The quality of conference presentations have, on average, much improved over the past decade or two. Why? Certainly technological improvements like PowerPoint...
My cell phone received a breaking new alert yesterday: The FDA is investigating a link between the impotence drug Viagra and blindness . The story also made...
Ravi Kumar and D. Sivakumar, the local organizers of the upcoming Conference on Computational Complexity in San Jose, ask that I post the following. I hope to...
A Chicago undergrad Amanda Redlich gave a presentation and used the shorthand ity (Complex-ity). Clever. Of course this should never be confused with ity. ...
My liveblogging experiment didn't quite work as planned. I seemed to have lost half of what I wrote and then my battery died. So here is some basic info from...
Most US universities have ended their academic year and moved into the summer season. I like summer not so much for the weather (it gets hot and muggy in...
I was 13 when I went to see the first Star Wars movie on opening weekend in 1977 in New York City when it was just called "Star Wars" without a subtitle or...
George Dantzig passed away last Friday. In the 1940s Dantzig invented linear programming and developed the simplex method for solving LP. Simplex works well in...
Guest Post by Boaz Barak The National Science Foundation (NSF) has a program called "Theory of Computing" which is the only program devoted to funding research...
In my last post you can find some links and comments about the tenure system. Let me add a few concerns that don't often get mentioned. Tenure keeps academic...
The US House Committee on Science held a hearing yesterday on The Future of Computer Science Research in the U.S. You can watch the webcast or read the...
One of our gradate students wanted to define a property P of classes C to hold if we don't know that C has complete sets. Doing so would make the concept time...
Deep into the bowels of the Physical Sciences Library I went to retrieve the Proceedings of a Symposium on the Complexity of Computer Computation to track down...
April Edition If Cook made the P versus NP question interesting to logicians, Karp made the question important to everyone else. Richard Karp, Reducibility...
A few years ago, one ranking listed Harvard as the number one engineering school. The schools were ranked by average starting salary of their graduates and...
Science has a special issue on Distributed High Performance Computing including an article Service-Oriented Science by Chicago's own Ian Foster. The must read...
While other fields have standardized postdoc programs, computer science still searches for the right approach for postdocs. While we have had postdoc positions...
Some interesting game theory and philosophy from the last couple of NUMB3RS episodes. Usual spoiler warnings. In the April 22nd episode Dirty Bomb there were...
Leonid Khachiyan passed away Friday at the age of 52. Khachiyan was best known for his 1979 ellipsoid algorithm giving the first polynomial-time algorithm to...
One of the requirements for a software engineering job at Autodesk. Good knowledge of common algorithms and data structures; understanding of computational...
Some sad news from Thomas Schwentick. What we have feared during the last weeks and months came true yesterday morning: Clemens Lautemann died at the age of 53...
Too often Ph.D. theses in computer science consist of not much more than a couple of "papers stapled together." A shame as one can use the thesis to truly...
Today is take your daughter (and son) to work day so today's post is written by Annie Fortnow (age 10) on the topic of her choice. This is a Dell Computer. It...
Around 1980 for fun in New Jersey we would go visit the electronic video arcades to play various games like Asteroids, Pac-Man, Tempest, Missile Command and...
My daughters saw the movie Ice Princess over the weekend. Based on what they told me here is the basic story: Casey decides to do a science project on figure...
March Edition This month we honor the papers that gave us the first NP-complete problems and marked the official beginning of the P versus NP question. The P...
You have probably heard this story by now. Some MIT students created a computer-generated paper accepted to a non-reviewed session of the Systemics,...
Haipeng Guo wins the math poetry contest with the poem below. Congratulations and thanks to all that participated. When a P-man loves an NP-woman Been a happy...
There is some buzz about a new construction of probabilistically checkable proofs by Irit Dinur. The PCP theorem, first proved by Arora, Lund, Motwani, Sudan...
New Balance has been heavily advertising some questions about sports so I'd thought I would give my own discussion questions about academics. You've been...
