Due to inclement weather, the deadline for STOC submissions has been extended to Monday, November 5, at 5:00 pm EST. Check the STOC web page for more details
Due to inclement weather, the deadline for STOC submissions has been extended to Monday, November 5, at 5:00 pm EST. Check the STOC web page for more details
I found a couple of interesting games after reading Kotaku's recent article The Complicated Truth Behind Games That Want to Change the World. One has more gameplay time than the other, but both can be experienced in a short period of time, making them worth a quick look.
Sweatshop
The first game is called Sweatshop. It is essentially a tower defence-style game where you place workers instead of towers to create items of knock-off clothing instead of kill enemies. You start with a child worker that costs less than others. As you move up through the levels, you get different types of pricier but quicker workers to place, such as a shirt maker or a hat maker. You need to place them around the conveyor belt strategically so that they are able to finish creating and packaging each item before it reaches the end.
The thing that intrigued me about this game was whether it used procedural rhetoric to make its point. From the Kotaku article:
The game aims to educate players on workplace conditions around the world. "I think its strength comes from putting you in the role of the manager, someone who is still a guilty party but has some capacity for empathy," she [Mattie Brice, social justice activist and game critic] explained. "The game forces you to be efficient and min/max to keep profits high, and usually has you doing some unethical things to your workers. Instead of having an artificial story put on top of a detached mechanic or so, the game twists how you already interact with tower defense and uses that to create a connection to what's going on."
So it seems there is an argument for this. To maximize profits and thus win the game, you have to be unethical and act as they really do in sweatshops. I think designers of games for change need to pay more attention to procedural rhetoric if we want to see more good games of this type.
Unmanned
Unmanned, on the other hand, is more of a story-based game experience. The game is presented with a split screen. In the screenshot above, which comes from the opening sequence, the main character is shown on the left asleep, and what seems to be his dream appears on the right. Much of the time, one side of the screen is dedicated to dialog and dialog choices. Though you can earn medals by choosing the right dialog, this example is much less game-like than Sweatshop.
Kotaku doesn't say much about this one; just that it's "nothing short of remarkable." The story follows a man who is apparently a soldier. He seems to be working to stop terrorist activity. You follow him through a typical day, where at one point he's on the cell phone talking to his wife (?) about their son, and after work he's playing war games with that son. You get a disjointed feel for his character, and you help build it through your dialog choices. There is much left unsaid so that you fill in the blanks, and I think that is what makes this experience so potentially powerful.
Hurricane Sandy looks like it will be the most closely watched storm in history. Google has set us a "crisis map" for Hurricane Sandy to help people who may be in its path. The map features various overlays including: the storm's predicted path, wind speeds, predicted storm surge, public alerts, evacuation routes, refuge centres and more. Of course as the power goes down across the North Eastern seaboard of the US WiFi and broadband will be lost as well. Cell phone towers can work for a time on battery power, so 3G may still be available, but I'd recommend getting any digital information you may require sooner rather than later - the Internet isn't storm proof.
The Harvard Crimson just finished a four-part series looking at the Harvard Ad Board since the reforms a couple of years ago. I must admit I didn't find the articles very insightful, but they offered a glimpse as to some of the changes and current feelings about the Ad Board. The first part begins here<.a>, and from there you can find links to the rest of the articles.
The Harvard Crimson just finished a four-part series looking at the Harvard Ad Board since the reforms a couple of years ago. I must admit I didn't find the articles very insightful, but they offered a glimpse as to some of the changes and current feelings about the Ad Board. The first part begins here, and from there you can find links to the rest of the articles.
Another piece of history brought to my attention by Bob Doran. This one features the British Post Office (GPO) in 1969 looking ahead to the future of telecommunications in the 1990s including: video phone calls, document sharing, online banking and access to other computing services. Unfortunately, the GPO is still envisaging using circuit switching with its wasteful dedicated end-to-end communications and complex exchanges and not the much more efficient packet switching that underpins the Internet.
