Harvard in the NCAA Tournament

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

Cambridge Area Economics and Computation Day 2013

I was asked to advertise the upcoming Second Cambridge Area Economics and Computation Day (CAEC'13);
information is available at http://caec.seas.harvard.edu/

It's being co-chaired by Turing-award winner Silvio Micali and Harvard's own Yiling Chen.

The data/location is

Friday, April 26, 2013
Singleton Auditorium (46-3002)
Brain and Cognitive Sciences / McGovern Building, MIT
43 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02139

Registration is free, but you have to register in advance.

Here's the call:

------------------------------
Call For Participation

A lot of research and business activity in the Cambridge/Boston area is engaged in economic and computational questions in regard to understanding and developing the economics of Internet activity. Examples of topics of interest include theoretical, modeling, algorithmic, and empirical work on electronic commerce, networked behavior, and social networks.
One of the main purposes of CAEC is to encourage collaboration between local researchers. Significant emphasis will be placed on a poster session and short talks. The overall structure of the day will involve four longer talks, by Daron Acemoglu, Yiling Chen, Matthew Jackson, and Silvio Micali, with a short talks session and a poster session over lunch, along with brief poster announcements.
Submissions

For short talks and posters, send an email to caec13@seas.harvard.edu by Thursday April 11, 2013, including a brief description of your work, along with an indication of a preference for the work to be presented as a short talk or a poster, or be considered for both. We will select a small number of short talks and put together a poster session.
Decisions about the program will be made by Monday April 15, 2013.
The suggested format for a short talk is (a) description of the problem, (b) statement of results, and (c) discussion of open research directions. There will be no time for setting up individual laptops for the short-talk session, instead we will have all presentations preloaded on a computer in the auditorium.
Registration

This event is free to participants, but PLEASE register by Monday April 22.
Breakfast and lunch will be provided for the event. There will be no cost to participants

Looking forward to seeing you there,
CAEC Steering Committee
Yiling Chen, Silvio Micali, Costis Daskalakis, Andrew Lo, and David Parkes 

Update: Andrew Auernheimer Watch

Well, this is going to give me nightmares for a while.

TechNewsWorld:

"Andrew Auernheimer, a hacker known as "Weev," was sentenced Monday to 41 months in prison for obtaining the personal data of more than 100,000 iPad owners from AT&T's publicly accessible website and sending the information to the media. The ruling immediately sparked an outcry from a digital rights group that claims the punishment does not fit the crime."

Wired:

Auernheimer and Spitler discovered that the site would leak e-mail addresses to anyone who provided it with a ICC-ID. So the two wrote a script – which they dubbed the “iPad 3G Account Slurper” — to mimic the behavior of numerous iPads contacting the web site in order to harvest the e-mail addresses of iPad users.
...
The two contacted the Gawker website to report the hole...
On Monday, following the announcement of his sentence, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it had joined Auernheimer’s appellate team.

Slate:

"This is the third big CFAA-related case I’ve covered lately, the other two being those of Internet activist Aaron Swartz and Reuters deputy social media editor Matthew Keys. While the specifics of the charges in each case differ, all three illustrate the unfortunate plasticity of the CFAA, and how it can be shaped and contorted to cover almost any computing-related actions. (Did you fill out an NCAA bracket from your work computer today? Congratulations! Depending on your office’s computer use policies, you may have violated the CFAA!)"

Salon:

Heading into his sentencing hearing, “Weev” reportedly proclaimed, “I’m going to jail for doing arithmetic!” And in an earlier Twitter direct message conversation, the hacker told me what he believes to be the issues at stake in his case. He explained that the AT&T data he accessed was already “published” — the telecom company has admitted as much. “The government asserted that after the fact, they can declare a given access to data anyone makes public ‘unauthorized’ and have you thrown in prison,” he wrote.
...
As well as 41 months in jail, “Weev” has been sentenced to an added three years’ probation and must pay more than $73,000 in restitution to AT&T.
...
Auernheimer will appeal the federal court’s decision. On Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that its attorneys would join his legal team. “Weev is facing more than three years in prison because he pointed out that a company failed to protect its users’ data, even though his actions didn’t harm anyone,” EFF senior staff attorney Marcia Hofmann said. “The punishments for computer crimes are seriously off-kilter, and Congress needs to fix them.”

But I Haven't Thought of You Lately At All....

I realize the times they-are-a-changing, and so maybe I shouldn't find this unusual, but...

