about him. Second, I'd enjoy hearing more about the waste and abuse he was attacking; in terms of profligacy, I think it's clear his tenure as president was a net negative. The previous paragraph of the article has a different take. "In reality, however, when Summers was president of Harvard, he alienated just about every faculty member who crossed his path. Instead of being admired as a visionary, he was said to be arrogant. Instead of being recognized as a bold and fearless leader, he was perceived as a cerebral bully." The current administration, under the gun, is dealing with financial waste through serious budget cuts, apparently more effectively than Summers ever did. And through a quite difficult situation, they appear thus far to have maintained the strong respect and support of the faculty.)

Anyhow, I encourage everyone to read the article, and to comment on the issues raised by the article -- both in terms of Harvard's situation and the corresponding situations at other universities -- as you like.

California Update Part 1

I spent Tuesday at the pre-EC tutorials and NetEcon workshop at Stanford. The highlight was watching Jon Feldman and Muthu Muthukrishnan give a tutorial on web advertising. While most of what they talked about was already within my range of knowledge, they presented it very well and it's interesting to see their view of a theoretical take on real-world advertising problems. (My experience with Google people, reinforced here, is unfortunately they only let out enough details to whet your interest, without giving enough details to be really useful. Not that I blame them. There are undoubtedly limits on what they can reveal, and obviously any individual can't know all the working details at a low level.)

Today I gave my version 0.1 talk on "Open Problems in Cuckoo Hashing" at Microsoft. I was blessed with a receptive audience, who asked questions and pointed out various typographical errors and other possible fixes. The highlight for me was when two of my TAs from last semester showed up for the talk. (One is doing a summer internship a few blocks away at Google, the other -- who will starting grad school in theory next year -- is the daughter of a Microsoft Researcher.) Since I'm sure they'll stumble across this, a big thank you for coming!

In the afternoon I saw an interesting talk by Rafael Pass on Game Theory with Costly Computation. The high-level idea is to include a notion of computation cost in the utility function, so that your utility can depend on how much computation you use, which might in turn affect your choice of game strategy. It seemed like an interesting conceptual idea, and the twist has some surprising implications (like Nash equilibria no longer always exist).

Self-Advertising : Talks and Such

I'll be on my annual summer pilgrimage to California this week. In case you're in town with nothing to do, I'll be giving a "practice talk" for my invited ESA talk:

Some Open Problems in Cuckoo Hashing

this Thursday at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley (10:30 am), and Tuesday July 14 at Stanford (4:00 pm).

On Monday July 13 I'll be at Google. giving a different talk, on the PODS paper An Efficient Rigorous Approach for Identifying Statistically Significant Frequent Itemsets, by Kirsch, Mitzenmacher, Pietracaprina, Pucci, Upfal, and Vandin. See the previous blog post here.

If you're around please feel free to come to a talk. (At Google and Microsoft, if you're not an employee, I'm not sure how you get in the door, but I'm sure you can find a way...) Or if you're already at one of these places and want to see me, please try to get on the schedule.

FOCS 2009 (Guest Post)

Guest Post by Dan Spielman.

The list of papers accepted to FOCS 2009 is now available at: http://www.cs.yale.edu/focs09/papers.html

As Mike did after the STOC 2009 PC Meeting, I'd like to provide a short summary of what happened at the FOCS 2009 Meeting.

We arrived at the meeting having at least three reviews for each paper. To save time for discussions of papers during the meeting, we voted to reject many papers in the two weeks before the meeting. We also voted to accept a small number that had overwhelmingly strong reviews. I would like to have heard more about these papers, but it would not have been a productive use of time.

After our preliminary decisions we had 123 papers to discuss over 2 days. This gave us only a few minutes to discuss each paper. In spite of the short timeframes, the discussions of papers were remarkably insightful, intelligent, and witty. Things were said that I will remember always. Unfortunately, confidentiality prevents me from sharing them with you. As chair, my job was to prematurely halt these discussions so that we could vote and move on to the next paper.