This Sunday (Oct 28 8:00pm) BBC2 is giving us another chance to see its excellent Timewatch programme "Codebreakers: Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes", giving overdue recognition to the brilliance of Bill Tutte and Tommy Flowers. The BBC says the documentary "reveals the secret story behind one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II, a feat that gave birth to the digital age. In 1943, a 24-year-old maths student and a GPO engineer combined to hack into Hitler's personal super-code machine - not Enigma but an even tougher system, which he called his 'secrets writer'." If you thought that Bletchley Park was just about Alan Turing, Enigma and U Boats you're in for a pleasant surprise!
In the week that Apple released the new iPad Mini and Microsoft released Windows 8 and its Surface tablet my colleague Bob Doran pointed me back to the future - 1975 to be precise. Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, invented the digital camera in December 1975. In a Kodak blog post written in 2007, before Kodak went bankrupt, Sasson explains how it was constructed: "It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like." We all become mesmerized by the new and the shiny but this reminds us that being first or being an established powerful company doesn't inevitably result in long term success. Sasson ends his post with, "The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future." - how did Kodak get it so wrong.
Now that I'm back in school full time, it's a good time to have a look at where I am research-wise. Here are some of the projects I'm working on and what progress I've made. (My last snapshot was from Fall 2011, before I went on maternity leave, and has more detail about some of these projects.)
Since last fall, this project has moved forward a bit. One of our team members ran a pilot project that just wrapped up. The study compared a slightly updated version of Gram's House that tracks player stats, and a new game created by my colleague's students. It will be very interesting to see the data that was collected during the study.
In the meantime, we are also finding some new researchers who want to try for an NSF (or other) grant to further develop the project. We've got a few ideas on how to make our project stand out among the many trying to do things like this with games, and I'm excited to see where we go!
This project centred on the study we did in this past year's mini-course. The study went well and we learned some interesting things (like the fact that story had little or not benefit over context). However, the paper we submitted to SIGCSE was not accepted.
We are in the process of deciding what to do next, but I am leaning toward taking what we learned, doing a follow up study, and submitting to next year's conference. I am not sure if I'd like to stick to the middle school age group or try something in an undergrad class.
Nonlinear Story in Games
This is the thread of research that will be my thesis. In fact, my supervisor liked the ideas I had put together while on leave, so I have a good, solid direction now! In a nutshell, I want to use procedural rhetoric as a way to break apart story episodes in a reasonable way, and learning theory to dynamically arrange those pieces as well as entire episodes.
Before delving too deeply into my specific ideas, however, I'm going to finish some work I started last fall. We're looking at nonlinear stories (that is, stories whose events are presented out of chronological order) and comparing them to nonlinear stories in games. We are trying to see why games shy away from more sophisticated uses of nonlinear stories, which may lead to new ideas on how to do it.
The unveiling of the iPad Mini with its 7.9-inch display has many pundits referring to Steve Job's talking about the wisdom of making a tablet with a screen smaller than the iPad's 10-inch display (for example this article in the Register). It's true that the iPad Mini is a "gap filler" aimed in particular at the Amazon Kindle Fire market. Apple seem to have reasoned, "why shouldn't we make a mini tablet?We make iPod's and MacBooks in all sort of different sizes and specs." Yes, it makes no sense logically - if I want a device that fits in my pocket I've got an iPhone; if I want a device that fits in my bag I've got an iPad. Why would I want something in between? But it seems some people do want a device this size and Apple aren't about to gift this market segment to Amazon and Google. I expect the iPad Mini will sell well, despite being technically underwhelming. It will certainly appeal to people who are already committed to the Apple ecosystem, and will make a good eBook reader being about the size of a small paperback.