Kristen Bell and Rob Thomas put up a Kickstarter campaign to raise 2 million to make a Veronica Mars movie.*  They gave the project 30 days to raise the money.

Done, in less than 24 hours. 

There have got to be huge lessons for e-commerce and marketing there.  I'm still trying to figure out what they are.  Maybe it's also just because I watched Amanda Palmer's TED talk recently, but the idea that you can now just go to the world and say, "Help support this project, that you will love" and it can happen, at a scale that I don't think was possible even ten years ago, feels very powerful.

Or perhaps I'm just happy that they're going to make a movie.  

* The first season of Veronica Mars remains one of the best things ever on television.  It's not just me saying that -- it was Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith.  Go buy the DVDs or something if you don't believe me.

 

Turing Award : Goldwasser and Micali

Got in the office this morning and heard about the latest Turing Award:  Congrats to Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali!  (Press release.) 

A Second Life for our Groupon Paper

Groupon has been in the news lately -- something about their CEO leaving, I hear.  And Giorgos Zervas has been out giving talks.  (He's a great speaker.  You should invite him to your next related workshop or conference.)  The combination of these events seems to have given our Groupon work ([Byers Mitzenmacher Zervas] the newer arXiv paper, the older arXiv paper) a new life in the press.  I've seen it up on Forbes (by way of Rajiv Sethi's blog) and the Freakonomics blog, from which is seems to be being re-distributed through the Internet in the standard way.  Amusingly, the Freakonomics blog refers to it as a "new" paper (it's not), and nobody ever spells Giorgos's name right (this time, it's Servas instead of Zervas).

Since my name has been appearing in the press the past several days for less interesting reasons, it was nice to see it in the "news" for actual work. 

The Press

Harvard's name, obviously, still sells newspapers.  The "e-mailgate" scandal of the past few days has been appearing everywhere.  I was contacted multiple times from various news organizations over the weekend and yesterday -- the most contact from the press I've ever had.

I've chosen not to talk to them, not because I'm against the press, or because I'm naturally shy (I write a blog, after all), but because I don't feel I have anything much to say, other than what I'm saying here on the blog.  I don't have any additional facts other than what I'm getting from publicly available information.  I suppose the press is looking for my opinion, or more realistically some good quotes, but I'd rather not work through my opinions on this issue over the phone with a reporter.   

However, I guess I am "on the record":  reporters have quoted the blog.  While I'm not entirely comfortable with that, I suppose that's the way it is.  It's somewhat disappointing when you have to explain to your mother that yes, your name was in the New York Times, and no, you didn't do anything important.  

My first blog post on this was part of the narrative that the faculty was critical of the administration.  I noticed my second post has been interpreted that I've been "mollified" (a term used in at least one article) by the administration's explanation, which I do not think is accurate.  I'm glad the administration explained what happened from its point of view, and that it offered an apology (even if many interpret it as a half-hearted one);  I think the Harvard community was owed the explanation, and the Resident Deans were owed an apology. I acknowledge that the administration did a good thing to present that statement.  But I still say (quite clearly in the 2nd post) that I think the administration made a mistake, and there's clearly resulting damage they will have to deal with.  I can only imagine the Resident Deans are especially angry -- I don't believe I've seen a formal statement acknowledging that they are "faculty", but some of the initial speculation that the administration didn't feel they had to follow the "faculty policy" for them would, I surmise, be very insulting.  I don't believe the administration's statement addressed this point, but perhaps it has been addressed privately.  I also believe there's lasting damage to the trust between administration and faculty.  Harry Lewis has said he'll move much of his e-mail to a private gmail account;  I suspect many other faculty will do the same.  I also worry that this has damaged the nature of the relationships between Resident Deans and students, as Resident Deans are meant to be a "go-to" point for students experiencing a variety of problems.  Both sides, I suspect, will feel more wary of what they say to each other, if they are concerned the administration might be watching.  Those feelings may not be warranted, and the administration has tried to make that case in discussing the targeted methods they used when looking at the e-mail;  that doesn't mean they those feelings won't be there. 

I don't expect this issue to just go away without further discussion, at the upcoming Faculty Council and FAS Faculty meeting.  Some people still have questions as to how this came to pass.  Larger scale, this fits into a narrative I've heard multiple times the last few days, about the "corporatization" of universities in general and Harvard in particular.  It's an issue that many faculty naturally feel very strongly about.  This event may galvanize some reflection or future action on that front.

So again, I don't think this is over.  But I think the form it takes from this point may be much less interesting for the press.

