Computer Science
jane | August 25, 2008Doesn't that sound scandalous? Sadly, it's not scandalous. But it is pretty darn cool:
I just signed up for free childcare. At a computer science conference, no less.
Yes, of course I'm talking about the Grace Hopper Conference. Continuing their fine tradition of being one of the coolest conferences ever, GHC (as of last year, I think?) now offers childcare. And it's free. Free, available, convenient childcare! Even during the banquet! (Not during the Friday night festivities, I noticed, but other than that, the hours are really good.) What a concept!
This will be my third conference…
pontiff | August 18, 2008"Expeditions in Computing awards" are ten million dollar NSF grants from the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering to pursue long-term research agendas. My favorite kinds of projects: high risk, high reward, and long term. Today the first four award winners have been announced. The winning programs are
Open Programmable Mobile Internet 2020
The Molecular Programming Project
Understanding, Coping with and Benefiting from Intractibility
Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society
Of note for the theoretical…
edyong | August 14, 2008What would you do if someone asked you to help transcribe an old book onto a website? Chances are, you'd say no on the basis that you have other things to do, or simply that it just doesn't sound very interesting. And yet, millions of people every day are helping with precisely this task, and most are completely unaware that they're helping out.
It's all thanks to a computer program developing by Luis von Ahn and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University. Their goal was to slightly alter a simple task that all web users encounter and convert it from wasted time into something productive. That…
pontiff | August 7, 2008Summer school in November, Quantum crypto is to legit to quit, quantum Pagerank, and no prayer in quantum prayer.
An email about a summer school in Australia:Dear Colleagues
Please forgive us if you receive this multiple times...
We would like to circulate notice of the inaugural 2008 Asher Peres International Summer School in Physics
which will take place in Chowder Bay, Sydney Harbor, from 17-22 November 2008 in memory of Professor Asher Peres
The 2008 school is entitled: From Qubits to Black Holes
and is organised jointly between Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), and the Technion…
pontiff | August 5, 2008Summary of what's new and happening on the arXivs according to voters on SciRate.
0807.4935 (15 scites) "Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels" by Graeme Smith and Jon Yard.
I blogged about this article here.
0807.4753 (9 scites) "Counterexamples to the maximal p-norm multiplicativity conjecture for all p > 1" by Patrick Hayden and Andreas Winter
One of the largest one questions in quantum information theory is the additivity of the Holevo capacity of quantum channels. The Holevo capacity of a quantum channel is the rate at which you can send classical information down this…
pontiff | August 1, 2008A result of much quantum coolness out today: arXiv:0807.4935 (scirate): "Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels" by Graeme Smith and Jon Yard. Strange things they are going on when we try to use our quantum cell phones, it seems. Quantum cell phones, what the hell? Read on...
You know the situation. You're standing in line to get your morning coffee and bagel, and you get a call from your boss: "Hey Pontiff Dude, what's your bank account number? I need to have it so that I can deposit this large bonus into your account and if I don't do this within a few seconds, you won't get…
pontiff | July 25, 2008An interesting idea from Mark Changizi from RPI: can one design pictures which, when interpreted by your vision, perform a computation? Press release here (note to RPI public relations department: you should probably make it so that the webpage address of your press releases can be copied from the browser address bar. Somewhere a web designer should be shot.) and paper in Perception published here.
The basic idea is to use the orientation information we glean from looking at objects to perform computations. Thus for example, Changizi suggest that we can represent zeros and ones via the two…
pontiff | July 25, 2008Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, passed away early today. If you haven't watched Pausch's last lecture, you should:
This lecture, when I first saw it, reminded me how important humor is for teaching. In other words, my students from last term can blame all my silly jokes on Randy.
pontiff | July 14, 2008Ed Lazowska has penned an article over at the CCC blog about the state of computer science enrollments which is well worth reading.
My favorite part of the post is where Ed points out that the "news" reported in the "news" is not really "news":The Taulbee Survey "headline" this year was (roughly) "computer science bachelors degrees drop again." In my view, this is not news -- it was entirely predictable from the legitimate headline four years ago: (roughly) "freshman interest and new enrollments drop again." The actual news right now in the CRA data is that freshman interest and new…
pontiff | July 10, 2008An interesting interview with Christos Papadimitriou (recent winner of the Katayanagi Prize for Research Excellence) on Dr. Dobb's Journal. On chess and backgammon:In chess, when you play like an idiot, you always lose, so you learn. In backgammon, you can play 10 games, not play well, and win. So you think you are great but you have made a great number of mistakes. Tragically, life is closer to backgammon, because you can play a perfect game and lose!
