Ruminations on computational geometry, algorithms, theoretical computer science and life
News moves fast. 12 hours ago I was enjoying the demolition that the US put on Paraguay when I heard that Anthropic had shut down access to Fable and Mythos (their latest and most powerful models). Since then, more news has surfaced about what went down, and I feel like it's a good exercise in understanding both the policy and psychodrama around AI today - with maybe even a moral or two like…
OpenAI just announced that ChatGPT has disproved a conjecture about one of Erdos's most famous problems: the unit distance problem. This problem is personal to me: I spent a good chunk of time during my Ph.D mulling over it, and it's what hooked me into computational geometry. Like most of Erdos's problems, it's really easy to state Let P be a set of n points in the plane (amen). What is the…
AAAI did an experiment this year where they supplemented human reviews with AI-generated reviews and solicited feedback from authors and the review hierarchy about the process. They've now written up the experiment . The paper isn't too long, and I'd encourage you to read the whole thing (or, I don't know, put it into notebookLM and make a podcast out of it!). Some interesting points stood out to…
it's always difficult to keep track of the papers a speaker mentions when they're giving a talk. I'm delivering a keynote at FAccT 2025, and so thought I'd make a list of paper references for easy access to anyone interested. Note that some of my papers are not yet publicly available. I'll make them accessible as soon as they are, and you can find the link here when they are. FATML 2016 closing…
It's been forever since I've written a blog post. Twitter, and then X, and then Bluesky, has absorbed most of my hot takes. But I think more and more that it's time to move away from transient thoughts to things that are more well formed, and so I'm going to try and blog a bit more again. Mar 7, 2025 was Stand Up For Science Day . I was invited to speak at the Rhode Island local event. It was a…
I've been at the U of Utah and Salt Lake City for 14 years (14.5 really). It was my first academic job and the longest time I've spent anywhere (throughout my whole life). So it's a little hard to accept that I'm moving to my next adventure. It's a two-part adventure, because why make one move when you can make two. Firstly, as of today, I'm going to working with Alondra Nelson at the White House…
Not a post I'd have wanted to make on Christmas day, but that's how it goes sometimes. Lars Arge just passed away, on Dec 23. For those of us who've been following his battles with cancer, this might not come as a total shock, but there was always hope, and that's no longer an option. It's hard to imagine this in 2020, but there was a time not that long ago (at least in my mind) when "big data"…
Martin Farach-Colton asked me to mention this, which is definitely NOT a pox on computer systems. ACM-SIAM Algorithmic Principles of Computer Systems (APoCS20) https://www.siam.org/Conferences/CM/Main/apocs20 January 8, 2020 Hilton Salt Lake City Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA Colocated with SODA, SOSA, and Alenex The First ACM-SIAM APoCS is sponsored by SIAM SIAG/ACDA and ACM SIGACT. Important…
SODA 2020 (in SLC!!) is experimenting with a new submission guideline: PC members will be allowed to submit papers. I had a conversation about this with Shuchi Chawla (the PC chair) and she was kind enough (thanks Shuchi!) to share the guidelines she's provided to PC members about how this will work. SODA is allowing PC members (but not the PC chair) to submit papers this year. To preserve the…
All of twitter is .... atwitter?... over the OpenAI announcement and partial non-release of code/documentation for a language model that purports to generate realistic-sounding text from simple prompts. The system actually addresses many NLP tasks, but the one that's drawing the most attention is the deepfakes-like generation of plausible news copy ( here's one sample ). Most consternation is over…
Session 3: Representation and Profiling Session 4: Fairness methods.
Building systems that have fairness properties and monitoring systems that do A/B testing on us. Session 2 of FAT* : my opinionated summary.
I'll be blogging about each session of papers from the FAT* Conference. So as not to clutter your feed, the posts will be housed at the fairness blog that I co-write along with Sorelle Friedler and Carlos Scheidegger. The first post is on Session 1: Framing and Abstraction .