There's also more positive news on "the press" front, but it's worthy of it's own, separate post, which will be right up. 

Mike Smith Explains, Apologizes

Given the hubbub that arose this weekend over the issue of Harvard examining the e-mail of some of the Resident Deans, it's gratifying (if unsurprising) that this morning Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Mike Smith has released a statement, which explains the incident from the administration's point of view.

My high-level take -- this has been blown out of proportion by the media, but it's certainly an issue the administration and faculty should discuss and work out together, so there's a common understanding.  

Here's my summary (with commentary), but of course you should go the source.
1)  It was apparent that an e-mail labeled confidential has made it's way out to the press.  While the e-mail itself might not have contained especially sensitive information, the administration was concerned.  Who knew what else might have or would be leaked?  There was also concern that other specific confidential information had leaked to the Crimson.

Commentary:  The Ad Board member, who apparently forwarded a note containing advice on how Resident Deans might advise their students with regard to the Gov 1030 case, made an understandable error in judgment.  It's best not to forward mail labeled confidential, even if it seems unimportant.  If they had just rephrased the advice in their own words, perhaps this would have been avoided.  The administration's concern is also understandable, given the student privacy issues around Ad Board proceedings.

2)  The administration says they asked the Ad Board members about the forwarded email, but "No one cam forward", and they were told this might cause an investigation.

Commentary:  Sounds good.  This was something that wasn't clear or known (at least by me) based on previous reports.

3)  The administration decided to do a targeted e-mail search, looking specifically at the "Resident Dean" accounts (and not the "individual Harvard email accounts");  they did not look at the email content, but just looked at the subject lines to determine if the email in question had been forwarded. 

Commentary:  While I pleased with the care with which they did the search so as to avoid violating the privacy of the Resident Deans, I don't think this care offers an excuse for not following the policy of informing the Resident Deans of the search.  I would still say a search on their email had been performed and, from my understanding of the policy, they should have been notified.  This is something the faculty and administration can and should discuss further.  (In particular, should searches be required in the future, I do think the administration should be encouraged to follow a similar process to specifically target the search.)

4)  After the forwarding had been found, the administration determined it was an inadvertent error, and no further action was taken. 

Commentary: Based on what I know, I agree, and think the administration took the right action.

5)  The administration made the decision not to inform the other Resident Deans, in order to protect the privacy of this Resident Dean and "[allow] the students cases being handled by this Resident Dean to move forward expeditiously."

And now here's the key statement to me in the statement:

"We understand that others may see the situation differently, and we apologize if any Resident Deans feel our communication of the investigation was insufficient."   

Commentary:  In the original story I saw at boston.com, Sharon Howell, senior Resident Dean, said the following:

“They don’t seem to think they’ve done anything wrong,” she said. “[I told them], if you want to repair this with the resident deans, it would make sense to talk about why you thought this was the right thing at the time, and apologize for not notifying us after the fact.”

I feel that the administration has done this.

I've seen postings in other places, where people are suggesting that this case demonstrates some sort of moral failing, and that someone somewhere should be dismissed.  I disagree.  In my opinion, a Resident Dean made an understandable (and I would argue small) error in judgment in forwarding an email marked confidential.  The administration was rightly concerned.  In my opinion, the administration made an error in judgment by not treating the Resident Deans as faculty and strictly following the Harvard policy by informing them that a search was being done as part of an investigation into the matter.  I'm not clear if they feel they made an error in judgment, but they have apologized.

The faculty now have a chance to discuss with the administration why they felt this was an error in judgment and how they'd like to see similar situations handled in the future.  I expect and hope these conversations will happen.  But I don't think that's the sort of exciting stuff that somehow gets into the New York Times. 

Harvard Spies on E-mails

A strange offshoot of the Harvard cheating scandal -- a report in the Boston Globe that Harvard administrators decided it was OK to search through Resident Dean e-mails when some information marked confidential had appeared to have been leaked.

Just some "vocabulary" for non-Harvard people.  Resident Deans are people who live in the Harvard dorms (what we call "houses") who help administrate the dorms and work with students.  For example, one of their jobs is to serve on the Administrative Board ("Ad Board"), which, as I've talked about, handles disciplinary cases, including the now infamous Gov 1030 cheating scandal.

Short version of the story:  it was noted that a confidential e-mail of the Ad Board had apparently leaked out to the Crimson.  The e-mail was pretty innocuous, but of course one doesn't want confidential e-mails leaking about.  So someone in the Harvard administration decided a bright idea was to check the e-mail accounts of the Resident Deans without telling them to see if they had leaked it.  (Apparently, one had.  Success!)  

