You've told us what to wear and how to give the talk at my interview. Any tips for the rest of the trip?

Take the lead from the person you are talking to. If they start talking about their own research then listen intently and ask friendly intelligent questions. If they start talking about the town (indicating a belief that the two of you have no research interests in common) then have a nice talk comparing it to places you have lived in the past. If they ask about your own research then describe some results beyond your job talk.

Some will ask you questions. "Would you be willing to teach X, or organize Y?" Your answer is always "Yes, I'd be happy to." Some might ask why your research or even theoretical computer science in general is relevant. Make sure you have something intelligent to say and never apologize for your research. Some will ask about your ability to generate funding. Say you will regularly apply for grants at the NSF and other agencies. Acknowledge that theory grants aren't as large as more applied areas but your needs are also fewer.

You must avoid dead silence. Visit the web pages of the faculty you are meeting ahead of time and find some talking point for each of them. Have a list of questions about the department that you can always ask to keep the conversation going.

Act positively. Always show interest in what the other person says. Say only positive things about the place you are visiting and don't say anything negative about any other place. Don't complain how bad the market it. Don't complain about the hotel or the food. Don't complain about anything. Most importantly act like you really want the job whether or not you do.

Have good manners. Always firmly shake hands and thank the person you just talked to and firmly shake hands with the person you will talk with next. Act civilized at dinner. Send thank you emails soon after you return.

Good luck!

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 2/05/2007 08:05:00 PM

• The NSF received a 6.8% increase over the FY07 request.
• Research and Related Activities: 7.7%.
• Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE): 9.0%.
• Computing and Communication Foundation (CCF): A whopping 21.4%.

Also NSF would have a new agency wide program on Cyber-Enabled Discover and Innovation (CDI) to "Broaden the Nation's capability for innovation by developing a new generation of computationally based discovery concepts and tools to deal with complex, data-rich, and interacting systems."

The big caveat: The budget has to survive the congressional appropriation process.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 2/06/2007 08:41:00 PM

Last week the University of Chicago president announced that the board of trustees would not change the investment strategies of the university in response to calls not to invest in companies doing business with the Sudanese government, despite the fact that several other universities including Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale have decided to eliminate such investments. American companies are already barred from doing such business so a university could eliminate such investments reasonably painlessly but the University of Chicago didn't want to set a precedent.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 2/07/2007 05:48:00 PM

A few of the accepted papers of the upcoming Computational Complexity Conference that caught my eye.

Extractors and Condensers from Univariate Polynomials, Venkatesan Guruswami, Christopher Umans, and Salil Vadhan.

Extracting nearly uniform random bits from weakly-random sources has been one of the solid lines of research in the past few years in complexity. This paper matches the best known bounds for extractors with a clever use of recently developed list-decodable codes.

I'm less excited by the title result than the tools Zimand develops, an extractor that produces bits that looks random even to circuits that can see part of the weakly random string.

When running a multiple proof system in parallel, the provers can sometimes do better coordinating between runs than treating each run separately. This paper gives an example when classically the provers can take advantage of the parallelism but quantumly they cannot.

Bill Gasarch again.

Martin David Kruskal was a brilliant Mathematician
who passed away in late December, at the age of 81.
       (His brother Joe, still alive, did Min Spanning Tree.
More on his whole mathematical family later).
He has three children: Karen, Kerry, and Clyde.

Clyde is a theorist in my dept who works on Parallelism.

The memorial for Martin (Feb 11, 2007) was unusual.

When someone passes away there may be a memorial service
where people take turns saying things about the deceased.
The family organizes this.

When an academic passes away there may be a conference held
in his honor (invited talks from people who knew his work).
His collegues organize this.

For Martin Kruskal they had BOTH ON THE SAME DAY!
The intent was that people would GO TO BOTH.
From 1:30-3:30 there were five 20-minute technical talks
about his work.
The speakers were warned that that many lay people would attend.
From 4:00-5:30 there were seventeen 3-minute presentations
about Martin Kruskal, the person.

0) It was held at Princeton in the math building-
like a real conference.

1) The Tech talks were GREAT if you knew just a LITTLE
bit of math. People completely outside of math may have
had some problems following some of it, but they still got
the impression that Martin did great work.

2) The Tech talks had far more personal touches than most
tech talks have.
  The Memorial talks had far more math stories in them than most
memorial talks have.

