More exciting news from Oregon State! Mike Rosulek will be joining our faculty in September. Mike will bring some great complexity expertise to our department, but it is for his contributions to the fundamentals of cryptography that we recruited him to OSU. We are building a security group at OSU, and Mike will lead things [...]
April 8, 2013
Algorithms group doubles!
I am super happy to announce that Amir Nayyeri will be joining our faculty at Oregon State next year! Amir completed his Ph.D. with Jeff Erickson at UIUC and has been, for the past year, post-doc’ing at CMU with Gary Miller. Amir is an expert in combinatorial optimization in computational topology and geometry. Not only [...]
January 20, 2013
What would Aaron Swartz want you to do?
I hadn’t checked my rss-feed reader since the winter break. After the (deserved) attention of the life and untimely death of Aaron Swartz, I was interested in hearing the thoughts of my fellow computer scientists and so delved into the hundreds of unread articles in my rss-feed reader. I was saddened to see that of [...]
July 2, 2012
Grant writing style questions
This isn’t the most serious question, but when writing a grant (without a co-PI) do you use the royal editorial “we”? Or do your refer to yourself in the first person? When citing your own work, do you use your surname or do you say “the PI”? When writing a grant with more than one [...]
April 30, 2012
The $17,500 computer science degree
Our department has announced a new, entirely online, bachelor’s degree in computer science which can be completed in one year. Given that we are a public university, this translates to a $17,500 degree*. I will admit, when I first heard the idea I did not have very good thoughts about it. My negative thoughts included [...]
March 17, 2012
crash course in TCS
I recently gave a pair of talks in the Math Department’s Applied Math Seminar on basics of TCS. It was intended for a mathematically mature audience with no background in TCS. The slides for the talk are available here; they are far from perfect — but I will happily take suggestions on things that should be [...]
February 22, 2012
Women in Theory workshop — applications due February 29
Applications for attendance at the Women in Theory workshop are due February 29. The Women in Theory (WIT) Workshop is intended for graduate and undergraduate students in the area of theory of computer science. The workshop will feature technical talks and tutorials by senior and junior women in the field, as well as social events [...]
January 29, 2012
Undergraduate-appropriate summer projects
(updated: now with links to projects) A friend asked me, in reference to my post about the call for proposals for REU positions from CRA, “What kind of projects did you have them work on?” Two years ago, I proposed two projects and used one. (I was to have two students, but sadly the shuttle [...]
December 21, 2011
Wonderful, funded undergraduates for the summer
The solicitation for summer research projects for undergraduates from the CRA-W is out: the DREU. I highly recommend proposing a project. For those who haven’t heard of it, the DREU are Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (from Underrepresented Groups in Computer Science and Engineering). How it works: profs suggest projects; students apply; the fine people who [...]
December 2, 2011
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Your FOCS registration may have caused an unwanted registration to ActiveAdvantage
I registered for FOCS via our school’s accountant. It seems to have caused an automatic registration to ActiveAdvantage, run through active.com (which handled the FOCS registrations?). After a one month “free trial membership”, the school’s credit card was charged $59.95 for a “membership renewal”. You may want to check your credit card bill to see [...]