I was asked to post the following regarding STOC 2013 submissions:
1) Please read the Call for Papers carefully and pay special attention to length and formatting requirements, which have changed since last year: a) Submissions must be no more than 10 pages in two-column ACM Proceedings format, including the bibliography. b) Length and formatting requirements will be enforced strictly and literally; submissions that don't conform will be summarily rejected. Note that you have the option of uploading a full-paper version, along with your 10-page extended abstract. 2) The online submission process will take more time than it has in the past for at least two reasons: a) There are roughly three times as many Program-Committee members as in the past, and thus Conflicts of Interest will take longer to check off. b) Each author is required to select one or more Topics (from a moderately long list) that describe his or her submission. Thus we strongly suggest that you create your user account on the submission server NOW and fill in a "start new paper" form for each submission, even if you have not yet finished writing it. Submissions can be modified any time between now and the deadline of Nov. 2, 2012 at 04:59 pm EDT. Note that this and all other information about STOC 2013 can be found athttp://theory.stanford.edu/stoc2013/
I was asked to post the following regarding STOC 2013 submissions:
1) Please read the Call for Papers carefully and pay special attention to length and formatting requirements, which have changed since last year: a) Submissions must be no more than 10 pages in two-column ACM Proceedings format, including the bibliography. b) Length and formatting requirements will be enforced strictly and literally; submissions that don't conform will be summarily rejected. Note that you have the option of uploading a full-paper version, along with your 10-page extended abstract. 2) The online submission process will take more time than it has in the past for at least two reasons: a) There are roughly three times as many Program-Committee members as in the past, and thus Conflicts of Interest will take longer to check off. b) Each author is required to select one or more Topics (from a moderately long list) that describe his or her submission. Thus we strongly suggest that you create your user account on the submission server NOW and fill in a "start new paper" form for each submission, even if you have not yet finished writing it. Submissions can be modified any time between now and the deadline of Nov. 2, 2012 at 04:59 pm EDT. Note that this and all other information about STOC 2013 can be found athttp://theory.stanford.edu/stoc2013/
The nice folks at Texas A&M asked me to give a teleseminar as part of their series. So instead of flying all the way to Texas to give a talk, I did so from the comfort of my office, using Cisco's WebEx. It was, I believe, the first formal teleseminar I've given. I imagine that it's the future of talks, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on the experience.
Overall, technically, it went just fine. Any slight hiccups were managed easily. I was working in my office and not paying attention to the clock, so they had to e-mail me and remind me to get online for the talk. (Oops.) When I logged in at first the sound didn't work for some reason, but logging in again all was fine, and we started pretty much on time. They could see the slides on my laptop, they had a camera image of me and I had an image of them, and after the initial bump the sound seemed to work the entire time (at least on my end, and I think I spoke loudly enough it was not a problem on their end). At this point the technology is really there to do this sort of thing, so if anything I'm surprised there's not more of this type of seminar being done.
Pros: Obviously, from my standpoint, not flying to give a talk. I'm going to Cornell to give a talk in a couple of weeks, and while I'll undoubtedly enjoy the face time with the many great people at Cornell I'll get to see, I won't enjoy the multiple nights away from my family, or the multiple hours flying to get there. (One could arrange the Web equivalent of face to face time with teleseminars quite easily -- set up Skype sessions or a Google hangout for the day.)
Another pro is that people online could log in, watch the talk, and ask questions as well. That can also be done with standard talks, although it seemed to me the real-time asking of questions is a bit more awkward when the speaker is there live with the audience rather than online.
Cons: You don't get that face to face time with the people at the home institution that can, sometimes, work out so well. I've had someone giving a talk at Harvard come to my office for the standard chat-with-the-visitor session and had the solid beginning of a paper by the time they left. I don't know if serendipity works the same online yet.
The biggest downside was the setup made it hard for me to gauge the audience reaction, which would have been really helpful for this talk. I was talking about hashing data structures like Bloom filters to a primarily EE audience, so for all I knew I could have been going way over their head, boring them silly, or been pretty much on target. I wasn't able to see how they were responding and adjust accordingly. I think I needed a second (very big) screen in front of me -- one devoted to my slides, and one large, full screen instead of a little window big enough so I could watch the audience react, the way I do in a live lecture. This might have been easy enough to set up had I knew how useful it would be ahead of time. I tried to ask during the talk and it seemed like I was targeting the right level, but that type of on-the-fly correction would have been easier to make if I were actually there.