3) There were between 250 and 300 people there!
Free dinner! No registration fee!

4) Karen Kruskal remarked that Clyde was the only one
of the three children who went into mathematics, and hence
Clyde understood his fathers work.  Clyde would be the first
to tell you that this is not true.  Lay people (she's a lawyer)
do not realize just have vast mathematics is.  To her, Clyde
who works on parallel computation, and Martin, who works on
the mathematics of soliton waves, both do math, and hence
understand each others work. She was half right.

5) Martin had two brothers and two sisters. All three brothers
were first rate mathematicians:
Joe Kruskal: Kruskal MST, Kruskal Tree Theorem on Well quasi orderings,
               Kruskal-Katona theorem
Bill Kruskal: Kruskal-Wallace test in statistics (deceased)
Martin Kruskal: Soliton Waves, Kruskal Coordinates, Plasma Physics. (deceased)

6) Joe Kruskal spoke about how Martin taught him math
at a very young age. (Joe was younger than Martin.)

7) Kerry Kruskal sang a song he wrote, to the tune of
GUYS AND DOLLS, about Martin's work in Mathematical Physics.
I have a copy- Until they put it on YOU-TUBE it is the
second rarest thing in my collection.

8) Clydes Triplets (Recall that Clyde works in parallelism)
performed classical music as a trio.
(Alex-Trumpet, Justin-French Horn, Rebecca-Trumpet)

9) Clyde gave an excellent talk which involved Donald Knuth,
his triples, and yours truly.  Tune in tommorow for that.

Guest Posting for Guest Blogger Bill Gasarch,
Guest Poster Clyde Kruskal.

At my fathers memorial service, here is how
I ended my remarks.

I want to share a story that is
about my kids, my Dad, and Donald Knuth.
As you will see, it all ties together.

The way Dad learned about surreal numbers, which
became his passion, is by
reading a book by Donald Knuth, written
in the form of a dialog.  Donald Knuth is in many
ways the father of computer science.  In the 1960's
he wrote a three volume set laying out the foundations
of computer science.
The world has been patiently waiting since 1973 for
Volume 4, which is just now coming out.

Anyway, you know how Dad was when he read something.
He had to make sure every technical detail was correct,
and he never missed a typo.  After finishing the book
he sent Knuth a long list of corrections,
and was surprised to get a check back in the mail.
It turns out Knuth pays money to the first person
who finds each error in his books.

If I am allowed to interupt myself, I sent this story
to Knuth.  He wrote back that he

``... found a copy of the letter I wrote to your dad in
August, 1975.  It closed with `...your reward check is
enclosed. It's the first time I've ever paid out for
{\sl Surreal Numbers\/}; in this kind of book
[written as a dialog], I can usually claim that errors
were intentional.' ''

Well, two summers ago my colleague Bill Gasarch decided
to review a math book, which happened to be written in the
form of a dialog.  So, one afternoon, he gathered
[my triplets] Alexander, Justin, and Rebecca together,
taught them the material, and wrote down their comments
as a dialog.  Of course, anything that had to do with
both math and the kids I emailed to dad, because he
would appreciate it.  Sure enough, back came a full
page of unsolicited corrections and improvements.
Bill was amazed.  After making the edits, the review
was sent out with Bill and the three kids as authors.
It appeared in the fall.

Last month I was in Bill's office and he says.
``Look.  I just got email from Donald Knuth.''
Here's what he says about the review.
``Brilliant.''
Then it goes on to ask if he has received Volume 4 yet
to review
``possibly with the help of Alexander, Justin, and Rebecca.''

I thought to myself.  ``Wow!  I can't wait to tell Dad.''

But I couldn't.
So, I hope you heard this.
We miss you.

I enter events in my online calendar in Lance-time, i.e., at the time in the time-zone I will be in when the event occurs. Calendar programs don't have Lance-time so I just use Central time. Normally not a really big problem since I just leave the calendar in Central time when I travel. But on this trip I downloaded my calendar to my mobile phone. My mobile phone knows what time-zone I am in so it automatically adjusts the clock (which I like) but also the calendar. So say, an 8 PM flight out of LA, would come up as 6 PM. Software being too smart for its own good.

During my vacation a new folder "Mike's Music" popped up in Itunes. Quite an impressive collection, including the Beatles, CSN&Y and Bruce Springsteen, most of it quite playable. I don't know who you are Mike, or how your music ended up on my machine but thanks for the tunes.