As was done in many PCs before, I asked committee members with conflicts of interest to leave the room. Committee members were deemed to have a conflict of interest with authors who were their advisor or advisee, who were at the same institution, and with whom they were close friends. My test for friendship was "would you be proud if this paper was accepted?" As many observed, these are not perfect tests for COIs, but they are a first-order approximation. This policy did have some drawbacks, as it often meant that the person most expert in the area of a paper was excluded from the discussion. To ameliorate this problem, I solicited extra reviews of papers for which this was the case. I am thankful that so many in our community responded to my urgent requests for reviews.

I am VERY happy that we took this approach to handling COIs. I know that I would have had a difficult time being unbiased when discussing papers with which I had a COI. One advantage of this approach that I did not see discussed in the comments on Mike's blog is that it preserves the committee members' reputations for integrity. We accepted many papers with which I had a COI, and I am glad that I will not be suspected of tilting the process in favor of my friends.

Deciding which papers to accept is a very difficult process. With insufficient time and consideration, we were forced to make decisions that are very important to many people. We did the best we could, but I am sure we made mistakes. At least there is no paper on which a majority of the committee believed we made a mistake.

I hope you all will join us for the 50th IEEE FOCS.

Netflix Prize in the News

A group (BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos) has announced that they've beaten the barrier needed to win the $1 million Netflix Prize. This sets off a 30-day clock -- this team will win unless some other team does better in this period.

While there's been various opinions as to what extent contests like this really drive forward science, it's certainly been memorable -- I remember lots of news articles when the contest was first announced, and a lot of excitement over it. I'm a little surprised as how muted the news is now that the contest has been "won"; a Google news query for "Netflix Prize" shows just over a hundred articles, reasonable for a tech story but certainly not high by any means. At the very least, it was an interesting challenge that non-scientists could relate to and demonstrated the importance of good algorithms.

Are there other similar prizes out there? (Google seems to have run a number of contests, such as this one.) Maybe we should create more of them, or encourage industry to do so? For many people science is inspiring for its own sake, but for many others, a little flair (and money) is more likely to attract their attention.

ISIT conference this week

The 2009 International Symposium on Information Theory is going on this week in Seoul, Korea. I'm not attending, although it sounds like there's plenty of interesting things going on. Amin Shokrollahi is giving a tutorial on fountain codes, Balaji Prabhakar is talking about models and algorithms for Internet data centers. Some of the plenary talks sound like they'd be of interest to CS folks: Randomized Dimensionality Reduction by Richard Baraniuk, It's Easier to Approximate by David Tse, Combinatorial Reasoning in Information Theory by Noga Alon. Plenty of sessions on low-density parity-check codes and their variations, and network coding. There's something relatively new out there called "Polar codes" that I should learn more about.

It's a bit disappointing to see in the program a lack of what I think of as "CS theorists" at ISIT, though perhaps this year Seoul was just too far to go for a conference that's more tangential to people working on related areas in this group. As I've said before, given the list of topics, one would think there would be more crossover. With eight parallel sessions over 4 1/2 days, there would certainly seem to be room. Maybe next year.

If anyone in the comments wants to point out exciting news or results from ISIT, or other blogs discussing the goings-on, please do so; I'd be happy to hear of news.

Another Harvard CS Professor Blogs

Stuart Shieber has started a blog focused on issues related to scholarly communication (particularly, Open Access) call The Occasional Pamphlet. I'd recommend the post on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rights retention as a starting point.

Deep Packet Inspection : Iran

I was interested to hear the words "deep packet inspection" -- a phrase I'm well familiar with -- used in conjunction with "Iran" on NPR on the way home. Here's the corresponding article in the Wall Street Journal.

SIGACT elections

The results of the SIGACT elections are complete, and the newly elected members are:

SIGACT Chair:
Lance Fortnow, Northwestern University

Members-at-Large:
Cynthia Dwork, Microsoft Reesearch
Anna Lysyanskaya, Brown University
Michael Mitzenmacher, Harvard University
Mike Saks, Rutgers University

I'm looking forward to working with this group, and to hearing what it is we actually think we'll plan to be doing. Given a blogging chair and member-at-large, there should be plenty of opportunity for people to comment on the job the SIGACT officers are doing for the next few years.

SLOGN

While people are all talking about ICS, another new conference was also being whispered about in the hallways at STOC. I'm happy to say that SLOGN now has a call for papers up (sent to me by Ryan O'Donnell and Rocco Servedio). It promises to be something different entirely.