The Geomblog

 I've been at the U of Utah and Salt Lake City for 14 years (14.5 really). It was my first academic job and the longest time I've spent anywhere (throughout my whole life). So it's a little hard...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2021/05/transitions.html

 Not a post I'd have wanted to make on Christmas day, but that's how it goes sometimes.  Lars Arge just passed away, on Dec 23. For those of us who've been following his battles with cancer, ...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2020/12/lars-arge.html

Martin Farach-Colton asked me to mention this, which is definitely NOT a pox on computer systems.  > ACM-SIAM Algorithmic Principles of Computer Systems (APoCS20)  > https://www.sia...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2019/04/new-conference-announcement.html

SODA 2020 (in SLC!!) is experimenting with a new submission guideline: PC members will be allowed to submit papers. I had a conversation about this with Shuchi Chawla (the PC chair) and she was k...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2019/03/on-pc-submissions-at-soda-2020.html

All of twitter is .... atwitter?... over the OpenAI announcement and partial non-release of code/documentation for a language model that purports to generate realistic-sounding text from simple ...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2019/02/openai-ai-threats-and-norm-building-for.html

Session 3: Representation and Profiling Session 4: Fairness methods. 

http://blog.geomblog.org/2019/02/more-fat-blogging.html

Building systems that have fairness properties and monitoring systems that do A/B testing on us. Session 2 of FAT* : my opinionated summary.

http://blog.geomblog.org/2019/01/fat-session-2-systems-and-measurement.html

I'll be blogging about each session of papers from the FAT* Conference. So as not to clutter your feed, the posts will be housed at the fairness blog that I co-write along with Sorelle Friedler a...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2019/01/fat-blogging.html

(will all those absent today please email me) (if you can't hear me in the back, raise your hand) The theoryCS blog aggregator is back up and running at its new location -- cstheory-feed.org...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/12/the-theorycs-blog-aggregator-reborn.html

As you all might now, the cstheory blog aggregator is currently down. Many people have been wondering what's going on and when it will be back up so here's a short summary. The aggregator has b...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/12/the-theorycs-aggregator.html

It's both exhilarating and frustrating when you see the warnings in papers you write play out in practice. Case in point, the proposal by DHS to use credit scores to ascertain whether someone sh...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/11/should-credit-scores-be-used-for.html

So, what do you work on?  As questions go, this is one of the most rudimentary. It's the conference equivalent of "Nice weather we're having", or "How about them Broncos!". It's a throat-cle...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/11/what-do-i-work-on.html

Kara Swisher (who is unafraid to call it like it is!) has a new op-ed in the NYT titled "Who will teach Silicon Valley to be ethical ". She asks > How can an industry that, unlike other ...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/10/on-teaching-ethics-to-tech-companies.html

Breitbart just acquired a leaked copy of an internal google doc taking a cold hard look at the problems of free speech, fake news and censorship in the current era. I wrote a tweet storm about i...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/10/googles-analysis-of-dilemma-of-free.html

One of my most visited posts is the anonymous post by a theoryCS colleague describing her own #metoo moments inside the TCS conference circuit . It was a brutal and horrific story to read. Conc...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/10/a-new-sexual-harassment-policy-for-tcs.html

A short review of Hannah Fry's new book 'Hello World' Starting wth Cathy O'Neill's Weapons of Math Destruction, there's been an onslaught of books sounding the alarm about the use of algorithms...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/09/hello-world-short-review.html

For the last X years (X being a confidential and never to be revealed number, but large enough that AI was more than just deep learning at the time), Sergei Vassilvitskii and  I have been toilin...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/08/clustering-draft-of-part.html

This is a guest post by a colleague in the TCS community, a person I know. If you read other TCS blogs you might come across this there. This is by design. Please do read it.  Every #MeToo sto...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/02/a-metoo-testimonial-that-hits-close-to.html

My first two posts on double blind review triggered good discussion by Michael Mitzenmacher and Boaz Barak (see the comments on these posts for more).  I thought I'd try to synthesize what I t...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/01/double-blind-review-continuing.html

I've had a number of discussions with people both before and after the report that Rasmus and I wrote on the double-blind experiment at ALENEX. And I think it's helpful to lay out some of my thou...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/01/double-blind-review-at-theory.html

+Rasmus Pagh  and I chaired ALENEX 2018 , and we decided to experiment with double blind review  for the conference. What follows is a report that we wrote on our experiences doing this. There ...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2018/01/report-on-double-blind-reviewing-in.html

This past Friday, I gave a lecture on cake cutting algorithms at the Timpanogos Women's Facility as part of a lecture series organized by my Utah colleague Erin L. Castro and her Utah Prison Educ...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2017/10/cake-cutting-algorithms-in-prison.html

I'm a perpetual student when it comes to my guitar-playing. I started off learning acoustic guitar, and taught myself a little bass in college. When I was in the college band our music advisor pl...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2017/09/on-music-mathematics-and-teaching.html

After the infamous Google memo (and frankly for much longer if you work in algorithmic fairness), the idea of something being a "social construct" has popped up again, and I will admit that I've ...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2017/09/x-is-social-construct-and-perils-of.html

In the light of the wave of racist and neo-Nazi bile being slung around in Charlottesville and beyond, Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance has been doing the rounds. Paraphrased, it can be phrase...

http://blog.geomblog.org/2017/08/on-free-speech-gerrymandering-and-self.html