Now that I returned to Chicago the music disappeared without a trace. Go figure.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 2/19/2007 07:38:00 AM

One of my readers broke down the STOC accepts by area. Also check out the FAQ sent with the paper comments, though I doubt "No reviewer liked my paper. How come it was accepted?" gets frequently asked.

For those authors of the 234 papers not accepted to STOC: Maybe your tastes don't match those of this committee, maybe your paper is just not STOC-worthy, or maybe life just isn't fair. In any case, don't get angry, just go update your paper with the reviewer's comments and submit your paper to a journal or another conference.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 2/20/2007 07:28:00 AM

• Judging Applications
• Choosing a Graduate School
• Choosing an Advisor
• Finding Problems to Work On
• Attending Conferences
• Writing a Dissertation
• Looking for Academic Jobs
• The Academic Interview Trip
  • What to Wear
  • The Job Talk
  • Meeting with Faculty
• Negotiating Your Offer

But it was while teaching courses on her beloved algorithms at Cornell University when she had a flash. "I realized that efficient algorithms were fun but not very useful to the world anymore," she says.

While most algorithms developed by theorists have little practical value and will never see code, efficient algorithms play a critical role in any large system, especially at Google. As Henzinger states herself later in the same article:

If you think Google is fast, it's because we have good algorithms.

This year the American Economic Association started a signaling process where each candidate can signal interest in up to two departments through a centralized AEA web site. The AEA also organizes a meeting each January whose main purpose is to provide a centralized location for job candidates and departments to have short interviews with each other.

In the computer science job market, departments start off interviewing similar sets of top candidates and until those settle do schools start looking at the next tier of still rather strong applicants. The CS academic hiring season starts in January and often lasts through June or later and this year is shaping up to be no exception.

Structurally the fields of computer science and economics have much in common—culturally diverse fields from the very theoretical to the very applied. But when it comes to the academic job market, economics and most other fields have a structured process that streamlines the search while CS remains quite ad hoc. Computer science needs some central authority to bring some organization to the process but beyond posting paid listings, the ACM and CRA currently do little to facilitate the hiring process.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 2/23/2007 08:11:00 AM

Ideally we would like a mathematical proof that NP ⊄ BQP. But any such proof would imply P≠NP, one of the great open problems in mathematics.

Moving on, complexity theorists give evidence that a statement Q is false by a "Pigs Can Fly" argument, by showing that Q implies something else we don't believe. For example

• If there are sparse NP-complete sets then P=NP.
• If NP has efficient probabilistic algorithms (NP⊆BPP), then the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses.
• If good pseudorandom generators don't exist then exponential time has small circuits.

What we do have is the result of Bennett, Bernstein, Brassard, Vazirani that BQP can't solve black-box NP problems, a relativized separation of NP from BQP. Relativized results like this don't tell us whether or not a statement is true, just that any proof that NP in BQP would require nonrelativizing techniques. So the sentence from the Economist article

In principle, by putting a set of entangled qubits into a suitably tuned magnetic field, the optimal solution to a given NP-complete problem can be found in one shot.

Can one have a nonrelativizing proof that NP is in BQP? We do have precedent. My very first theorem gave a relativized world where co-NP does not have interactive proof systems. We published the result in a 1988 paper Are there interactive protocols for co-NP languages? and we conjectured the answer was no. We were wrong.

But so far interactive proof and related systems have been the only source of reasonable nonrelativized proof techniques that we have seen in computational complexity and we haven't had any success using this algebraic structure of arithmetized satisfiability to make efficient quantum algorithms for NP problems.

I do conjecture that NP ⊄ BQP and most computational complexity theorists would agree with me. But until we see some negative consequences of NP in BQP, computational complexity theory has so far failed to give any real evidence that NP ⊄ BQP. We believe that NP ⊄ BQP for the same reason we believe that there are no probabilistic polynomial-time algorithms for Factoring—despite considerable effort, failure to find any algorithmic techniques that might solve the problem.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 2/25/2007 04:37:00 PM

Why have we seen an increase in the two-body problem? There is less of a gender imbalance in Ph.D. students, particularly in the sciences, than in the past. Most Ph.D.'s spend nearly all of their working and social lives with their fellow students and romantic entanglements naturally develop.