( will all those absent today please email me) (if you can't hear me in the back, raise your hand) The theoryCS blog aggregator is back up and running at its new location -- cstheory-feed.org -- which of course you can't know unless you're subscribed to the new feed, which.... More seriously, we've announced this on the cstheory twitter feed as well, so feel free to repost this and spread the word…
As you all might now, the cstheory blog aggregator is currently down. Many people have been wondering what's going on and when it will be back up so here's a short summary. The aggregator has been thus far maintained by Arvind Narayanan who deserves a HUGE thanks for setting up the aggregator, lots of custom code and the linked twitter account. Arvind has been planning to hand it over and the…
It's both exhilarating and frustrating when you see the warnings in papers you write play out in practice. Case in point, the proposal by DHS to use credit scores to ascertain whether someone should be granted legal residence. Josh Lauer at Slate does a nice analysis of the proposal and I'll extract some relevant bits for commentary. First up: what does the proposal call for? (emphasis mine) The…
So, what do you work on? As questions go, this is one of the most rudimentary. It's the conference equivalent of "Nice weather we're having", or "How about them Broncos!". It's a throat-clearer, designed to start a conversation in an easy non-controversial way. And yet I'm always having to calculate and calibrate my answers. There's a visible pause, a hesitation as I quickly look through my…
Kara Swisher (who is unafraid to call it like it is!) has a new op-ed in the NYT titled " Who will teach Silicon Valley to be ethical ". She asks How can an industry that, unlike other business sectors, persistently promotes itself as doing good, learn to do that in reality? Do you want to not do harm, or do you want to do good? These are two totally different things. And how do you put an…
Breitbart just acquired a leaked copy of an internal google doc taking a cold hard look at the problems of free speech, fake news and censorship in the current era. I wrote a tweet storm about it, but also wanted to preserve it here because tweets, once off the TL, cease to exist. Breitbart acquired an internal google doc discussing the misinformation landscape that the world finds itself in now:…
One of my most visited posts is the anonymous post by a theoryCS colleague describing her own #metoo moments inside the TCS conference circuit . It was a brutal and horrific story to read. Concurrently (I don't know if the blog post had an effect, but one can but hope it helped push things along), a committee was set up under the auspices of TCMF (FOCS), ACM, SIAM, and EATCS to Draft a proposal…
A short review of Hannah Fry's new book 'Hello World' Starting wth Cathy O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction, there's been an onslaught of books sounding the alarm about the use of algorithms in daily life. My Amazon list that collects these together is even called 'Woke CS'. These are all excellent books, calling out the racial, gender, and class inequalities that algorithmic decision-making…
For the last X years (X being a confidential and never to be revealed number, but large enough that AI was more than just deep learning at the time), Sergei Vassilvitskii and I have been toiling away at a book on clustering. The book isn't ready yet, but we do have a draft of part I (the core of the book). Check it out , and send any comments you might have to clusteringbook@gmail.com .
This is a guest post by a colleague in the TCS community, a person I know. If you read other TCS blogs you might come across this there. This is by design. Please do read it. Every #MeToo story over the last several months has made me pause. My heart races and my concentration fails. The fact that the stories have largely focused on the workplace adds to my difficulty. Do I speak out too? I have…
My first two posts on double blind review triggered good discussion by Michael Mitzenmacher and Boaz Barak (see the comments on these posts for more). I thought I'd try to synthesize what I took away from the posts and how my own thinking has developed. First up, I think it's gratifying to see that the the basic premise: "single blind review has the potential for bias, especially with respect to…
I've had a number of discussions with people both before and after the report that Rasmus and I wrote on the double-blind experiment at ALENEX. And I think it's helpful to lay out some of my thoughts on both the purpose of double blind review as I understand it, and the logistical challenges of implementing it. What is the purpose of double blind review? The goal is to mitigate the effects of the…