Conclusion: I would happily give a teleseminar like this again. Until my kids are older and I feel like traveling more instead of less, this may become my preferred method of giving talks (except, possibly, for California; I'm generally always happy to have an excuse to go to California, but even then, timing might make a teleseminar preferable sometimes). I'm surprised there aren't more schools or organizations adopting and experimenting with this approach. It seems both cost-effective and time-effective. Thanks to Texas A&M for inviting me to try it.
The nice folks at Texas A&M asked me to give a teleseminar as part of their series. So instead of flying all the way to Texas to give a talk, I did so from the comfort of my office, using Cisco's WebEx. It was, I believe, the first formal teleseminar I've given. I imagine that it's the future of talks, so I thought I'd share my thoughts on the experience.
Overall, technically, it went just fine. Any slight hiccups were managed easily. I was working in my office and not paying attention to the clock, so they had to e-mail me and remind me to get online for the talk. (Oops.) When I logged in at first the sound didn't work for some reason, but logging in again all was fine, and we started pretty much on time. They could see the slides on my laptop, they had a camera image of me and I had an image of them, and after the initial bump the sound seemed to work the entire time (at least on my end, and I think I spoke loudly enough it was not a problem on their end). At this point the technology is really there to do this sort of thing, so if anything I'm surprised there's not more of this type of seminar being done.
Pros: Obviously, from my standpoint, not flying to give a talk. I'm going to Cornell to give a talk in a couple of weeks, and while I'll undoubtedly enjoy the face time with the many great people at Cornell I'll get to see, I won't enjoy the multiple nights away from my family, or the multiple hours flying to get there. (One could arrange the Web equivalent of face to face time with teleseminars quite easily -- set up Skype sessions or a Google hangout for the day.)
Another pro is that people online could log in, watch the talk, and ask questions as well. That can also be done with standard talks, although it seemed to me the real-time asking of questions is a bit more awkward when the speaker is there live with the audience rather than online.
Cons: You don't get that face to face time with the people at the home institution that can, sometimes, work out so well. I've had someone giving a talk at Harvard come to my office for the standard chat-with-the-visitor session and had the solid beginning of a paper by the time they left. I don't know if serendipity works the same online yet.
The biggest downside was the setup made it hard for me to gauge the audience reaction, which would have been really helpful for this talk. I was talking about hashing data structures like Bloom filters to a primarily EE audience, so for all I knew I could have been going way over their head, boring them silly, or been pretty much on target. I wasn't able to see how they were responding and adjust accordingly. I think I needed a second (very big) screen in front of me -- one devoted to my slides, and one large, full screen instead of a little window big enough so I could watch the audience react, the way I do in a live lecture. This might have been easy enough to set up had I knew how useful it would be ahead of time. I tried to ask during the talk and it seemed like I was targeting the right level, but that type of on-the-fly correction would have been easier to make if I were actually there.
Conclusion: I would happily give a teleseminar like this again. Until my kids are older and I feel like traveling more instead of less, this may become my preferred method of giving talks (except, possibly, for California; I'm generally always happy to have an excuse to go to California, but even then, timing might make a teleseminar preferable sometimes). I'm surprised there aren't more schools or organizations adopting and experimenting with this approach. It seems both cost-effective and time-effective. Thanks to Texas A&M for inviting me to try it.
The Pet Shop Boys write on their blog Pet Texts that, "We will be performing a concert with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in Salford, Greater Manchester, on December 6th. As well as a selection of old and new songs, we'll be premiering part of a piece we have been writing inspired by the British scientist, mathematician and code-breaker, Alan Turing. The concert will be broadcast on BBC Radio 2." Not sure if the concert will be broadcast live, but I'll try to let you know.