How do you avoid the two-body problem? Find yourself a non-academic partner. You may spend the rest of your working life spending time with academics, do you really want to spend your non-working life with them as well? You have to work to find a non-academic partner. Join some clubs, preferably outside the university, that match your interests. You'll meet people who share at least one interest with you. Use the on-line dating sites, let friends set you up. It will take some work to find a partner but maybe you'll fall in love with some nice MBA. That's what happened to me.

Of course you may just end up in an academic couple. After all, you just can't stop true love.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 2/26/2007 06:02:00 PM

So how about something more radical? Let's give up currency all together. No more coins. No more bills. I use electronic transactions, mostly my credit card, for nearly all purchases now. Many places don't require a signature for under $25, making the transaction faster than cash. I don't even slow down to pay tolls anymore on the Illinois Tollways. Surely we can make that final push to remove cash from the rest of the transactions.

We certainly have the technology today to eliminate currency. There will be some costs involved but with the savings for the government, banks and businesses of not having to deal with cash, we should be able to supply all Americans and visitors with smart cards. We can even put pictures of presidents on the cards to keep with tradition.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 2/28/2007 08:08:00 AM

Charley (to Amita): I haven't seen an inductive Turing machine used like that before.
Amita: I'm trying to find the finite state machine for these. (points to screen)

If you IGNORE the TV show, it could mean the following, taking a cue from the field of Inductive Inference:

A set of computable functions S is in EX if there is a TURING MACHINE M such that for all f in S if you feed f(0), f(1), f(2), … into M, it outputs e₁, e₂, e₃, … and in the limit the sequence converges to e, a Turing Machine index for a machine that computes f. Such a machine M is called an INDUCTIVE TURING MACHINE.

Of course this is an incredibly inefficient way to learn regular languages, but then again Amita wasn't having much success. Perhaps she should have used one of the efficient finite automata learning algorithms like Rivest and Schapire.

Gasarch has a different take.

The show DID NOT mean this. So what did they mean and what could they have said? They should have either used a generic term for learning or just use a fictional term. Then they can't really be wrong. Here are some possibilities:

1. Charley (To Amita): I haven't seen that learning algorithm used that way before.
2. Charley (To Amita): I haven't seen Carl Smith's Technique used that way before.
3. Charley (To Amita): I haven't seen cross-convergence used that way before.

Or they could have made Charley's comment and Amita's Answer match better:

Charley (To Amita): I haven't seen the Generalized Polynomial Hales-Jewitt Theorem used that way before.
Amita: I'm trying to prove the polynomial van der Waerden's theorem over the reals.

The conversation they DID have is connected to later in the show when they are trying to learn the maze. I can make a vague connection–the show did not do so.

Having said all that, it was a good episode.

What does the closing of CompUSA have to do with computer science? Absolutely nothing, and yet everything. Computers have gone past devices you had to understand, ripping them open to add memory and other components. Now they get sold as a commodity not much different than televisions.

We do still have computer stores nearby. The local mall has an Apple Store and a Dell kiosk. But these are just showrooms, ways to exhibit their products, not places to go to get nuts and bolts to keep the computers going.

A field "Television Science" would never have flourished, but unfortunately many young people view Computer Science in a similar way today. That does not bode well for the long-term future of our discipline.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/04/2007 06:32:00 AM

You can jump six times higher in space.

You can jump six times higher on the surface of the moon than on the surface of the earth.

(6F/Mg -1)/(F/Mg-1)

See what you can learn eating at McDonald's.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/05/2007 04:07:00 PM

Carnegie Mellon will host OurCS: Opportunities for Undergraduate Research In Computer Science,October 5-7 for undergraduate woman. In addition to providing the participants opportunities to network, to meet role models, to learn about graduate school and jobs in CS, the conference will be unique in that undergraduate student teams will be embarking on research projects led by researchers from industry and academia. There will also be opportunities for students to present their own work as well as team results.

DIMACS in New Jersey is now hosting the Homeland Security Center for Dynamic Data Analysis (DyDAn), which plans to develop techniques to analyze massive flows of data arriving continuously over time. DyDAn should give theoretical computer scientists and discrete mathematicians the opportunity to put much of their research into practice as well as develop new theoretical tools.

In more DIMACS news, Rebecca Wright will become the new Deputy Director of DIMACS with the eventual plan to succeed Fred Roberts as director. I'm sure Rebecca will do a great job but she has a tough act to follow.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/07/2007 07:30:00 AM

Student: I hear Bill Gates wants "P ≠ NP" proven at Microsoft and is hiring smart mathematicians to do so. Me: All the power to him. Student: How can you say that? Isn't Bill Gates pure evil.

