Computer Science
sb admin | February 25, 2009I'm supervising a few independent studies this year, with groups of students working on fairly large and fairly fuzzily-defined design projects. These groups couldn't be more different from each other in terms of the way they act as a group, act as individuals, and interact with me. It's got me thinking a lot lately about group dynamics among students and the strong influences that certain individuals have over the behavior of the entire group.
One of the groups is highly functional---on the surface. The students all get along really well with each other and appear to complement each other…
pontiff | February 17, 2009Congrats to the quantum tenure odds booster award winners Sloan award winners:Robert Raussendorf, UBC
Hartmut Häffner, UC Berkeley (Go Bears!)
Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Haavard
Scott Aaronson, MIT (that other Tech school)
Andrew Houck, Princeton
Subhadeep Gupta, University of Washington
Lance lists the theoretical computer scientist winners.
pontiff | February 13, 2009Conference of interest to the fault-tolerant crowd (hm, wording not quite right):Event Title: Workshop on Logical Aspects of Fault Tolerance (LAFT)
(affiliated with LICS 2009)
Date: 08/15/2009
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
URL: http://www.aero.org/support/laft
Description:
We are soliciting papers on logical aspects of fault tolerance. The concept of
"fault" underlies essentially all computational systems that have any goal.
Loosely speaking, a fault is an unintended event that can have an unintended
effect on the attainment of that goal. "Fault tolerance" is the term given…
jane | January 31, 2009I'd really like a do-over on this week. This was probably the least productive, worst week I've had in a long, long time. It started with this lovely incident, and went downhill from there. Astute readers may recall that I really couldn't afford any distractions this week, so the fact that I basically did just the bare minimum to not get me fired really was not my best career move.
So instead of making progress on my frighteningly long to-do list, I've been:
dealing with a backache that won't go away, no matter how many tried-and-true yoga stretches I do
feeling intermittently like I am…
jane | January 26, 2009Long time readers of my old blog may remember that earlier in my career at my institution, I was the recipient of a number of harassing phone calls. And that the resolution of these calls was largely unsatisfying. But it's been three years since the last one, and so I thought that maybe that was it, that I could start to relax.
Ha.
I got yet another one this weekend. Same modus operandi as usual. This one, at least, didn't mention me by name, but it definitely sounds as if it was targeted at me.
There is one key difference this time: I have the support of my colleagues. My chair…
jane | January 7, 2009I just found out about this very cool idea, a sort of a call to arms to address those old, tired statements "where are the women in tech? why aren't there any women in tech? there are no women in tech! there are no women tech pioneers/innovators/role models because women don't like tech/are not genetically predisposed to be good at tech/can't hack it in our little boys' world".....sorry, got a bit carried away there. Anyway. I give you: Ada Lovelace Day.
From the pledge site:
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's…
pontiff | December 14, 2008Who can find what is wrong the quickest in arXiv:0812.1385 (or verify that it is correct!)? 1,2,3,....go!
pontiff | December 11, 2008The Optimizer ideas on Worldview Manager gets written up in Forbes.The program will work by showing users a list of statements about a topic and then asking them how strongly they agree or disagree with each. At the end, the system will present users with a list of the statements they endorsed that contradict one another. It will also suggest that users reconsider those views and the assumptions behind them.
Similar teaching programs already exist for narrow fields, especially in technical areas of philosophy. Aaronson, though, is extremely ambitious for Worldview Manager and wants it to…
pontiff | December 4, 2008Via Michael Nielsen's friendfeed, I am led to ACM Classic Books Series. If you've got ACM subscription access, some of the book are even in electronic form. Cool. I love the introduction to "The Computer and the Brain" by John von Neumann:Since I am neither a neurologist nor a psychiatrist, but a mathematician, the work that follows requires some explanation and justification. It is an approach toward the understanding of the nervous system from the mathematician's point of view. However, this statement must immediately be qualified in both of its essential parts.
I feel like I need to use…
sporte | November 25, 2008It's funny but even though I work with data on a regular basis, I can't always predict the best way to manage data until I have my own data to manage.
My classroom wiki site is no exception.
Now, that I've been seriously using a wiki with my class, I've found that I should have set a few things up a bit differently.
Technorati Tags: teaching, teaching technology, wikis, wiki, science education"
The biggest challenge has been making sure that the right people can do the right things - or who gets to see what and upload what where.
