## Saturday, August 23, 2014

### LaTeX is code...

I'm giving a talk on LaTeX this Monday as part of our new grad student "boot camp" series. It's really more of an interactive presentation: I'll use writelatex (or sharelatex) to demo examples, give student simple assignments, and use real-time chat to see how things are going. It should be quite interesting.

Here's the talk announcement:
Did you know that every time you use $..$ to italicize text, or use \\ to force a newline, Leslie Lamport cries out in agony and Don Knuth starts another fascicle of Volume IV of TAoCP ?
Come and learn about how to use LaTeX, and use it well. Your collaborators will love you, your advisors will love me, and you'll realize that the most awfully written drivel looks awesome when typeset well.
This will be interactive!! I'll be using a shared space for editing and viewing latex documents, and there will be class activities, so please do bring your laptops/tablets/other editing device so you can follow along and participate.

For this talk I solicited comments from colleagues as to what they'd like their students to learn. Probably the most useful comment I got was from +Robert Ricci and +Eric Eide: to whit,

LaTeX is code.

This might seem obvious, but once you internalize it, all kinds of other things become very natural. For example
• You should really use some kind of IDE to write and build your documents
• Version control is your friend
• *sections should be separate files.
• Use macros where convenient
• Don't reinvent: use the many many built-in packages at ctan.org
• Use tex.stackexchange.com to learn how to hack whatever you need in LaTeX.

A corollary: to see a theoretician editing LaTeX close to a STOC/FOCS/SODA deadline is to realize that theory folk are AWESOME programmers.

## Tuesday, August 19, 2014

### Long Live the Fall Workshop (guest post by Don Sheehy)

An announcement for the Fall Workshop in Computational Geometry, by Don Sheehy

In all the conversation about SoCG leaving the ACM, there were many discussions about ownership, paywalls, and money.  This leads naturally to questions of ideals.  What can and ought a research community be like?  What should it cost to realize this?  Isn't it enough to bring together researchers and in an unused lecture hall at some university somewhere, provide coffee (and wifi), and create a venue for sharing problems, solutions, and new research in an open and friendly atmosphere?  There is a place for large conferences, with grand social events (Who will forget the boat cruise on the Seine at SoCG 2011?), but there is also a place for small meetings run on shoestring budgets that are the grassroots of a research community.

The Fall Workshop on Computational Geometry is such a meeting.  It started in 1991, at SUNY Stony Brook and has been held annually every fall since.  I first attended a Fall Workshop during my first year of graduate school, back in 2005.  This year marks the 24th edition of the workshop, and this time, I will be hosting it at the University of Connecticut.  It is organized as a labor of love, with no registration fees.  There are no published proceedings and it is a great opportunity to discuss new work and fine-tune it in preparation for submission.  It is perfectly timed to provide a forum for presenting and getting immediate feedback on your potential SoCG submissions.  I cordially invite you to submit a short abstract to give a talk and I hope to see you there.

Important dates:
Submission deadline: Oct 3 midnight (anywhere on earth)
Conference: Oct 31-Nov 1, 2014.

## Wednesday, August 13, 2014

### Interdisciplinary research and the intellectual richness of data analysis

Slides on a brief introduction to themes in machine learning from an algorithms perspective, and some thoughts on the mathematical richness of the study of data.

## Wednesday, August 06, 2014

### A brief note on Fano's inequality

I've been bumping into Fano's inequality a lot lately, and have found the various explanations on the web somewhat lacking. Not because they aren't useful, but because their perspective is very different to the kind that I'd prefer as an algorithms person.

So after grumbling and mumbling and complaining, I decided the only solution was to write my own ! And here it is, as a raindrop.

Eh ? What's that you say ? And here we're just getting used to twitter ?

Raindrops are a web publishing form designed by the company run by our very own V. Vinay. When I was in India last I visited him in Bangalore, and he showed me the system. It's a nice way to make presentations or short lectures.

The raindrop I created is embedded directly in my blog, but can also be viewed directly at this link. I hope you like the medium, and the content !

## Sunday, July 27, 2014

### A response to Vint Cerf

A somewhat grumpy response to +Vint cerf 's request for feedback on how the ACM can do more for "professional programmers".

Dear  Dr. Cerf
In your recent letter to the members of ACM, you write "I would like to ask readers how they satisfy their need to keep informed about computing practices and research results that may influence their own work". While I suspect your goal is to understand how ACM can serve the larger tech community and not the research community and I am a card-carrying member of the latter group, I thought I'd respond anyway.