There is a tendency among many academics to think of the world in black and white and in particular consider some people or institutions truly evil. Elsevier, George Bush (and Republicans in general) and the RIAA only desire to destroy everything good about academic publishing, the US, and personal freedom respectively. Bill Gates certainly used to be in that category but has softened now that Microsoft has lost some dominance and hires many of our friends.

Scientist tend to believe the world works by simple rules and we reinforce these viewpoints by only hanging out with other scientists like ourselves. The Internet has only made things worse, as we tend to only read stuff written by people who already agree with us.

I certainly don't defend all the policies of Elsevier, George, and the recording industry, but they don't have agendas of evil and in fact often have the same long-term goals that many of us share. We don't always share the same strategies but it would be better to work with them then to shut them out entirely by having no faith that they can do any good.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/08/2007 10:26:00 AM

Junior faculty are hired as assistant professors for a four-year term. After which they are usually renewed for an additional three-year term. At the of that second term either they are promoted to associate professor with tenure or their contract is not renewed and they need to find another position.

An assistant professor is hired based on potential and promoted to tenure based on accomplishment.

It is rare to not renew a candidate after the first term, happening only if the department feels there is little chance that the faculty member will received tenure after second term.

Since tenure requires a long-term commitment from the university, the department, the dean and the university put considerable effort in vetting the case. The candidate first puts together a tenure packet, with CV, detailed research and teaching statements, a collection of publications and list of potential letter writers. The department sends the packets to senior people in the field both on and off the list given by the candidate. Ten or more review letters are not uncommon for a tenure case. The tenure case works its way through the system from the senior members of the department through the dean, provost and so on. Many universities have a tenure committee that reviews all cases for the provost or president.

The final decision is based on several parameters including the letters, publications, teaching, grants, service to the university and academic community and how well the faculty member fits in the department. The weights given to each item as well as how high the tenure bar is held differs greatly between universities. You can get a good feeling by how recent tenure cases went in the department.

Can one come up for early tenure? Can one get credit for years as a postdoc, research scientist or an assistant professor elsewhere? Or can one "stop the tenure clock" for illness, a new child or other leaves of absences? Can one be promoted to associate professor without immediate tenure if needed? Can one get an extra year to search for a new job if not promoted? Will the candidate have access to the review letters? If the answers to these or other questions concern you, best to bring them up before you accept the job.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/11/2007 08:13:00 PM

In my lifetime we've sent a man to the moon and music has moved from records to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs to MP3 players. But what hasn't changed. The vast changes have been in computation and communication, but transportation remains mostly the same. Airplanes fly as fast now as they did in the 60's using the same basic jet engine technology. Most cars still run on the combustion engine and remain grounded. Elevators, escalators and sidewalks where people still walk. We really haven't changed how we get from point A to point B.

We still read our books on paper and write with ballpoint pens. Locks are mostly split cylinders. They still haven't invented a good mouse trap or cured the common cold. And let's not forget the greatest device devised by man: Saran Wrap.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/13/2007 08:50:00 AM

The biggest news in Canada is happening in Chicago, the trial of Lord Conrad Black, but it barely makes the news here. Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribune wrote today about the non-story. The big news in Chicago is a 73 degree day yesterday, Mayor Daley's wrangling to get the 2016 Olympics in Chicago and, of course, March Madness.

What speaks math more than the NCAA Men's Division I Collegiate Basketball tournament that gets underway tomorrow. First you have a beautiful binary tree published in all the US papers (and Canadian ones too) and filled out by millions in their office pools. Nothing like a single elimination contest to explain exponential growth, 64 teams need only 6 rounds to find a champion. Technically they have 65 teams now, and they needed an extra single-game round yesterday to get to the 64 remaining teams.

The tournament draws more betting, legal and illegal, than any other event (though the Super Bowl draws more for a single game). These bets lead to predictions. With sites like Tradesports you can get prices on securities that give you estimated probabilities. Not absolute probabilities but those who use the markets to fill out their office pools likely won't do too poorly, even with no understanding of college basketball.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/14/2007 08:21:00 PM

A readers asks where he can put his open problem on the web. Back in the late 80's we had three Theorynet mailing lists. Theorynt-A announced major conferences, Theorynt-B announced local workshops and Theorynt-C had everything else including various questions people put out to the community. But now we have only one Theorynt only announcing conferences and the volume of a Theorynt-C type list today would overwhelm anyone trying to read it.