Ada Lovelace Day was celebrated last week and as usual was organised and co-ordinated by Finding Ada - "Celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths." If you don't know who Ada Lovelace is and why we might be celebrating her I suggest you find out from: "Who was Ada?" The Guardian has also just published a good story about the "forgotten women of science," But, as women struggle for the right to be educated in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan perhaps we should remember just how difficult it was, just over a century ago, for any woman to get an education. Kate Edger in 1877 was the first woman in New Zealand, and the British Empire, to receive a Bachelor's degree from the University of New Zealand! Kate Edger is honoured at Auckland University by having the Information Commons building named after her.
I'm one of the original founders of our Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering group. I stayed on the exec for a few years, stepping down only when I was pregnant, since I knew I wasn't going to be there the whole year. I was the last remaining original exec. The transition into new leadership was tricky at first, but I couldn't be more proud of what the new generation of CU-WISE is doing!
I put a lot of effort into making CU-WISE successful and, more importantly, sustainable. From ensuring we had an up-to-date web presence, to creating a consistent brand, to planning outreach events and events for current students, to getting our mentoring program off the ground... I did a lot. When I left, they needed more than one person to replace me! Despite my efforts in documenting everything, it was difficult at first for those who remained to get off the ground.
After a bit of struggle last year, CU-WISE is totally rocking it this year. We finally scored some coveted office space, which the new co-chairs have set up very nicely. They use it to meet in person weekly, something we never did before (but should have). One of our past execs has offered to get the mentoring program going again remotely, despite being a post-doc at another institution now. There are several really interesting new events planned, including outreach events that build off of what I had created in the past. Things are looking amazing. The only thing that's needed is a few more executive members to help the current team out!
So why do I tell you all this? Yes, I did want to share my pride, but I also wanted to encourage anyone else who wonders whether all the effort is worth it. It is! If you're trying to get a women in science and/or engineering program off the ground at your school or workplace, give it all you can reasonably give. Document everything so others can take over later. And if you're finding nobody is able to carry the torch at first, don't fret - persevere, and you'll see the fruits of your effort in no time. You'll be amazed at what comes next.
Harvard's CRCS is looking for postdocs! Please apply.... We're very interested in theorists (and, of course, non-theorists as well!) in all of the areas listed below. Also, for those who know of my work with Giorgos Zervas -- well, he's finishing his postdoc this year, and I'd be thrilled to find other people to work with on the semi-theoretical semi-data-focused EconCS style work. Spread the word... ---------- The Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) solicits applications for its Postdoctoral Fellows and Visiting Scholars Programs for the 2013-2014 academic year. Postdoctoral Fellows are given an annual salary of approximately $60,000 for one year (with the possibility of renewal) to engage in a program of original research, and are provided with additional funds for travel and research support. Visiting Scholars often come with their own support, but CRCS can occasionally offer supplemental funding. We seek researchers who wish to interact with both computer scientists and colleagues from other disciplines, and have a demonstrated interest in connecting their research agenda with societal issues. We are particularly interested in candidates with interests in Economics and Computer Science, Health Care Informatics, Privacy & Security, and/or Technology & Accessibility, and those who may be interested in engaging in one of our ongoing/upcoming projects: - Intelligent, Adaptive Systems for Health Care Informatics - Language-Based Security - Personalized Accessibility - Privacy and Security in Targeted Advertising - Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data - Trustworthy Crowdsourcing Harvard University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. We are particularly interested in attracting women and underrepresented groups to participate in CRCS. For further information about the Center and its activities, seehttp://crcs.seas.harvard.edu/. Application Procedure A cover letter, CV, research statement, copies of up to three research papers, and up to three letters of reference should be sent to: Postdoctoral Fellows and Visiting Scholars Programs Center for Research on Computation and Society crcs-apply@seas.harvard.edu References for postdoctoral fellows should send their letters directly, and Visiting Scholar applicants may provide a list of references rather than having letters sent. The application deadline for full consideration is December 16, 2012.
