My Biased Coin

I've already talked a lot in this blog about deletion channels. Trace reconstruction involves a similar problem. We start with an orig...

Luca Trevisan points to an article in the AMS by Neal Koblitz on modern cryptography that I think everyone in theoretical computer science...

I've just returned from a week in the Bay Area, primarily to visit my "corporate sponsors"; Cisco and Yahoo have both provided...

Next semester, I'm teaching my class on randomized algorithms and probabilistic analysis, based on the Mitzenmacher/Upfal book . Harvard...

In a binary symmetric error channel, n bits are sent, and the channel flips each bit independently with probability p. So, for example, the...

Registration has opened for FOCS 2007, which will take place in Providence on October 20-23. Please go to http://focs2007.org/ Note that the...

This year marked the 11th HotOS workshop. From the call for papers : We request submissions of position papers that propose new directions ...

SIGCOMM (the major networking conference) will be taking place shortly. Although I won't be attending, I thought I'd mention some ...

One thing I've been enjoying is that as people seem to discover this blog, they comment on the older posts. I appreciate these comments...

In my undergraduate class, I devote one class (and one programming assignment) to heuristic search methods. I focus on hill climbing, since...

I became more interested in (and knowledgeable about) heuristic methods when I was working on a related project at the nearby Mistubishi Ele...

Most of you probably don't know about Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), a small lab nestled in Kendall Square (very clo...

Peter Winzer argued for using (variants of) Valiant's randomized load balancing (route to a random intermediate spot, and go from there ...

My DIMACS slides are now available on my Talks page .

I'm spending a couple of days at the DIMACS Tutorial on Algorithms for Next Generation Networks . Tracey Ho and Alex Sprintson and gi...

For those of you who haven't succumbed to buying the Mitzenmacher/Upfal textbook on Probability and Computing , there are two very posit...

I'm sure there are plenty of places to get such information, but for basic tech news (like what's up with Google and the FCC, voting...

The state of journal reviewing in CS and EE journals is generally pretty dismal. It often takes an unforgivably long time to get reviews ba...

This post is dedicated to a researcher most CS people might not know about (although most information theorists probably do), David MacKay. ...

Over at the geomblog , Suresh and Piotr have taken my initial data-gathering on citations counts for the theory conferences to the extreme. ...