Which made me wonder which game is the closest game to "real life?" (Okay I'll dispense with the obvious answer which is the board game "…
pontiff | July 1, 2008One of the subjects of great debate in physics goes under the moniker of "the arrow of time." The basic debate here is (very) roughly to try to understand why time goes it's merry way seemingly in one direction, especially given that the many of the laws of physics appear to behave the same going backwards as forwards in time. But aren't we forgetting our most basic science when we debate at great philosophical lengths about the arrow of time? Aren't we forgetting about...experiment? Here, for your pleasure, then, are some of my personal observations about the direction of time which I've…
pontiff | June 23, 2008The first edition of the newly revamped Communications of the ACM is out. And I must say, so far I'm greatly impressed. First of all it seems that they've gotten rid of the absolutely horrible front pages for all articles that were (a) ugly (I'm not a font nazi, but sheesh that font choice was horrible!), and (b) a waste of space. This issue includes a blurb about quantum computing, an interview with the Donald Knuth, and a paper by David Shaw (yeah, THAT David Shaw) and coworkers on custom hardware for molecular dynamics simulations. Good stuff, I hope they can keep it up!
pontiff | May 28, 2008Bill Gates thinks that robots are at the equivalent stage that computers were when he and Paul Allen and a ton of hobbyists helped fuel the PC revolution. But is he right? Here is a radical proposal: might not bioengineering be the next field where amateurs have a huge impact? Such is the hypothesis of DIYbio which had its first meeting in Cambridge, MA on May 1st:In the packed back-room of Asgard's Irish Pub in Cambridge, a diverse crowd of 25+ enthusiasts gathered to discuss the next big thing in biology: amateurs. Mackenzie (Mac) Cowell led-off the night with an overview of recent…
pontiff | May 27, 2008A story, from Jeff Silverman:
Whenever you build an airplane, you have to make sure that each part weighs no more than allocated by the designers, and you have to control where the weight it located to keep the center of gravity with limits. So there is an organization called weights which tracks that.
For the 747-100, one of the configuration items was the software for the navigation computer. In those days (mid-1960s), the concept of software was not widely understood. The weight of the software was 0. The weights people didn't understand this so they sent a guy to the software group to…
jane | May 17, 2008My research straddles several subfields---let's call them X, Y, Q, and Z (because I'm not in the mood to come up with more descriptive terms). Z is really a minor related area, and Q is a peripherally related area, so my research basically falls into camps X and Y. Because of my particular training, and the lab I studied in in grad school, I have always identified myself as being an X researcher, primarily, whose work just happens to include Y.
This may be about to change.
It's been the case for a while now that sending my work out to conferences has been somewhat of a crap shoot. If I…
pontiff | May 9, 2008From a student today in office hours before today's midterm: "How many times will the word automata appear in the test, including its use in acronyms like DFA, NFA, GNFA, and WTFA?"
pontiff | May 8, 2008The mothership, aka Seed magazine, has a crib sheet for quantum computing. Its not half bad, considering how bad things like this can go. And of course this is probably due in part to the fact that they list the Optimizer as a consultant. But the real question is whether that little shade of black outside of NP is an illustrators trick or the result of a complexity theorist being the person they asked to vet the cheat sheet?
jane | May 7, 2008* Baby Jane is walking. I'm thrilled. And panicking. Luckily, she's still slow, but given how fast she can crawl....well, let's just say I fear for my future.
* I'm working on Part 3 in the series Is Computer Science a Science? (parts 1, 1a, and 2 here). Part 3 will cover computer science's relationship to engineering. At the very least, it will serve as a welcome break from my bitching and moaning about the state of children's clothing.
* Also brewing in the "future posts" category: reflections on my first year of motherhood and the school year, and the whole adjustment to the working…
jane | April 28, 2008If you read almost any academic blog, or Rate Your Students, or really any site that academics frequent, you'll encounter discussion, debate, and general bitching about students' lack of ability to (a) properly cite sources and (b) avoid plagiarism. Discussions with my academic friends in more writing-intensive disciplines bear out what cyberspace illustrates: students don't, or can't, or won't, properly cite sources.
This carries over into computer science, too, though, and that's something that's been on my mind lately: How do we teach students how to properly "cite", and avoid…
pontiff | April 24, 2008Good talks are rare gems. Good talks about interesting topics even rarer. Good talks that make you want to change fields and design E. Coli which smell like bananas are the best. I saw a good one earlier this week, and its now online: Learning to Program DNA by Drew Endy. If you get a chance, check out the picture of Drew going off a waterfall in a kayake on the Lower McCloud river. That's very close to where I grew up (and don't you city folk come up there and ruin that beautiful neck of the woods. Stay way slicker!)