Last summer I gave a mini-course on the Sum of Squares algorithm in the Swedish Summer School of Computer Science. It was a great experience - the venue was  Djurönäset  - a hotel in the beautiful Stockholm archipelgo with stunning views and great food. It was organized very smoothly by Jakob Nordström, Per Austrin, and Johan Håstad, … Continue reading 2015 Swedish Summer School in Computer Science – apply soon

See here. NSF-sponsored papers should be freely available no more than 12 months after publication in a journal. This is not perfect, but a step in the right direction. Computer scientists should insist that conference proceedings are treated the same way, and made freely available no more than 12 months after publication. Hat tip: Lance Fortnow.

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

The closing of MSR-SV two months ago raised a fair bit of discussion, and I would like to contribute some of my own thoughts. Since the topic of industrial research is important, I would like the opportunity to counter some misconceptions that have spread. I would also like to share my advice with anyone that (like me) is … Continue reading Out the Window