First up, it's an ambitious (and brave!) idea to think that the ACM (or any single entity for that matter) can serve the needs of the vast technology enterprise. There was probably a time before the web when professional societies played an important role in collecting together people with shared interests and disseminating valuable information out to interested individuals. But now we have your current employer ! and online communities galore ! and Quora ! and the Stackexchange ecosystem ! and so many different ways for people to build communities, share information and learn about new ideas percolating through the world of tech.

It's a little funny though that you're worried about ACM's presence in the professional world. Many of us have long assumed that ACM spends most of its focus on that side of the computing community (the excellent revamp of the CACM under +Moshe Vardi  being the exception that proved the rule). In fact, I'd go as far as to argue that the ACM would be much better served if it were instead to realize how it's driving itself into irrelevance in a research community that so desperately needs an institutional voice.

How do we satisfy our need to keep informed about results that might influence our work ? We (still) read papers and go to conferences. And how does the ACM help ? Well not very well.

• Aggregating the deluge of information: anyone will tell you that the amount of research material to track and read has grown exponentially. But we still, to this day, have nothing like PUBMED/MEDLINE as a central clearinghouse for publications in CS-disciplines. The ACM DL is one step towards this, but it's a very poor imitation of what a 21st century repository of information should look like. It's not comprehensive, its bibliographic data is more erroneous than one expects, and the search mechanisms are just plain depressing (it's much easier to use Google)
• Dealing with the changing nature of peer review and publication: Sadly, ACM, rather than acting like a society with its members' interests at heart, has been acting as a for-profit publisher with a some window dressing to make it look less execrable. Many people have documented this far more effectively than I ever could.
• Conference services: One of the services a national organization supposedly provides are the conference services that help keep communities running. But what exactly does the ACM do ? It sits back and nitpicks conference budgets, but provides little in the way of real institutional support. There's no infrastructure to help with conference review processes, no support for at-conference-time services like social networking, fostering online discussion and communities, and even modern web support. I only bring this up because all of these services exist, but piecemeal, and outside the ACM umbrella.

Underneath all of this is a slow but clear change in the overall CS research experience. The CRA has been doing yeoman service here: taking the temperature of the community every year with the Taulbee surveys, putting out a best practices document for postdocs after extensive community discussion, and even forming action groups to help gain more support for CS research from the government. Does the ACM do any of this ?

In many ways, this is a golden era for computer science, as the fruits of decades of work in our field seep out into the larger world under the guise of computational thinking, big data and learning. It's a perfect time for an organization that has deep connections in both the academic side of CS and the industrial side to help with  the translation and tech transfer needed to maximize the impact of the amazing new technologies we're all developing, as well as reach out to similar institutions in other areas to bring more CS into their communities (as you rightly pointed out)

But there is no sign that ACM has ideas about how to do this or even wants to. And while it continues to chase a professional tech community that doesn't seem to care about it at all, the academics who would have cared are finding their own way.

## Monday, June 09, 2014

### A declaration of independence (kind of), and technology-induced disintermediation

Musings on the SoCG move to declare independence of the ACM.

It's a little odd to be sitting in Denmark while high quality rød pølse (with remoulade!) is being made across the world in Kyoto. There's an abysmal lack of blogging/tweeting/facebooking/instagramming/snapchatting/can-I-stop-now-ing from the conference.

Of course following in the lines of the complexity conference, we're attempting to declare our own independence from the EEVVIIL SKELETOR AND HIS MINIONS ACM. Jeff Erickson, our esteeemed grand poobah steering committee chair has put out a series of posts outlining the issues at hand, the history of the matter, and the current status of discussions with SIGACT and ACM. Please visit http://makingsocg.wordpress.com to read, discuss and/or heckle as you see fit.

It might be obvious, but this new wave of devolution is being driven largely by technology - most importantly the existence of LIPIcs. Having a platform for open-access publication with minimal costs exposes as false the claims of institutional providers that they alone can provide the support needed for conferences. In fact, there are a number of related claims that appear to be not true in practice (or at least are not as obviously true as once thought).

* We need the imprimatur of an institutional provider as a signalling mechanism for quality. While it might be too soon to tell if dropping affiliation with established institutions (IEEE or ACM) will affect how publications in a venue will be perceived, there's a lot of confidence in the communities that their long-established reputation will outweigh any loss of prestige.

* Institutional providers provide quality editorial and archival services necessary for a serious venue. I think juxtaposing 'quality' and 'editorial' together with Sheridan Printing might cause my two remaining readers to die of hysterical laughter. But the archival issue is a good one. LIPIcs appears to be funded solidly by the German government for a while, and will take a fixed fee from a conference for publication (capped at 750 €). But the Arxiv was struggling for a while. Should we view the ACM and IEEE as "more likely to last" than any other entity ?

