My Biased Coin

A group (BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos) has announced that they've beaten the barrier needed to win the $1 million Netflix Prize . Thi...

The 2009 International Symposium on Information Theory is going on this week in Seoul, Korea. I'm not attending, although it sounds li...

Stuart Shieber has started a blog focused on issues related to scholarly communication (particularly, Open Access) call The Occasional Pamph...

I was interested to hear the words "deep packet inspection" -- a phrase I'm well familiar with -- used in conjunction with ...

The results of the SIGACT elections are complete, and the newly elected members are: SIGACT Chair: Lance Fortnow, Northwestern University Me...

While people are all talking about ICS , another new conference was also being whispered about in the hallways at STOC. I'm happy to sa...

New up on my papers page -- a survey of results from the human-guided search project I did years ago. Lots of fun stuff came out of that p...

An old friend pointed me to this article about Glen Whitney, who is creating a math museum (after what I assume was a successful career in ...

SODA info is up . Submissions page says you need to register (with abstract) on June 29, with paper due July 6, 5pm Eastern Daylight Time....

I went down to AT&T Labs to give a talk and visit yesterday. The visit was primarily inspired by wanting to talk to Mikkel Thorup , who...

I awoke this morning to find the tragic news of the death of Rajeev Motwani (from Lance and Suresh ). I had the pleasure of meeting Rajee...

I'm a bit surprised by the lack of discussion on the announcement of the new ICS conference . (That's "Innovations in Computer...

Michael Kearns has put up photos and slides for many of the talks for Valiant's day here . Avi Wigderson has the slides from his talk (...

The conference is over. I thought it would be useful to provide a thread for feedback on the conference. The point here is, in my mind, to...

The highlight of Day 2 was the Award Paper session. The papers of Chris Peikert and Robin Moser were already amazing; but the two of them...

One of the more interesting things to be announced at STOC is a new Innovations in Computer Science Conference.  As it says in this call ,  ...

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...