Glencora Borradaile

I like to start my grad algorithms course with stable matching.  It is a beautiful, clean, practical algorithm.  It can be covered relatively quickly and give an overview of the basics of algorithm design and analysis.  I love it. What I hate is that every treatment of stable matching available online and in the textbooks [...]

It’s getting to be that time.  Mid-tenure.  I apparently am supposed to include acceptance rates for conference publications.  Google got me about half the numbers, but for the rest … is it annoying to email the program chair for that conference?  Even if it was a few years ago?  How else would you find out? [...]

I received some advice from an established biochemist via a friend in regards to the stress related to advising graduate students.  See, of the new tasks in the past year, graduate advising has been the most stressful for me.  I feel this weight of a person’s career in my hands.  What if I pick the [...]

Claire Mathieu caught me on IM a few weeks ago – she was in the middle of a discussing a quote with Valerie King by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, at Barnard College’s commencement.  You can read our discussion on Claire’s much-more-prolific-than-mine blog.  I’m not sure at what point it became clear that this discussion would [...]

In teaching so far, I have relied almost exclusively on textbooks and other people’s lecture notes (Jeff Erickson comes to mind, again and again) for providing materials to my students.  Yes, I would recommend this to anyone who has not been teaching for too long.  Preparing lecture notes that are hand-out-to-your-students worthy is time consuming! [...]

The workshop on Theory of Computation as a Lens on the Sciences at Berkeley was this weekend. For the three people out there that haven’t seen Christos Papadimitriou’s talk on the same, I recommend it.  A follow-up to a focus on the use of theoretical computer science as a methodology for study in seemingly distance fields [...]

A good friend taught me how to crochet on Sunday night.  I started with the classic square-to-be-used-as-a-dish-rag project and moved onto the spiral-to-be-used-as-a-pot-stand project. Project number three? The Möbius Strip. Now, I understand the Möbius strip well. What kid has not taken a strip of paper, twisted it, taped the ends together and then drawn [...]

Rightly chastised by Suresh for not blogging while at SODA [1] – enough time has passed for me to completely forget anything I might have wanted to say. But the timing is perfect. I am procrastinating writing a paper that I do not wish to write [2]. So here are six (not necessarily technical) things [...]

I’ve long been meaning to remark on my experiences of being on the SODA and ALENEX program committees this past year and fellow bloggers recent reflections on PC membership encourages me to finally post what little I have to say. I went into the SODA PC expecting a lot of work.  I (mostly) cleared out [...]

One of my experiments in teaching this quarter was to have a quiz the second week of class on material that I considered so basic, that if you couldn’t do very well on the quiz, well, you may well consider (re-)taking the undergrad algorithms course first.  A few students with lower scores on the quiz [...]