There are only two FOCS/STOC chairs per year, and most would do just fine without my unsolicited advice. Nevertheless, I thought it might make sense to write down some of my thoughts after chairing FOCS 2014, and perhaps even some people that are not program chairs will find it of interest. This is based on … Continue reading Tips for future FOCS/STOC program chairs

And available at this web page. At some point I would like to add a direct link to the video for each paper from the program page, but I figured that it's best to announce this now rather than let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Update: Paul Beame notes below that the videos, as … Continue reading FOCS 2014 videos are online

[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

Hope everyone has a great FOCS! In the previous post we mentioned the two workshops on different aspects of the Fourier transforms occurring today. I also wanted to mention the Tutorial on obfuscation today with talks by  Amit Sahai, Allison Lewko and Dan Boneh. The new constructions of obfuscation and their applications form one of the most exciting and … Continue reading FOCS 2014 is starting

[Guest post by Anna Gilbert, who is co-organizing with Piotr Indyk and Dina Katabi a FOCS 2014 workshop on The  Sparse Fourier Transform: Theory and Applications, this Saturday 9am-3:30pm]  After reading Boaz's post on Updates from the ICM and in particular his discussion of interactions between the TCS and applied math communities, I thought I'd contribute a … Continue reading Applied mathematicians vs Theoretical Computer Scientists

Not unrelated to our last post, the upcoming FOCS will have a panel-led discussion on "How might FOCS and STOC evolve?" (organized by David Shmoys) on Saturday 10/18 at 6pm. If you are interested in the future of FOCS and STOC, and haven't yet registered or made your travel plans, I urge you to do so … Continue reading Evolving FOCS – mobile edition

[Note: As I commented on Omer's touching post, I too was shocked by the sudden closure of the amazingly successful MSR Silicon Valley lab. I hope that this blog, whose contents had very little to do with MSR itself and everything to do with the great group of people that was there, would continue to … Continue reading Sum of Squares: Upper bounds, lower bounds, and open questions