Edith Cohen, Vitaly Feldman, Omer Reingold and Ronitt Rubinfeld wrote a pledge for inclusiveness in TCS. I think it is mostly common sense: saying that not just our universities, but also our conferences and workshops, are part of our workplace, and that we should strive for them to be free of harassment. But sometimes it … Continue reading Consider signing a pledge for inclusiveness in TCS

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

Michael Mitzenmacher points to two  posts of Suresh Venkatasubramanian on the issue of so called "double blind reviews" (i.e., anonymous submissions) in theory conferences. In short, both Michael and Suresh think they are a good idea. I agree with much of their motivations, but, based on my experience in both non-blinded (e.g., STOC/FOCS) and blinded (e.g., CRYPTO) … Continue reading On double blind reviews in theory conferences

(Edit: scribe notes on my lectures on this topic are now up.) Subhash Khot, Dor Minzer and Muli Safra just posted an exciting manuscript online. In it, they confirm the combinatorial hypothesis I've posted about before on the structure of non-expanding set in the degree two short-code graph (or, equivalently, in the Grassman graph).   Together with … Continue reading Unique Games Conjecture – halfway there?

This fall I taught CS 121 - "Introduction to Theoretical Computer Science" - at Harvard. This is analogous to courses known at other universities as "Introduction to the Theory of Computation", "Automata and Computability", or "Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science", and are often taught using Sipser's excellent book. However, I decided to significantly revise it … Continue reading Intro TCS course post-mortem

The deadline to register to the Women In Theory workshop is January 16, 2018.  As Omer Reingold posted, this is a wonderful workshop with a strong set of speakers (confirmed speakers include  Bonnie Berger, Yael Kalai, Julia Kempe,  Gillat Kol, Nancy Lynch, and Barna Saha). It is sure to have a great technical content, as well … Continue reading Women In Theory – registration deadline getting closer