Worth noting -- two semester-long programs for Fall 2013 are already decided: these are "Real Analysis in Computer Science," organized by Gil Kalai, Subhash Khot, Michel Ledoux, Elchanan Mossel, Prasad Raghavendra and Luca Trevisan; and "Theoretical Foundations of Big Data Analysis," organized by Stephen Boyd, Peter Buehlmann, Michael Jordan, Ravi Kannan, Michael Mahoney and Muthu Muthukrishnan. Get your tickets now.
14 Ağustos 2012 Salı
Simons Institute Call
To contact us Click HERE
Alistair Sinclair asked me to post the call at http://simons.berkeley.
Worth noting -- two semester-long programs for Fall 2013 are already decided: these are "Real Analysis in Computer Science," organized by Gil Kalai, Subhash Khot, Michel Ledoux, Elchanan Mossel, Prasad Raghavendra and Luca Trevisan; and "Theoretical Foundations of Big Data Analysis," organized by Stephen Boyd, Peter Buehlmann, Michael Jordan, Ravi Kannan, Michael Mahoney and Muthu Muthukrishnan. Get your tickets now.
Worth noting -- two semester-long programs for Fall 2013 are already decided: these are "Real Analysis in Computer Science," organized by Gil Kalai, Subhash Khot, Michel Ledoux, Elchanan Mossel, Prasad Raghavendra and Luca Trevisan; and "Theoretical Foundations of Big Data Analysis," organized by Stephen Boyd, Peter Buehlmann, Michael Jordan, Ravi Kannan, Michael Mahoney and Muthu Muthukrishnan. Get your tickets now.
MMDS
To contact us Click HERE
I'm hanging out at MMDS -- the Workshop on Algorithms for Modern Massive Datasets at Stanford. The crowd is surprisingly huge, with a greater number of people in "adjacent" areas (math/statistics/machine learning) and industry than is normal for me. It's very exciting to see such wide-scale interest.
Right now, though, the non-theorists are having to listen to a very theoretical session:
Fun stuff!
I just enjoyed an interesting aspect of Ashish's talk. He was putting the social search problem in a framework where you first do preprocessing on the social graph (using distance oracles for shortest paths), and then do incremental updates (corresponding to when someone say does a new Tweet, you update the keywords associated with that user). I like it because I talk about the preprocessing + query answering approach (using examples like suffix trees, least common ancestor data structures) in my undergrad class. This preprocessing + incremental update + query answering example in the context of social search would make a nice addition (that students can hopefully appreciate), if I could simplify it in a reasonable way.
Right now, though, the non-theorists are having to listen to a very theoretical session:
|
Fun stuff!
I just enjoyed an interesting aspect of Ashish's talk. He was putting the social search problem in a framework where you first do preprocessing on the social graph (using distance oracles for shortest paths), and then do incremental updates (corresponding to when someone say does a new Tweet, you update the keywords associated with that user). I like it because I talk about the preprocessing + query answering approach (using examples like suffix trees, least common ancestor data structures) in my undergrad class. This preprocessing + incremental update + query answering example in the context of social search would make a nice addition (that students can hopefully appreciate), if I could simplify it in a reasonable way.
Like a Movie Meteor...
To contact us Click HERE
The new semester is hurtling toward me.
This semester I get to teach one of my graduate courses, the one I named Algorithms at the End of the Wire sometime over a decade ago, when that seemed like an appropriate title. Students seem to have learned that the appropriate subtitle for the course is something akin to: "Things Professor Mitzenmacher is working on, is interested in, or otherwise likes." Standard topics therefore include ranking and search engines (Pagerank + variants), data sketches and summaries, coding, and compression.
Since I teach it every other year, I try to introduce new topics into the mix where appropriate. Generally, I'm looking for two things:
1) Topics that have an interesting mix of theory and practice. The class is based on paper-reading, so it's particularly fun (for me) to try to find a topic where I can assign one theoretical paper and one practical paper. This yields interesting room for comparisons and contrasts, induces (I can only hope) interactions between systems and theory students in the class, and (again I can only hope) ensures that everyone gets something out of at least one of the papers.
