If you are a student or a postdoc looking for a new position, please come to ITCS 2016 (January 14-16 in Cambridge MA) and give a short presentation on your work during the graduating bits event (Friday, Jan 15 6:30pm). If you are interested, please send me your information and presentation (see here for precise details how to … Continue reading Register for graduating bits

ITCS 2016 will be held in Cambridge January 14-16. As in previous years,  we will have a "graduating bits" session where students graduating this year can present a (very) short talk on their work. This year I am in charge of the graduating bits event, which means that details on how to sign up for it will only appear … Continue reading Graduating bits at ITCS

The deadline to apply for the Rabin postdocs, as well as other postdoc positions, is coming up on December 1st, see my previous post. Don't forget to apply!!  

Theoretical computer scientists love inequalities. After all, a great many of our papers involve showing either an upper bound or a lower bound on some quantity. So I thought I'd share some cool stuff I've learned this Friday in our reading group's talk by Zeev Dvir. This is based on my partial and vague recollection … Continue reading The mother of all inequalities

[I don't have much to add to Luca, Scott, and Lipton/Regan on the exciting announcement by Babai of a quasipolynomial time graph isomorphism algorithm. I can't wait to hear the details! --Boaz] Aided by some very generous gifts, Computer Science is on a growth streak at Harvard, and in particular there are some new opportunities in Theoretical Computer … Continue reading Theoretical CS Opportunities at Harvard

As a Ph.D student, I searched for advice on succeeding in grad school, and often thought that eventually I would repay the favor when I became a professor. I never got around to doing that, but now decided to give it a shot. So, here goes: Tip #1: Don’t get advice from the Internet. Grad … Continue reading Advice for the budding theorist

(see also this post and these lecture notes) There is a longstanding feud in statistics between "frequentists" and "Bayesians". One way to understand these two camps is to consider the following statements: The probability that my paternal great great grandfather had blue eyes is 5% The probability that the $latex 10^{10^{10}}$-th digit of $latex \pi$ is … Continue reading A different type of pseudo

[Forwarding an announcement by Prasad Raghavendra --Boaz] FOCS 2015 will be held at Berkeley, California on October 18–20, 2015. Registrations are open at: http://focs15.simons.berkeley.edu/registration.html The deadline for early registration is Sept 25th. KARPfest80 On Saturday October 17, the day immediately before FOCS 2015, the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing will host a celebration … Continue reading FOCS 2015 and KARPFest80

[Below is a guest post from Sanjeev Arora on his redesign of the traditional graduate algorithms course to be a better match for today's students. --Boaz] For the last two years I have tried new ideas in teaching algorithms at the graduate level. The course is directed at first year CS grads, but is also taken by grads … Continue reading Sanjeev Arora on rethinking the graduate algorithms course