Update (4/15): Scribe notes are now up thanks to Mitali Bafna, Chi-Ning Chou, and Zhao Song. As I posted before, recently Khot, Minzer and Safra posted a manuscript which is the culmination of a beautiful line of work, initiated by the same authors, and completes the proof of (the imperfect completeness variant of) Khot's 2 … Continue reading On the recent proof of the 2-to-2 conjecture

In the U.S., we have almost no research masters programs. We only admit students into a Ph.D. Overall it works well, but it requires us to be very conservative in our admissions, since we are committing to have the student come for 5 years or so. This can be a particular issue for students that … Continue reading Research masters

In an earlier post I asked if we have TCS "Harvey Weinsteins". Unfortunately academia is hardly immune from sexual harassment and now a  TCS researcher posted about her experiences with sexual harassment and assault in our community. While this is not pleasant reading, it is important, and I urge you to read the full post … Continue reading #metootcs

In NIPS 2017, Ali Rahimi and Ben Recht won the test of time award for their paper "Random Features for Large-scale Kernel Machines". Ali delivered the following acceptance speech (see also addendum) in which he said that Machine Learning has become "alchemy" in the sense that it involves more and more "tricks" or "hacks" that work … Continue reading Looking for car keys under the streetlight