Not knowing what methods would turn out to be useful, I…
pontiff | October 31, 2008Shor's algorithm is an algorithm for quantum computers which allows for efficiently factoring of numbers. This in turn allows Shor's algorithm to break the RSA public key cryptosystem. Further variations on Shor's algorithm break a plethora of other public key cryptosystems, including those based on elliptic curves. The McEliece cryptosystem is one of the few public key cryptosystems where variations on Shor's algorithm do not break the cryptosystem. Thus it has been suggested that the McEliece cryptosystem might be a suitable cryptosystem in the "post quantum world", i.e. for a world…
pontiff | October 22, 2008The universe doesn't always operate the way we want it to. No, I'm not talking about the stock market (unless you've been short lately), I'm talking about the role of error in logical deterministic systems! When you zoom down far enough into any computing device you'll see that its constituent components don't behave in a completely digital manner and all sorts of crazy random crap (technical term) is going on. Yet, on a larger scale, digital logical can and does emerge.
Today heading to work in the early dawn I was pondering what all of this meant for our notion of reality.
Some of the…
jane | October 4, 2008That's the best way to describe how I feel right now: it was a whirlwind trip to GHC (did it seem to anyone else like the schedule was just CRAMMED FULL this year?), and I'm mentally and physically exhausted. I'm sure I'll have more posts in subsequent days about more specific stuff that came out of the conference (including some thoughts on a question posed by this person), but for now, here are my quick summary thoughts on the conference.
The blogger meetup did in fact happen (even though apparently lots of people decided to wear brown skirts and mill around the appointed meeting spot at…
pontiff | October 1, 2008DonorChoose, an organization which matches teachers requests for funds with donors, is running their annual blogger challenge. Already Cosmic Variance is trying to harness their vast resources of physicists, The Optimizer is appealing to the base nerd in everyone, He of Uncertain Principles is offering up his dog's services for donations (does the dog know?), and the moral Mathematician is offering solutions to math homework problems (err I mean blog posts on a chosen topic.) But I think you shouldn't fall in this trap and support those blogs....
Because, of course instead you should…
jane | September 30, 2008OK, I think I've finally figured out what my schedule looks like for Grace Hopper (with all the logistics going on, you'd think we were trying to move the pope or something) and I have some possible meet-up times. (I was going to email the interested parties, but then I realized that I don't have everyone's email, hence the blog post.) So, here they are:
Possibility #1: Wednesday night at the poster session/opening reception. I can meet after 8-ish if we do this.
Possibility #2: There seems to be a rather large break after lunch on Thursday---well, ok, there's a plenary session, but…
jane | September 24, 2008As I may have mentioned, oh, once or twice or 20 times, I'll be at the Grace Hopper Conference this year. I'm still trying to figure out my schedule and such while there, but I'd love to try and meet up with fellow bloggers and readers, if we could possibly pull such a thing off. So, if you're going and would like to try and meet up, leave a comment! If there's enough interest, I'll do another post where we can figure out times and dates and all that fun stuff.
(and please, keep the comments and thoughts coming on the previous post---great discussion there so far!)
pontiff | September 24, 2008Major news from the quantum information front. Today I see posted on the arXiv a paper by M.B. Hastings: arXiv:0809.3972 "A Counterexample to Additivity of Minimum Output Entropy." If correct this resolves one of the most famous open problems in quantum information theory, and, even more interestingly says that in a quantum world, transmitting classical information down quantum channel defies your classical intuition. Blessed be our quantum world, which just continues and continues to amaze.
Previously I explained the idea channel capacity. You're sending (classical) information from one…
jane | September 23, 2008This year, our department (finally! finally! after years of wheedling/wishing/hoping/pleading) is seriously discussing issues of retention, recruitment, and climate. I'll have much more to say on this later. But for now, I want to focus on an interesting side discussion that's come up:
Should computer science, as a major and a field, be an exclusive club, or be open to all comers?
There is a very real divide among my colleagues on this issue. Those who subscribe to the "exclusive club" mentality, if I understand their arguments correctly, say that computer science is Hard! and…
pontiff | September 22, 2008I just saw the news that Alexei Kitaev, a pioneer in quantum computing and an incredible physicst/computer scientist, has won a MacArthur "genius" award. Awesome!
Kitaev was my next door neighbor while I was a postdoc at Caltech, and among the many highlights of my short life I count listening to Kitaev's amazing, confounding, brilliant and way over my head ideas. One event in particular I will always remember involved Alexei talking to theoretical computer scientists and, halfway through the talk, pointing out how Majorana fermions were essential to understanding what was going on in that…
pontiff | September 12, 2008Fifty years ago today, this device
set the course for a pretty big revolution. That's a picture of Jack Kilby's first integrated circuit which first functioned on September 12, 1958.