* Institutional providers provide the backing and clout needed for conference organization, hotel bookings and so on. This is another good example of a time-money tradeoff. Organizations like SIAM actually do take over the management of the conference: while the results are not always optimal, there is a clear reduction in hassle for the conference organizers. But organizations like the ACM don't take things over in the same way (and from what I can tell, neither does IEEE). I'm surprised though that there aren't yet lean-and-mean event planning providers that we can just pay money to and make our planning problems go away.

* Institutional providers have the financial wherewithal to manage cycles in revenue streams for a conference. This is another real issue. Conferences that have gone independent have eventually managed to maintain a steady income stream, but theory conferencs are smaller and poorer: it remains to be seen whether we can generate the kind of endowment needed to insulate the community against the natural variation in revenue from year to year.

What's disappointing is that none of this had to play out this way.

• Take LIPICs for example: they clearly marked out their scope -- indexing, archiving functions and hosting -- while staying away from the more content-driven aspects of the process (editing, proofing etc). This makes a lot of sense, given that everyone who publishes knows how to use LaTeX and style files, but might still not be able to make a web page. Why couldn't the ACM have realized this and provided a slimmed-down publishing service ?
• Why do we go to Microsoft (or Easychair, or hotCRP, or Shai Halevi's software) for our conference submission servers ? If the ACM had provided a service of this kind (or even provided hosting for hotCRP/Shai's software), we'd be happily using it right now, and it could have then tied nicely into Regonline, that ACM already partners with.
• A lot of the current angst seems to have tone as a root cause: a certain feeling about the provider's attitude towards the conference. This is again something that could have been recognized and addressed before things got to this stage.
While it's exciting to be part of the "academic spring" (?), people tend to forget that in all revolutions someone gets hurt, and often things don't get better for a long time. I'm intrigued by our attempt to move towards independence though, and the people involved have thought this through very carefully.

## Tuesday, May 20, 2014

### On beauty and truth in science.

Philip Ball writes a thought-provoking article in Aeon with the thesis that the kind of beauty that scientists describe does not necessarily match the aesthetic notions of art, and is not even consistent among scientists.

It was hard for me to get beyond the casual conflating of beauty in mathematics (the four-color theorem, the proof of Fermat's theorem, and proofs in general) and beauty in scientific theories (relativity, evolution, and so on). But if one goes beyond the artificial duality constructed by the author, the idea of beauty as a driver in science (and mathematics) is a rich one to explore.
A particular example: for a long time (and even codified in books) it was taught that there were five natural classes of approximation hardness: PTAS, constant factor-hard, log-hard, label-cover (superlogarithmic) hard, and near-linear hard. There were even canonical members of each class.

Of course, this nice classification no longer exists. There are even problems that are $\log^* n$-hard to approximate, and can also be approximated to that factor. And to be fair, I'm not sure how strong the belief was to begin with.

But it was such a beautiful idea.

At least in mathematics, the search for the beautiful result can be quite fruitful. It spurs us on to find better, simpler proofs, or even new ideas that connect many different proofs together. That notion of connection doesn't appear to be captured in the article above: that beauty can arise from the way a concept ties disparate areas together.

### MADALGO Summer School on Learning At Scale

I'm pleased to announce that this year's MADALGO summer school (continuing a long line of summer programs on various topics in TCS) will be on algorithms and learning. The formal announcement is below, and registration information will be posted shortly.

Save the date ! Aug 11-14, 2014.
LEARNING AT SCALE
August 11- 14, 2014, Aarhus University, Denmark

OVERVIEW AND GOAL
The MADALGO Summer School 2014 will introduce attendees to the latest developments in learning at scale. The topics will include high dimensional inference,  algorithmic perspectives on learning and optimization, and challenges in learning with huge data.
LECTURES
The school will be taught by experts in learning:
• Mikhail Belkin (Ohio State)
• Stefanie Jegelka (Berkeley)
• Ankur Moitra (MIT)
PARTICIPATION
The summer school will take place on August 11-14, 2014 at Center for Massive Data Algorithmics (MADALGO) at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Denmark. The school is targeted at graduate students, as well as researchers interested in an in-depth introduction to Learning. Registration will open soon at the school webpage. Registration is free on a first-come-first serve basis - handouts, coffee breaks, lunches and a dinner will be provided by MADALGO and Aarhus University.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
• Suresh Venkatasubramanian (University of Utah)
• Peyman Afshani (MADALGO, Aarhus University)
• Lars Arge (MADALGO, Aarhus University)
• Gerth S. Brodal (MADALGO, Aarhus University)
• Kasper Green Larsen (MADALGO, Aarhus University)
LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS
• Trine Ji Holmgaard (MADALGO, Aarhus University)
• Katrine Østergaard Rasmussen (MADALGO, Aarhus University)