Sanjeev Arora: Thoughts on Paper Publishing in the Digital Age

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

Umesh Vazirani: should publishing in STOC/FOCS and Science/Nature be mutually exclusive?

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?

Structure vs. Combinatorics in Computational Complexity

(Also available as a pdf file. Apologies for the many footnotes, feel free to skip them.) Computational problems come in all different types and from all kinds of applications, arising from engineering as well the mathematical, natural, and social sciences, and involving abstractions such as graphs, strings, numbers, and more. The universe of potential algorithms … Continue reading Structure vs. Combinatorics in Computational Complexity

On Moody Rd

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

CRYPTO: Day 4

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

CRYPTO: Day 1

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