Harvard's CRCS is looking for postdocs! Please apply.... We're very interested in theorists (and, of course, non-theorists as well!) in all of the areas listed below. Also, for those who know of my work with Giorgos Zervas -- well, he's finishing his postdoc this year, and I'd be thrilled to find other people to work with on the semi-theoretical semi-data-focused EconCS style work. Spread the word... ---------- The Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) solicits applications for its Postdoctoral Fellows and Visiting Scholars Programs for the 2013-2014 academic year. Postdoctoral Fellows are given an annual salary of approximately $60,000 for one year (with the possibility of renewal) to engage in a program of original research, and are provided with additional funds for travel and research support. Visiting Scholars often come with their own support, but CRCS can occasionally offer supplemental funding. We seek researchers who wish to interact with both computer scientists and colleagues from other disciplines, and have a demonstrated interest in connecting their research agenda with societal issues. We are particularly interested in candidates with interests in Economics and Computer Science, Health Care Informatics, Privacy & Security, and/or Technology & Accessibility, and those who may be interested in engaging in one of our ongoing/upcoming projects: - Intelligent, Adaptive Systems for Health Care Informatics - Language-Based Security - Personalized Accessibility - Privacy and Security in Targeted Advertising - Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data - Trustworthy Crowdsourcing Harvard University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. We are particularly interested in attracting women and underrepresented groups to participate in CRCS. For further information about the Center and its activities, seehttp://crcs.seas.harvard.edu/. Application Procedure A cover letter, CV, research statement, copies of up to three research papers, and up to three letters of reference should be sent to: Postdoctoral Fellows and Visiting Scholars Programs Center for Research on Computation and Society crcs-apply@seas.harvard.edu References for postdoctoral fellows should send their letters directly, and Visiting Scholar applicants may provide a list of references rather than having letters sent. The application deadline for full consideration is December 16, 2012.
Well we have an IT story from New Zealand that is front page news. On the 14th October kiwi blogger, Keith Ng, posted a piece titled: MSD's Leaky Servers. Read his post for his full story, but the basic gist of it is that by using Work and Income's public information kiosks he was able to access every server within the Ministry of Social Development simply by using the Open File dialog of MS Office. Once inside a server information was stored as plain unencrypted documents ranging from information about claimants, fraud investigations, court cases, invoices, and most alarmingly, information about children under the care of Child,Youth & Family. In many ways this isn't a security breach as it seems there was no security present to breach - Keith Ng isn't a hacker. Let's start from the bottom up; computer kiosks shouldn't allow access to any of the computer's underlying setup. They certainly shouldn't be connected to the entire ministry's network. Kiosks shouldn't have USB ports, which apparently these machines do. Nobody, apart from the sysadmin, should have access to the entire organisation's network. It seems any MSD employ can access any document. It seems that data isn't stored in a database, so there is no information gathered on when documents have been accessed and by whom. Moreover sensitive information, including passwords aren't encrypted. Finally, to make matters worse, Ministry chief executive, Brendan Boyle, has said the ministry received a report from Dimension Data in April last year identifying "flaws" in its system - obviously no action was taken! Perhaps the government is implementing an "open information" policy but has forgotten to tell us.
There is no Nobel Prize for computing so it was good to hear last week that Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for ground-breaking experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual quantum systems." Joshua Rothman, writing in The New Yorker, puts their groundbreaking research into perspective in an interesting article called, "Quantum Computing Wins a Nobel." If you're not sure what Quantum Computing is and what impact it is expected to have this is a good place to start - be prepared to be confused though quantum physics is baffling. As physicist Niels Bohr said, "If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them." [Note: the highest award in computer science is the ACM Turing Award, named in honour of Alan Turing]
Usain Bolt may be the fastest man in the world but he couldn't outrun Boston Dynamics' Cheetah Robot. The YouTube video below clocks the Cheetah at 28.3 mph 0.5 mph quicker than Bolt's fastest. Obviously this is only a prototype by Boston Dynamics plans to be testing a fully autonomous Cheetah in 2013. So what's the application for this technology? Boston Dynamics has been working for the US military and their DARPA programme developing robots to support combat troops. BigDog is essentially a pack horse that can carry equipment across rough terrain. PETMAN is an anthropomorphic robot for testing chemical protection clothing. PETMAN's range of motions are weirdly creepy and it falls right into the uncanny valley. Thanks to my friend, and author, Nas Hedron for pointing me in the direction of Cheetah - please check out his new novel, "Luck and Death at the Edge of the World" that stars an AI who channels Alan Turing.