Now, since Professors are the uber-people in the university*, we have rules to protect our e-mails from being searched except in extreme circumstances (and even then with notice), as the article points out.  I found it online after a bit of searching.  The first paragraph is:

"The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) provides the members of its faculty with computers, access to a computer network and computing services for business purposes, and it is expected that these resources will be used in an appropriate and professional manner. The FAS considers faculty email messages and other electronic documents stored on Harvard-owned computers to be confidential, and will not access them, except in the following circumstances."

(I was amused when the article noted "That FAS policy was drafted in part because some professors feared that previous president Lawrence Summers was monitoring their correspondence."  Summers really was quite unpopular with many faculty, and while I can't recall what specifically had some professors concerned about whether the administration could read or was reading our e-mail, I hope some of my colleagues can remind me in the comments -- I do recall that concern being around.)

So it would seem that the administration violated its own policy.  What ground do they have to stand on?  It seems like the only question is, are Resident Deans "faculty" under the policy?  They generally hold lecturer positions within the University, but they are also generally not tenure or tenure-track.  But as far as I can tell right now, they're faculty under any reasonable definition the university gives.

(The FAS Handbook described Lecturers as follows:
"A lectureship is a short-term, non-tenure-track position that is held by individuals who serve as course heads for courses that would otherwise be taught by tenure-track or tenured faculty. Lecturers must hold a Ph.D. All lecturer appointments must be based in a department or degree committee."
Sounds like faculty to me....) 

I was pleased to see CS faculty members Harry Lewis and Greg Morrisett quoted in the article, with both of them being pretty unhappy to hear about this.  Greg's comment that "a lot of faculty are going to be 'pissed off'" rings true to me.  (I assume I won't have to, but if nobody else makes a big deal about it -- hard to believe -- I would plan to bring it up at the next FAS faculty meeting.)

Also, it just seems silly.  They could have/should have first asked the Resident Deans if any of them had messed up, and let them know that Harvard considered the leak of Ad Board related confidential information a sufficiently big issue that they planned to search their e-mail if necessary.  My reading is the FAS policy would have allowed for that, according the following paragraph:

"Second, in extraordinary circumstances such as legal proceedings and internal Harvard investigations, faculty records may be accessed and copied by the administration. Such review requires the approval of the Dean of the FAS and the Office of the General Counsel. The faculty member is entitled to prior written notice that his or her records will be reviewed, unless circumstances make prior notification impossible, in which case the faculty member will be notified at the earliest possible opportunity."

One might quibble as to whether the e-mail leaked in this case corresponds to an "extraordinary circumstance", but if the administration had followed this policy, it would have been hard to argue with.  Why didn't they do this?  We (or at least I) don't know.  Heck, it could be that they forgot about this policy.  There are so many pages of policy around, it's hard to keep track of them all, as I've annoyingly found while serving as Area Dean.  Or they did remember the policy, but actively decided that Resident Deans weren't "faculty".  Or, they just really didn't care.  Lots of possibilities.  But the idea that nobody had the common sense to say, "Whoa!  Isn't it bad precedent to go looking through people's e-mail without going through other options or letting them know?" is the kind of thing that make faculty think they need to push back or even rein in the administrative side of the university.

So I expect to hear more on this issue.  

* Or at least we like to think so.  Though we can tell that the administrators increasingly think that they're the uber-people, and this can make us very unhappy in some circumstances.  Like this one.  

 UPDATE:  As is often the case these days, Harry Lewis and I are blogging in parallel on Harvard matters.  His insightful thoughts on this situation can be found here.  

Rankings Don't Matter (But)

Back when I started at Harvard, people would literally say things to me like, "I didn't know Harvard had computer science."

Now I could just point such people here.  

Discussing STOC 2013 PC with Joan Feigenbaum

Joan Feigenbaum is the Program Committee Chair for STOC 2013, where papers decisions were recently announced;  I served as part of the Executive Committee.  Joan did an excellent job running the entire process, and experimented with a "two-tiered" PC.  We agreed that it would be interesting to talk about her experience on the blog, and she agreed to answer some questions I posed.  We hope you'll find the discussion interesting.