2) Topics in my bailiwick. Networking (including social networking!) is always good; connections between "EE theory" and "CS theory" are nice; big data topics, including database or cloud style applications are very welcome.
So what papers in the last 2-3 years, say, really need to be added to the class reading list? Where are the new and exciting places where theory and practice are meeting to produce exciting breakthroughs (that, ideally, can be covered in couple of lectures)? Or, as another way to think about it, what should I really be learning about? Please let me know in the comments.
PS: Yes, I haven't been blogging much. I've been having a perfectly enjoyable summer without blogging. I've been busy with vacation, kid time, other lazy time, consulting work, the occasional bit of "Area Dean" administration, and, of course, my day job -- a few papers have been submitted, a few more are at various stages in the pipeline. But I suppose with the summer tailing off I'll have more reason to be blogging again.
This semester I get to teach one of my graduate courses, the one I named Algorithms at the End of the Wire sometime over a decade ago, when that seemed like an appropriate title. Students seem to have learned that the appropriate subtitle for the course is something akin to: "Things Professor Mitzenmacher is working on, is interested in, or otherwise likes." Standard topics therefore include ranking and search engines (Pagerank + variants), data sketches and summaries, coding, and compression.
Since I teach it every other year, I try to introduce new topics into the mix where appropriate. Generally, I'm looking for two things:
1) Topics that have an interesting mix of theory and practice. The class is based on paper-reading, so it's particularly fun (for me) to try to find a topic where I can assign one theoretical paper and one practical paper. This yields interesting room for comparisons and contrasts, induces (I can only hope) interactions between systems and theory students in the class, and (again I can only hope) ensures that everyone gets something out of at least one of the papers.
2) Topics in my bailiwick. Networking (including social networking!) is always good; connections between "EE theory" and "CS theory" are nice; big data topics, including database or cloud style applications are very welcome.
So what papers in the last 2-3 years, say, really need to be added to the class reading list? Where are the new and exciting places where theory and practice are meeting to produce exciting breakthroughs (that, ideally, can be covered in couple of lectures)? Or, as another way to think about it, what should I really be learning about? Please let me know in the comments.
PS: Yes, I haven't been blogging much. I've been having a perfectly enjoyable summer without blogging. I've been busy with vacation, kid time, other lazy time, consulting work, the occasional bit of "Area Dean" administration, and, of course, my day job -- a few papers have been submitted, a few more are at various stages in the pipeline. But I suppose with the summer tailing off I'll have more reason to be blogging again.
Distracting Videos
To contact us Click HERE
Jeff Erickson gets the blame for pointing out this amusing/disturbing video on counting. I feel like I should make it a background video before my undergraduate class one day. Catchy tune.
My wife liked this backyard roller coaster video, which apparently creates discussion about whether this is the best dad ever (let me repeat: backyard roller coaster) or completely irresponsible and dangerous parenting (let me repeat: backyard roller coaster).
David Malan gets fun videos up to advertise CS50. So any Harvard students reading this, point the freshpeople over to www.cs50.net and run the video. (In this case, I will not justify the choice of music.) Expect more CS50 goodness and news on the blog as it's one of the initial HarvardX courses.
I found my library had all the Sarah Jane Adventures DVD sets. (Trailer here.) For those who don't know, Sarah Jane Smith was one of Doctor Who's companions back in the 1970's; only three decades or so later, they finally gave her a spin-off show, which is a lighter and somewhat more kid-friendly version of Doctor Who. My kids (who also like Doctor Who, though they're occasionally creeped out by it) were instantly addicted when we visited London a few years ago. So this last week or so I've been forced to watch many, many happy hours of perfectly summertime TV with the kids. (My youngest only wants to watch Scooby Doo, so I've also been catching the new episodes of Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated -- EVIL PIZZA ; while I'm really, really, really burnt out on Scooby Doo at this point, I have to say, the Mystery Incorporated series seems like the best incarnation of Scooby Doo ever.)