Evan Selinger and Evelyn Kim, writing in The Atlantic, ask "Can a robot learn to cook?" They illustrate their article with The Jetsons robot maid Rosey and ask if it could ever acquire the tacit knowledge required to know if chicken was cooked properly. Well in fact there has been a Computer Cooking Competition (CCC) taking place for five years now where the competitors have to devise menus from restricted lists of ingredients. The CCC started out as a bit of fun within the case-based reasoning community but has now grown into something much more serious. "The goal of the CCC is attract new people (e.g., students) to work with AI technologies such as case-based reasoning, semantic technologies, search, and information extraction. Cooking is fun, particularly when using a computer to design the menu. And the contest will attract public interest. Since everybody knows something about cooking, people will be curious about how well a computer can cook."
Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Nokia, Adobe, HP, Opera Software and the Mozilla Foundation (usually rivals) have come together with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and Tim Berners-Lee to collaborate on the development of HTML5 and create WebPlatform Docs. The purpose, as described in its blog is: "For years, web developers have had to rely on multiple sites to help them learn web programming or design, each with one piece of the puzzle. Great sites appear, covering one or two subjects, but too often fail to keep up with the rapid pace of changes to the web platform. This may have been good enough when the web was just simple HTML, basic CSS, and maybe a little JavaScript, but that was a long time ago. Today's web is more than just documents, it's applications and multimedia, and it's changing at a breakneck pace." If you're a web developer you can create an account and share your experience and learn from others. It will be interesting to see how this compares in the future to StackExchange which already has several programming & web development Q&A forums.
This year was the 50th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (website). Hard to believe it's been around that long. I think my first year there was 1999, and while I haven't gone every year, I've been to Allerton regularly since.
I happily got to be the token (theoretical) computer scientist on one of the panels, where one of the questions was specifically whether the interaction between communications/control and theoretical computer science had been healthy. I found it interesting that two co-panelists Alexander Vardy and Muriel Medard both had opinions very similar to mine. If you looked about 10-15 years ago, you might have been very optimistic about what I'll call the "theoretical electrical engineering" community and the "theoretical computer science" community coming together in a big way. There had been some significant successes -- specifically, in the Guruswami-Sudan work on list decoding, and work on low-density parity-check coding (including the paper by Luby-Mitzenmacher-Shokrollahi-Spielman). Codes were clearly becoming important on the complexity side in TCS, and algorithmic considerations were becoming more important in TEE.
And while there's been the occasional crossover subject since then -- people on both sides of the aisle work on network coding, though it still seems more clearly a TEE subject than a TCS subject, and compressed sensing and even social networks have taken hold in both TEE and TCS -- there's still surprisingly little interaction between the two communities, especially since, more and more, I think the two communities are growing evdr closer intellectually. (I tried to spin some fun thoughts on that during the panel -- TEE sprung from Shannon, focusing on communication and transmission rate; TCS sprung from Turing, focusing on computation and computational complexity. And for fifty years or so, the two subjects have carved out fairly distinct sets of problems. But as the distinction between "communication" and "computation" continues to fall away, the sets of problems the two groups work on get ever closer together.)
Culturally, however, TEE and TCS seem quite different, not just with different conferences and journals, but different ideas about measuring research and publications. (Conferences don't really count for TEE, while journals don't really count for TCS.) Perhaps this inertia keeps the two communities apart. Or perhaps there's something else that I'm missing, but several younger people after the panel came up to me afterwards and seemed to agree. They wanted to be able to move back and forth between the communities, as the problems they were interested in seemed relevant to both (and possibly or probably needed techniques from both to fully tackle the problems), but the divide between them seemed rather large, and the best way forward career-wise seemed to be to stick with one or the other.