1.  You're now completing your stint as Program Committee Chair for STOC 2013.  How do you think the program looks? 
I think it looks great.  We had roughly 20% more submissions than last year, and many of them were excellent -- an embarrassment of riches.  Once we decided to stick with the recent STOC practice of a three-day program with two parallel tracks of talks, we were faced with the usual problem for STOC PCs, namely having to reject many clearly acceptable submissions.  I guess that's a much better problem to have than an insufficient number of clearly acceptable submissions, but I still have reservations about this approach to conferences.  (There's more on that in my answer to questions 2 and 5 below.)

2. You tried a number of new things this year -- a "two-tiered" PC being the most notable.  How do you think it worked?  Where do you think it improved things, and where did it not work as you might have hoped?
When Lance Fortnow, SIGACT Past Chair, asked me to be the Program Chair for STOC 2013, he strongly encouraged me to "experiment" and, in particular, strongly encouraged me to try a two-tiered PC.  I agreed to do so, but it was a strange "experiment" in that it was not clear to me (or to anyone, for that matter) what problem a two-tiered PC might solve.  There was no hypothesis to test, and the whole exercise wasn't a controlled experiment in any well defined sense.  Nonetheless, I was able to reverse engineer my way into some potential advantages of a two-tiered PC and hence some good reasons for trying it.
      Before I get into those reasons, however, I should state the primary conclusion that I drew from this experience: Given the extraordinarily high quantity and quality of STOC submissions, it's extremely easy to put together a good program, and any reasonable PC structure will do.  That is, assuming that you don't want to change the nature of the product (where the product is a three-day, two-track STOC that has a fairly but not ridiculously low acceptance rate), you have a lot of latitude in the program-committee process that you use to produce it.  There's nothing sacred about the "traditional," 20-person PC with one chair and no PC-authored submissions; there's nothing definitively wrong with it either.
      Now what did we try this year, and what were some of its potential advantages?  First of all, we briefly considered changing the product, e.g., by having three parallel sessions, but decided against it; we set out to put together a STOC program that was similar in quality and quantity to other recent STOC programs but to do so using a different process.  We had an Executive Committee (EC) of nine people (including me) and a Program Committee (PC) of 62 people.  PC members were allowed to submit, but EC members were not.  The job of the PC was to read the submissions in detail and write reviews, and the job of the EC was to oversee and coordinate the reviewing process.  For example, EC members reassigned submissions that HotCRP had assigned to inappropriate reviewers, looked for submissions that required extra scrutiny because they might have subtle technical flaws, and, most importantly, looked for pairs of submissions that were directly comparable and needed to have at least one reviewer in common.  In order to promote high-quality reviews (which I thought should be attainable, because each PC member had fewer submissions to review than he would have in a traditional PC), I put together a list of suggested review questions and regularly reminded PC members to flesh out, revise, and polish their reviews based on committee discussions.  We made accept/reject decisions about a hefty fraction of the submissions fairly early in the process, based on two reviews of each submission.  For the rest of the submissions, we got additional reviews or asked the original two reviewers to consider them in more detail or both; for each set of comparable submissions that survived the first cut, an EC member conducted an online "meeting" (using both email and HotCRP comments) of all of the reviewers of submissions in the set.
      One potential big advantage of this way of doing things over the traditional way is that PC service can be much less burdensome.  Each PC member can review far fewer submissions than he would for a traditional program committee and can also submit his own papers.  He can devote considerably more time and attention to each submission assigned to him and still wind up spending considerably less total time and effort than he would under the old system.  He's also less likely to have to review submissions that are outside of his area(s) of expertise, because there are many more PC members to choose from when finalizing assignments.  The hope is that almost everyone in the theory community will be willing to serve on a STOC PC when asked if the workload is manageable, that PC members will be more satisfied with the quality of their work if they can spend more time on each submission and don't have to review submissions outside of their area(s), and that authors will get higher quality reviews.
     A second potential advantage is that the managerial and oversight responsibilities can be shared by the entire EC and don't all fall on the chair.  In almost every traditional program committee I've served on (not just STOC committees), there has been a great deal of last-minute scrambling.  In particular, I've been in many face-to-face program-committee meetings at which we discovered that various pairs of papers needed to be compared but had been read by disjoint sets of reviewers.  That's not surprising, of course, when everyone (except the chair) had spent the previous few months trying to read the 60 submissions assigned to him and hence hadn't had a minute in which to at least skim all of the other submissions.  These relationships among submissions can be discovered early in the process if there are enough people whose job it is to look for them.  Having an EC that can facilitate many parallel, online "meetings" about disjoint sets of gray-area submissions is also a big win over a monolithic face-to-face program-committee meeting.  The latter inevitably requires each PC member to sit through long, tense discussions of submissions that he hasn't read and isn't interested in; our procedure enabled everyone to participate in the discussions to which he could really make a contribution -- and only those.
     I think that most of these hoped-for improvements actually materialized.  Certainly almost everyone whom I invited to serve on the PC said yes, and many said explicitly "OK, I'll do it because the workload looks as though it won't be crushing," or "I really appreciate the opportunity to submit papers!"  Similarly, we had no last-minute scrambling, and I attribute that to the oversight work done by the EC.  All of the potential technical flaws in submissions that we discovered were discovered early in the process and resolved one way or the other (sometimes with the help of outside experts); similarly, all of the pairs of submissions that, by the end, we thought should be compared were assigned to common reviewers early in the process.
      Unfortunately, the effect of the lower workload on quality of reviews was disappointing.  There was some improvement over the reviews produced by traditional STOC PCs but not as much as I had hoped for.

