My Biased Coin

Harvard, like many other places, has an option by which students (with "Advanced Standing" from AP classes) can obtain a Master...

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...

Not for me, thank goodness. A very talented graduating senior (who may or may not be Harvard...) has obtained a number of job offers, and as...

A few weeks ago, I talked about the reviewing process for NSDI and LATIN. I suppose now is a reasonable time for an update. LATIN is neari...

This post is about surveys. It's motivated by one of my tasks last night, as I has to spend some time going over the final proofs for t...

What do people think about students going to work for a year or two and then applying to graduate school? Or applying but then deferring to...

An anonymous commenter asked an insightful question, worthy of a real answer: "Hi Prof, Why are you so obsessed with ranking things?...

I had a funny conversation with Madhu Sudan yesterday, with him relaying an idea he said he heard from Umesh Vazirani (and perhaps the trail...

This post will talk about Harvard's financial aid program, and why it's a perfectly good thing to give money to Harvard, despite wha...

I promised at some point to get back to discussing the reviewing process for two conferences I am currently on the PC for, NSDI and LATIN. ...

As pointed out many places, the paper for the (strangely named) new theory conference Innovations in Computer Science are out, with the list...

I'm curious if various readers out there would be willing to offer their ranking of networking conferences. The issue has come up in so...

I'm thrilled to announce that my colleague Gu-Yeon Wei , in EE here at Harvard, received tenure. I feel this is worth a mention because:...

One interesting aspect of our WSDM paper is that we have multiple references from the 1930's and 40's. It turns out our problem is...

I'm happy to announce our paper "Adaptive Weighing Designs for Keyword Value Computation" -- by me, John Byers , and Georgios ...

For those who are interested in such things, Harvard's latest financial report appears to be available. Rumors have it that the report...

I'd like to welcome myself to the Blogroll for the Communications of the ACM! My colleague Greg Morrisett suggested I get my blog into...

I spent an hour or more today perusing the book Concentration of Measure for the Analysis of Randomized Algorithms , by Devdatt Dubhashi and...

One conference I've never had a paper in -- though I'd like to someday -- is SOSP, the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles , o...

This week I got my batches of papers to review for NSDI and LATIN . If I'm quiet for a while, I'm busy reading (and writing review...