My Biased Coin

All sorts of news about the plug finally being pulled on Altavista, which I still have an attachment to, being partially the product myself ...

As my Area Administrator Tristen reminded me, "...today is officially your last day as my boss..."  Monday is July 1, which offici...

Some of my previous posts have led me to think about the following -- something I'm hoping to write a longer piece about in the near fut...

Les Valiant has a new book out:  Probably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World ...

There's been a mild hubbub toward the end of the week here, due to a report and some articles ( Boston Globe , WSJ ) that the number of...

Noam Nisan points to the NSF trying out some new rules for reviewing in its upcoming SSS program.  There's a lot here to discuss.  Fi...

Teaching reviews are in!  I'm happy to say students were more forgiving than last year .  But also, I notice in the reviews the effects ...

As I'm up working/watching a Memorial Day weekend Arrested Development marathon (OK, I'm not working that hard), I found myself wand...

The grades are in for CS 124.  Hooray! Interesting trend : freshmen, who make up a small fraction of the class, are highly over-represente...

Justin Thaler and Jon Ullman had back-to-back thesis defenses today.  Both talks were excellent -- Justin's on his work on verificatio...

While I greatly enjoy working at Harvard, there are many painfully stupid things said and done by people here -- as I suppose is the case an...

Some researchers at IBM are so good at playing with atoms, they decided to make a movie (called A Boy and His Atom), by moving atoms.  Cool...

If you've been reading the other computer science blogs, you know that there are some new books out. First is the The Golden Ticket: P...

I'm off to a meeting next week, so today was my last day of class for Computer Science 124 (Algorithms and Data Structures) for the seme...

Michael asked me and Mark to write a post on our paper "Dual Lower Bounds for Approximate Degree and Markov Bernstein Inequali...

Luca Aceto reported the paper awards for ICALP 2013 .  But I find it necessary to give a special shout-out to Harvard Ph.D. students Mark Bu...

[Mikkel Thorup graciously has offered a guest blog post, discussing what he looks for in conference papers, and possible implications for re...

I've been asked to post for some upcoming events. The Simons Institute will have a multi-day symposium on Visions of the Theory of Com...

Yesterday was the long-awaited faculty meeting after the news that Harvard had examined the e-mail (metadata) of the Resident Deans looking ...

Thank goodness it's Harvard's vacation week. Otherwise, the rioting would have been unbearable .