3. In my experience, our major PCs -- STOC and FOCS -- have small amounts of institutional memory and even smaller amounts of actual analysis of performance.  What data would you like to have to help evaluate whether the PC process went better this year?
For this year, I'd like to hear from PC members whether they did in fact spend less time overall but more time per submission than they have in the past on "traditional" PCs.  I'd also like to know whether they found the whole experience to be manageable and unstressful (if that's a word) enough to be willing to do it often, by which I mean significantly more often than they'd be willing to serve on traditional PCs.  Finally, I'd like to know whether the opportunity to submit papers was a factor in their willingness to serve and whether they found it awkward to review their fellow PC members' submissions.
      If future PC Chairs continue to experiment with the process or even with the product, as I suggest that they do in my answer to question 5 below, then I hope they'll capture their PC members' opinions of the experimental steps they take.

4. Are there things you did for the PC that you would change if you had to do it again?
Because the goals of this "experiment" were so amorphous, I and the rest of the EC members made up a great deal of the process as we went along.  If I were to run this committee process again, I would start by creating a detailed schedule, and I would distribute and explain it to the entire PC at the beginning of the review process.  I'd also lengthen the amount of time PC members had to write their first round of reviews (used to make the "first-cut" accept/reject decisions) by a week or two.  I'd also assign second-round reviewers at the beginning, rather than waiting as we did until after the first round of decisions had already been made; we wound up losing a fair amount of time while we figured out whom to ask for additional reviews, and I suspect that many PC members wound up losing interest during this down time.  So each submission would still receive just two reviews in the first round, but third (and perhaps fourth) reviewers would have their assignments and be ready to start immediately on all submissions on which early decisions weren't made.

5. Are there things you would strongly recommend to future PC chairs?
I hope that the theory community as a whole will consider fundamental changes to the form and function of STOC.  As I said in my answer to question 2, if we want to continue producing the same type of product (a three-day, two-track conference with an acceptance rate somewhere between 25% and 30%), then there are many PC processes that would work well enough; each PC chair might as well choose the process that he or she thinks will be easiest for all concerned.  The more interesting question is whether we want to change the product.  Do we want more parallel sessions, no parallel sessions, different numbers of parallel sessions on different days, more invited talks, more papers but the same number of talks (which could be achieved by having some papers presented only in poster sessions), or something even more radical?  What do we want the goals of STOC to be, and how should we arrange the program to achieve our goals?
     The community should discuss these and other options.  We should elect SIGACT officers who support experimentation and empower future PC Chairs to try fundamentally new things.
      More specifically, I recommend that future PC chairs include, as we did, a subcommittee whose job it is to oversee the reviewing process rather than actually to review submissions; in our case, this oversight function was the responsibility of the executive "tier," but there might be other ways to do it.  As I said in my answer to question 2, giving oversight and management responsibility to more people than just the PC Chair really helped in uncovering problems early and in making sure that related submissions were compared early.
      Finally, I'd of course recommend that future PC chairs not make the same mistakes I made -- see my answer to question 4.

6. In my experience, the theoretical computer science community is known for comparatively poor conference reviewing.  Having been PC chair, do you agree or disagree?  Do you think the two-tiered structure help make for better reviews? Do you have any thoughts on how to make reviewing better in the future?
In my experience, reviews on submissions to theory conferences range enormously in quality.  The worst consist of just a few tossed-off remarks and the best of very clear, well thought out, constructive criticism.  As I said in my answer to question 2, I had hoped that the two-tiered PC and its concomitant lighter reviewing load (together with my suggested review questions and regular prodding) would lead to a marked improvement in the quality of reviews, but we got only a small improvement.  I was extremely disappointed.  Frankly, I don't know what the theory community can do about review quality.  Maybe we should start by discussing it frankly and finding out whether people really think it's a problem.  If most people don't see it as a serious problem, then perhaps we don't have to do anything.

