In this guest post, Sanjeev Arora will share some thoughts about the future of scientific publishing in our community. This is not unrelated to our last post, and is also aimed at initiating discussion towards FOCS 2013 that is starting in the coming weekend. As always, comments are most welcomed with the reminder that WindowsOnTheory … Continue reading Sanjeev Arora: Thoughts on Paper Publishing in the Digital Age

The business meeting of STOC/FOCS is usually rather tedious, but it is also an opportunity to raise and debate issues that the community should be concerned about. One such issue is the inconsistency between our publication norms and the norms of other communities. This is becoming more and more important as TCS megalomaniacally adopt the … Continue reading Umesh Vazirani: should publishing in STOC/FOCS and Science/Nature be mutually exclusive?

One of my favorite  quotes is “the work of the righteous is done by others.” It comes in handy whenever someone does something I could/should have done, and especially when this someone executes it better than I would. Based on its first few posts, I have the feeling that Moritz Hardt’s new blog, Moody Rd, will  give me … Continue reading On Moody Rd

On the last day of the conference I paid a visit to the friendly workshop next door – CHES (Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems). It was all foreign to me – a different mix of people, posters outside the lecture hall. After this year’s CRYPTO compressed talks, 25 minutes felt like an eternity. Actual food … Continue reading CRYPTO: Day 4

The highlights of the third day of CRYPTO were known ahead of time and yet did not disappoint: invited talk by Adam Langley on TLS, presentation of the best paper award, the business meeting followed by the beach barbecue. Adam Langley, known for his work in Google on TLS and HTTPS, addressed the joint session … Continue reading CRYPTO: Day 3

First, I’d like to thank my co-authors (Omkant Pandey and Ananth Raghunathan) for preparing and delivering two excellent talks this morning. It is due to their decision to step up to the plate that I get to do the fun stuff like blogging from the conference. The big topic of the afternoon session were multilinear … Continue reading CRYPTO: Day 2

First day of CRYPTO. Nothing happened… Just kidding. Actually, the first day was quite busy and eventful. It was headlined by the session on lattices and fully-homomorphic encryption. The one talk that I’d like to highlight was delivered by Craig Gentry (and co-authored by Amit Sahai and Brent Waters). It describes a particularly elegant and … Continue reading CRYPTO: Day 1

This week I’ll post a series of dispatches from the CRYPTO conference. Since this is the Day 0 of the conference, I’ll use it to lay some background for the uninitiated. This is the 33rd installment of the conference, which has gone from a small gathering of people excited about the newly emergent technology and … Continue reading CRYPTO 2013: Day 0

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