So the panelists seemed to agree with their sense of mild disappointment that the past decade hadn't really lived up to its potential in terms of TCS and TEE combining forces to meet their intellectual challenges, but still remaining optimistic that there were opportunities there.
I'm told the recording of the panel will go on line at some point; I'll link to it when it is.
This year was the 50th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (website). Hard to believe it's been around that long. I think my first year there was 1999, and while I haven't gone every year, I've been to Allerton regularly since.
I happily got to be the token (theoretical) computer scientist on one of the panels, where one of the questions was specifically whether the interaction between communications/control and theoretical computer science had been healthy. I found it interesting that two co-panelists Alexander Vardy and Muriel Medard both had opinions very similar to mine. If you looked about 10-15 years ago, you might have been very optimistic about what I'll call the "theoretical electrical engineering" community and the "theoretical computer science" community coming together in a big way. There had been some significant successes -- specifically, in the Guruswami-Sudan work on list decoding, and work on low-density parity-check coding (including the paper by Luby-Mitzenmacher-Shokrollahi-Spielman). Codes were clearly becoming important on the complexity side in TCS, and algorithmic considerations were becoming more important in TEE.
And while there's been the occasional crossover subject since then -- people on both sides of the aisle work on network coding, though it still seems more clearly a TEE subject than a TCS subject, and compressed sensing and even social networks have taken hold in both TEE and TCS -- there's still surprisingly little interaction between the two communities, especially since, more and more, I think the two communities are growing ever closer intellectually. (I tried to spin some fun thoughts on that during the panel -- TEE sprung from Shannon, focusing on communication and transmission rate; TCS sprung from Turing, focusing on computation and computational complexity. And for fifty years or so, the two subjects have carved out fairly distinct sets of problems. But as the distinction between "communication" and "computation" continues to fall away, the sets of problems the two groups work on get ever closer together.)
Culturally, however, TEE and TCS seem quite different, not just with different conferences and journals, but different ideas about measuring research and publications. (Conferences don't really count for TEE, while journals don't really count for TCS.) Perhaps this inertia keeps the two communities apart. Or perhaps there's something else that I'm missing, but several younger people after the panel came up to me afterwards and seemed to agree. They wanted to be able to move back and forth between the communities, as the problems they were interested in seemed relevant to both (and possibly or probably needed techniques from both to fully tackle the problems), but the divide between them seemed rather large, and the best way forward career-wise seemed to be to stick with one or the other.
So the panelists seemed to agree with their sense of mild disappointment that the past decade hadn't really lived up to its potential in terms of TCS and TEE combining forces to meet their intellectual challenges, but still remaining optimistic that there were opportunities there.
I'm told the recording of the panel will go on line at some point; I'll link to it when it is.
Tenure Track Position Open. Here's the official blurb:
Tenure-track Position in Computer Science
The Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) seeks applicants for a position at the level of tenure-track assistant professor in Computer Science, with an expected start date of July 1, 2013.
Candidates are required to have a PhD or an equivalent degree by the expected start date. In addition, we seek candidates who have an outstanding research record and a strong commitment to undergraduate teaching and graduate training.
This is a broad search, and we welcome outstanding applicants in all areas of computer science. This includes applicants whose research and interests connect to such areas as computational science, engineering, health and medicine, or the social sciences.
Required application documents include a cover letter, CV, a statement of research interests, a teaching statement, up to three representative papers, and names and contact information for at least three references. Applicants will apply online athttp://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/4324.
The Computer Science program at Harvard University benefits from outstanding undergraduate and graduate students, an excellent location, significant industrial collaboration, and substantial support from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Information about Harvard's current faculty, research, and educational programs is available athttp://www.seas.harvard.edu.
We encourage candidates to apply by December 1, 2012, but will continue to review applications until the position is filled. Harvard is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Applications from women and minority candidates are strongly encouraged.