7. As you know, I'm a big fan of HotCRP.  How did you like it?
I've used three web-based conference-management systems: HotCRP, EasyChair, and Shai Halevi's system (the name of which I don't remember).  In my experience, they're all reasonable and certainly capable of getting the job done, but none of them is great; HotCRP is the best, but not by a wide margin.  Part of my problem was that I had unrealistic expectations going in.  I'd been told that HotCRP was almost infinitely flexible and configurable, and I thought that it would be easy to set things up exactly as I wanted them; that turned out not to be true.  On the other hand, if you use HotCRP exactly as it was designed to be used, it works quite well.  I have the feeling that it is a "system builder's system" in that it's very powerful and very efficient but not all that easy on users; the UI is not great.  Anyway, you and I do agree on one thing: HotCRP's "tagging" feature is amazing; PCs of all shapes and sizes should make heavy use of it.

ICALP formatting

Given the loud outcry regarding the STOC 2013 formatting, which gave you 10 double-column pages to work with (at the cost of, you know, having to turn your paper into double-column format), I though I'd again express my annual dismay at the format for ICALP submission.  Twelve LNCS pages is simply not enough space to present anything interesting at a suitable level of detail.  I'm tempted as always to turn in a 1 page paper, that says "If the 1 paragraph abstract sounds interesting, here's the arxiv link to something you can read."  Why they haven't pushed LNCS to allow at least 14 pages remains a mystery to me. 

Back to formatting.

Online Censorship Day and Other Links

1)  Sharon Goldberg and Nick Feamster asked me to announce the following:

In the tradition of CAEC, NYCE, and etc, we are holding a "Day" on online censorship at BU on March 8, with speakers from technology, law and public policy.  We're currently soliciting abstracts for short talks and posters (due Feb 21).  Info is here:

http://www.bu.edu/cs/bfoc/

2)  The Crimson has a nice article on CS at Harvard, leading with

The computer science concentration has nearly doubled in size in the last two years and continues to drive growth in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, according to new data released by the SEAS Communications Office.

3)  I wanted to point to this essay by Don Rosa.  Don Rosa is well-known as the writer and illustrator for many of the tales of Scrooge McDuck, which I didn't read as a kid but have enjoyed with my kids as an adult.  (I'd recommend the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, but there doesn't appear to be an affordable version available on Amazon right now.)  The essay is a poignant explanation of why he stopped, which I expect might resonate with many people, including those who have never read a comic. 

Daily Show

Anyone else watching Jon Stewart making fun of Harvard w/regard to the "cheating scandal".

[I need the exact wording for the punch line -- "Open Internet?  Is this Harvard or the University of Phoenix?"]

Zachary Quinto and Cherry Jones are in Town...

Harvard had a special faculty meet-the-director-deal thing for a preview of The Glass Menagerie, playing the next few weeks at the American Repertory Theater, that my wife and I went out to tonight.  Cherry Jones and Zachary Quinto are the leads.  It was excellent, though, of course, totally depressing in that Tennessee Williams play way.  Shockingly (to me), there appear to be tickets available.  If you're in the Boston area, I'd highly recommend making an evening out of it.  Enough so that I thought to blog about it.

Ad Board Update

We've finally got an update on the Government 1310 situation.  As reported by the Crimson, FAS Dean Mike Smith sent out an email Friday, where he wrote that

“somewhat more than half” of cases heard by the College’s Administrative Board last fall resulted in forced withdrawals

and many of the other half resulted in disciplinary probation.  While this includes more than Gov 1310, given the size of the case, that probably represents the bulk of the withdrawals.

On the positive side, the university tried to limit any financial damage to students given the long time frame required to reach decisions, rolling it back for tuition purposes as though they had to withdraw September 30.  It seems like they could have decided and announced that previously, but at least they did it.

