[One can tell it's reviewing and letter-writing season when I escape to blogging more often..] There's been some discussion on the NIPS experiment, enough of it that even my neuro-scientist brother sent me a link to Eric Price's blog post. The gist of it is that the program chairs duplicated the reviewing process for 10% of the … Continue reading Quick comments on the NIPS experiment

Last Friday in our theory reading group, Yael Kalai observed that there's only one other woman in the room. She noticed it because in cryptography meetings, at least in the Boston area, there is a significantly higher female presence. Make no mistake, cryptography, even in Boston, still has a very lopsided gender ratio. But I think it is still … Continue reading An observation

I just gave the final lecture in my seminar on Sum of Squares Upper Bounds, Lower Bounds, and Open Questions. (see also this previous post). The lectures notes are available on the web page and also as a single pdf file.  They are extremely rough but I hope they would still be useful, as some … Continue reading Sum-of-Squares seminar: lecture notes and open problems