My Biased Coin

Sampath Kannan gave his overview from the NSF. It was actually very positive (the last slide ended with "CCF is alive and well") ...

Just a couple of quick highlights from Day 1. Costis Daskalakis, when discussing oblivious PTAS's for Nash equilibria, presented the fol...

The Saturday before STOC was devoted to a 60th birthday celebration for Les Valiant . The program is here . I'm afraid I missed most o...

I was asked to put up the following schedule changes for STOC on the blog. The information will also be available at the conference of cour...

The chairs of the SIGCOMM PC were asked to submit a note to CCR on the Commitee Process, available here . It's an interesting read. (O...

Apparently, student who filled out their class reviews got access to their grades today. It's been a while since I've taught a clas...

Congratulations to Professor Salil Vadhan of Harvard for winning SIGACT's Godel Prize . (Oh, right, also congratulations to his co-autho...

I'm reflecting on my Graduate Course on (vaguely) network algorithms from this year, and particularly the discussion I had with student...

I have to get in my final grades in the next day or so. Some thoughts and questions. 1) What's the average grade you give? (Anonymous...

Having just gone through the painful process of making up my final exam (again), I'm inspired to think that there must be a better way. ...

Guest blog post by Aaron Sterling. Michael M. asked me to post about an academic journey of one of my papers, so here goes. In November 200...

I'm serving this year, as I have every year I've been at Harvard, on the Hoopes Prize Committee for Harvard science theses. This is...

Here's an amusing article tying together budget cuts at universities and new technologies; the communications department at UW is cutt...

There's a new article on up at Notices of the AMS entitled Mathematics and the Internet: A Source of Enormous Confusion and Great Poten...

I'm posting online the "final version" of a paper that will be appearing at KDD, On Compressing Social Networks ; the collabor...

I was reminded by that bizarre NYT opinion piece that interdiscplarity is all the rage, but people rarely talk about intradisciplinarity. ...

UPDATED BELOW I was a few hours ago cc'ed on some messages to some STOC authors -- well, really to Salil Vadhan -- with the opening sta...

My students and colleagues today pointed me to this New York Times editorial by Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department of ...

This week in my graduate class on networking algorithms, I asked my class to focus on the question of whether network coding will become a p...

Today was a busy day with talks. Stefan Savage of UCSD gave a talk at Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society on his ...