As Boaz discussed, there is an excellent collection of papers to be presented at the upcoming FOCS in Philadelphia. These would be spread over three of the days of the conference. Before this though, there will be an exciting day of workshops and tutorials. It is your chance to reach hundreds of people from across … Continue reading FOCS 2014: Call for Workshops and Tutorials

Today, we have a guest post from Frank McSherry talking about a clever approach to using Differential Privacy for handling pesky dependencies that get in the way of proving measure concentration results. --------------------- In this post I'll explain a cute use of differential privacy as a tool in probabilistic analysis. This is a great example … Continue reading Differential Privacy for Measure Concentration

Only a few decades ago, I hear, CS papers were typewritten, with hand-drawn figures and hand-written greek letters. With the advent of computers, people began to use tools like troff, until we got tex, and then latex, making life much easier. I have no clue how people not at the same physical location co-wrote papers … Continue reading On BibTeX

Just a gentle reminder that the STOC 2013 posters submission deadline is a few days away. The STOC poster session is a great way to share your work with the TCS community, be it works appearing at other venues, your STOC papers you want to talk more about, or even your FOCS submissions that you … Continue reading STOC Poster Session: Deadline approaching

In a previous blog post, we saw how ideas from differential privacy can be used to prove a lower bound on the hereditary discrepancy for the Erdös Discrepancy problem. This lower bound happened to be nearly tight. It turns out that this tightness is no accident. The connection between hereditary discrepancy and privacy is in … Continue reading From Discrepancy to Privacy, and back Part 2: Approximating Hereditary Discrepancy

Quick Reminder: the deadline for ICALP is Feb 15th. Time to rev up your latex engines. The call for papers is here.

The 2012 MacArthur Fellows have recently been announced. Many congratulations to all the winners, including Dan Spielman and Maria Chudnovsky.

Different areas of mathematics, and theoretical computer science, freely borrow tools and ideas from each other and these interactions, like barters, can make both parties richer. In fact it's even better than barter: the objects being ideas, you don't have to actually give them up in an exchange. And so it is no surprise that … Continue reading From Discrepancy to Privacy, and back

Tim Gowers reports on a new set of open access math journals. There will be a Forum of Mathematics:Pi that is supposed to be a generalist math journal, and Forum of Mathematics:Sigma that would have "clusters" for different areas. It will be paid for by Cambridge University Press for the first three years, and will then … Continue reading Interesting new development in Math publishing