We need some Web 2.0 system. A blog or wiki to post the problems. A tagging method to mark the area and status. A voting system to rank the importance of the problem. A commenting system for discussion. A sophisticated RSS system for tracking. A visual appealing and simple interface. And most importantly someone willing to put it all together for no compensation beyond the thanks of the community.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/15/2007 09:00:00 PM

The three contestants on the venerable game show all finished with $16,000 after each answering the final question correctly in the category, "Women of the 1930s," on Friday's show. They identified Bonnie Parker, of the famed Bonnie and Clyde crime duo, as a woman who, as a waitress, once served one of the men who shot her…The show contacted a mathematician who calculated the odds of such a three-way tie happening — one in 25 million.

Before the Final Jeopardy round the totals were $13,4000, $8000 and $8000. Both of the $8000 decided to risk all of their money so they wouldn't be overtaken by the other one.

The $13,400 belonged to Scott Weiss, a computer science professor at Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland. Since $13,400 is between 1.5 and 2 times $8000, the standard strategy is to bet enough so that if you win you have more than $16,000 and if you lose you have more than $8000, for example betting $3000. Had Scott done so, he would have taken home all his winnings and come back for the next show.

Instead Scott bet $2600, leading to the $16,000 tie. By doing this, Scott gets to take home all his winnings and comes back for the next show.

It takes a computer scientist to make the most conservative bet, knowing that the rules of the game give no particular advantage to winning over tying and leading to the first three-way tie ever.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/17/2007 07:26:00 PM

Bob Sloan, program director in 2001-2002, wrote The Joys of Being an NSF Program Director for the latest SIGACT News.

If you have an interest not only in what we do, but also in the process and policy issues of what we do, then you too might really enjoy spending a couple of years being a program director. At many universities, definitely including mine, the whole funding process is a major component—perhaps the single most important component—in determining who will get tenure, promotions, etc. As somebody interested in process and policy, I really enjoyed getting to see how this system works from the inside.

Not only is NSF an interesting place, it is a highly purpose driven place. As faculty, we are called on to do many, many different tasks, some of which seem to have a clear goal, and some of which, well, leave one scratching one's head. One wonders, depending on where one is and who is the Dean/Provost/etc. any given year: Is the goal really to educate the masters students, or rather to keep them happy enough that we keep making money from them? NSF has one of the clearest goals possible: find the absolute best research to fund. (There can be huge disagreement about what is the best research, of course, but there really is not any disagreement about the underlying goal.)

Being a program director also gives you the ability to provide two good services to your research community. First, you have some ability to drive the direction of the research community. Second, you get to run the best, fairest competitions for funding possible. There is really quite a difference between the best panel run by somebody who knows the research area, knows who are likely to be good panelists, and is good at managing such things, and a panel run by an outsider who is a fair to middling manager of such things.

For registration, you pay a single fixed FCRC Fee and then a separate registration for every conference you attend. You are allowed to attend talks in any conference held during the same day you are registered for some conference. Tutorials and workshops are closed, though we are trying to open up the EC workshops.

If you need a visa, read this and apply now. The US visa process can take months.

Catherine McGeoch, the self-proclaimed ToC Hockey Commissioner, tells us the theory community has been challenged.

The computer architecture community (which attends ISCA) has challenged the theoretical computer science community to a "friendly inter-league" hockey game, to take place during FCRC. They will make local arrangements — we just have to get up a team.

If you are attending FCRC, and can pass as a theoretician (and/or as a hockey player), you are hereby invited to sign up for the now-forming ToC Hockey team. Tell all your friends to sign up, too.

How do I know about the email to our law faculty? Because the message was cc'd to the CS faculty because of the following line:

I know that some people aren't comfortable using a computer. If you need help with a computer to search the tax code (US Code, and Code of Federal Regulations), perhaps one of the computer science faculty can assist you.

Then the turtles started winning NSF Math Postdocs: Michelangelo (Grigni), Raphael (Ostrovsky) and Leonardo (Schulman). Poor Donatello never did get his postdoc.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/23/2007 07:02:00 AM

Thanks for reading.

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Posted by Lance to Computational Complexity at 3/25/2007 05:37:00 PM