For better or worse, I suspect we won't be getting substantially more details given the (appropriate) confidentiality with which these cases are handled.  I would like there to be some way that more could come out of this, though it appears that will be indirect.  A fairly recently-developed Committee on Academic Integrity (which does pre-date the Gov 1310 situation) will be making recommendations on issues such as whether Harvard should institute an honor code and how faculty should structure assessments.  I'm skeptical that these will get to the deeper issues -- what we mean by cheating (especially in the Internet age) and whether the faculty have a consistent and clear policy about it, what leads students to cheat, and what the role of the University is in developing morality in the student body.  At the same time, I'm sure these issues are much closer to the surface now than they have been in the past, and are discussed more amongst faculty and students, in unofficial settings.

Further update:  I highly recommend Harry Lewis's latest (and last?) post on the issue, and the discussion in Harvard Magazine, which includes the full text of Dean Smith's letter.  

Friday Ruminations

It's felt like a bad few weeks at Harvard.

Not that anything actually BAD has happened, like an inexplicable paper rejection or some interdepartmental fight or anything.  It's just that January is filled with time-sucking (or, really, just sucking) administrative work normally, and it's worse this year as I have more administrative duties. 

My weeks have been spent looking over faculty applications and graduate applications, and dealing with the paperwork and relevant meetings associated with such.  Handling multiple promotion cases.  Writing letters for students applying for internships or summer programs or whatever.  Preparing for my class this semester -- a process exacerbated my Harvard's fairly recent change of schedule which places many students away from campus from December finals until the day classes start, making it hard to organize the mostly undergraduate teaching assistants.  Handling papers as part of the STOC executive committee.  Reading some undergraduate admission folders.  Chairing a grant panel (for a friendly foreign country).  Writing letters for colleagues outside Harvard going through promotion cases.  (You're welcome.)  Dealing with the myriad issues of the other CS faculty that pass through me while I'm Area Dean.  It's rare that I've had the 20 minutes to think about research, talk to my collaborators, or work out things with my graduate students. 

Individually, there's nothing bad about any of these tasks.  They're part of the job.  But packed together, so I feel like I'm on an administrative treadmill, it's wearing me out.  If it's optional in February, I'm saying no.  (That means you, ISIT papers people have asked me to review.) 

On a more positive note, I was at a new concentrator event, and ended up talking for a while with four or five women who plan to major in CS at Harvard, most of whom are currently taking my class.  I'm happy that we're seeing many, many more women in CS at Harvard;  my only disappointment is that it hasn't been that way for so long. 

CS 124 is holding steady at about 100-110 students this year, maybe a little smaller than last year, but at the level of noise.  We've got four CS classes over 100 people this semester from the looks of things.  (To calibrate, that's a lot for us spoiled Ivy League faculty.)  Overall CS enrollments keep on growing.    

Finally, an amusing note, in Harvard's Courses of Instructions I'm listed as the teacher next year for CS 221, our graduate complexity course.  There always seem to be many bugs in the data for course listings, but this is particularly funny, as I'm planning to be on sabbatical next year, and I've never taught (or had it suggested that I teach) 221.  Someone transposed something somewhere.

On My Drive in This Morning...

It would, of course, be completely inappropriate for me to write that if you're interested in illegal prescription drugs, you should go talk to Stefan Savage of UCSD.  But it's more appropriate for me to give a shout-out to him for his recent appearance on Planet Money's podcast, in Episode 430:  Black Market Pharmacies and the Spam Empire Behind Them, which I listened to on my way into work this morning.  It's well worth listening to.  The podcast's take summarized (which matches my experience with other non-drug online advertising based businesses, and I think I'm summarizing Stefan correctly) -- it's actually a pretty boring business.  Online pharmacies are just trying to sell something, get their cut, and spam mail is their effective way of advertising.  (Since selling prescription drugs without a prescription in the US is illegal, they can't exactly advertise on TV.)  Stefan mentions in the podcast that in cases he's examined, they don't appear to be trying to send you placebos or bad product;  they're just making their margin, like other retail businesses. 

Maybe Stefan will see this and offer some pointers to research in the comments.  In any case, I enjoyed listening to his insights and smooth-sounding voice on the drive. 

Auernheimer Speaks

Auernheimer -- who as I've discussed on this blog was convicted of a felony by accessing AT&T servers -- put out a statement yesterday. 

Here Comes Another One

And yet another security story -- this one titled find a bug, get expelled or something close to that in various places. I'm going to have to find out where I send an opinionated letter to Dawson college.  

Also, if you haven't been reading it, I'd really recommend reading the last week or so of posts on Harry Lewis's blog, which goes into a lot of depth on issues related to the Aaron Swartz's case, university governance and culture, and the Harvard cheating case.