My wife liked this backyard roller coaster video, which apparently creates discussion about whether this is the best dad ever (let me repeat: backyard roller coaster) or completely irresponsible and dangerous parenting (let me repeat: backyard roller coaster).
David Malan gets fun videos up to advertise CS50. So any Harvard students reading this, point the freshpeople over to www.cs50.net and run the video. (In this case, I will not justify the choice of music.) Expect more CS50 goodness and news on the blog as it's one of the initial HarvardX courses.
I found my library had all the Sarah Jane Adventures DVD sets. (Trailer here.) For those who don't know, Sarah Jane Smith was one of Doctor Who's companions back in the 1970's; only three decades or so later, they finally gave her a spin-off show, which is a lighter and somewhat more kid-friendly version of Doctor Who. My kids (who also like Doctor Who, though they're occasionally creeped out by it) were instantly addicted when we visited London a few years ago. So this last week or so I've been forced to watch many, many happy hours of perfectly summertime TV with the kids. (My youngest only wants to watch Scooby Doo, so I've also been catching the new episodes of Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated -- EVIL PIZZA ; while I'm really, really, really burnt out on Scooby Doo at this point, I have to say, the Mystery Incorporated series seems like the best incarnation of Scooby Doo ever.)
Mail Issue
To contact us Click HERE
Last week I had an issue where I sent an e-mail to someone (non-work-related), and a while later got the response forwarded to me from my wife, with a note that Harvard was rejecting the response e-mail. It seemed to be a one-time issue -- I was getting other e-mail -- so I assumed it was a spurious issue and ignored it.
Last night, it happened again -- both of my brothers had their mail to me bounced from Harvard, with the same error message.
The commonality was easy to spot -- all were using Yahoo mail accounts.
I sent mail to IT, who quickly found that yes, a firewall upgrade last week had somehow made mail from mail.yahoo.com undeliverable.
It's always a little disturbing to me when I find these problems. For historical reasons I think I'm on a mail server that doesn't involve a large number of people at Harvard, but still, nobody noticed for a week that mail from Yahoo wasn't being delivered? Perhaps it says something unfortunate about how many people still use Yahoo mail accounts these days.
It's also an example of something I feel I always have to explain to people: e-mail is not a 100% reliable delivery service, and shouldn't be thought of as such. Yes, most of the time if your e-mail is dropped it is a "me issue" (you can either view it as my laziness/irresponsibility, or view it from my standpoint -- I get 50-100 e-mails a day and yours fell off the end somewhere); and sometimes these days it's a system issue (your mail looked like spam, and never reached my eyes). This time at least there was an error response so it was known that the mail didn't get through. But always best to be wary of your e-mail system, and use the phone if it's something important you need a response to.
Last night, it happened again -- both of my brothers had their mail to me bounced from Harvard, with the same error message.
The commonality was easy to spot -- all were using Yahoo mail accounts.
I sent mail to IT, who quickly found that yes, a firewall upgrade last week had somehow made mail from mail.yahoo.com undeliverable.
It's always a little disturbing to me when I find these problems. For historical reasons I think I'm on a mail server that doesn't involve a large number of people at Harvard, but still, nobody noticed for a week that mail from Yahoo wasn't being delivered? Perhaps it says something unfortunate about how many people still use Yahoo mail accounts these days.
It's also an example of something I feel I always have to explain to people: e-mail is not a 100% reliable delivery service, and shouldn't be thought of as such. Yes, most of the time if your e-mail is dropped it is a "me issue" (you can either view it as my laziness/irresponsibility, or view it from my standpoint -- I get 50-100 e-mails a day and yours fell off the end somewhere); and sometimes these days it's a system issue (your mail looked like spam, and never reached my eyes). This time at least there was an error response so it was known that the mail didn't get through. But always best to be wary of your e-mail system, and use the phone if it's something important you need a response to.
Kaydol:
Yorumlar (Atom)