CS Theory town hall meeting
Introductions
Danny Sleator
Manuel Blum
Rick Statman – computability theory, resources in math dept, Alan Frieze, Tom Bohman, Oleg Pikhurko
Gary Miller – Sparse systems, class on numerical methods and spectral stuff
David Abraham – 2 sided matching markets
Abraham Flaxman – algorithms and uncertainty, take minutes, last year grad student, lets pool resources
Steven Rudich
Daniel Golovin – approx algorithms, uncertainty in input but not average case
Adam Weirman – 5ht year with Mor Harchol-Balter, scheduling and queues
Mugizi Rwebangira – learning labeled, unlabeled
David Offner – approximation algorithm, graph algorithms, and pure combinatorics
Pall Melsted – Graphs algorithms
Barbara Anthony – robust optimization
Don Sheehy – computational geom, 1st year
Roy Liu – masters student with Manuel and Luis
Michelle Goodstein – applied algorithms
Luis von Ahn – trying to graduate, makes stuff up
Mike Mass — 1st year combinatorial and graph algorithms
Hector – visiting Luis heading to TTI
Srinath Sridhar – comp biology, evolutionary trees, data structures
Mohit Singh – approx
Vineet Goyal – approx, robust optimization and approximation
Mike Rochash – programming languages and applications
Dan Blandford – compressed data structures
Konstantin Andreev – 6th year with Bruce Maggs
Guy Blelloch – graph compression, data structures
Stefano Leondari – visiting for year, approx online game theory complex networks
Dan Licada – logic and pl with bob harper
Phil Gibbons – Intel lab, has algorithm questions come out of systems work, and needs runners for pretty good race Friday
Avrim Blum – machine learning approximation algorithms online algorithms.
ACO students from math and Tepper are here. Now there is a new official way for cs students to get involved in ACO– CS with minor in ACO. Take 3 semesters of courses from math and Tepper and go to ACO seminar. No application necessary.
FOCS conference here this fall. Avrim and Anupam are local chairs, they will need help. Especially reviews of local restaurants, 20 bucks per review (max 1 per person).
Anupam Gupta – approximation algorithm, metric embeddings, course this semester on approximation algorithms. Will put up a wiki for FOCS restaurants. Has other tasks for people to help with for FOCS, i.e. Registration,
Maverick Woo – 6th year, data structures, dynamic connectivity, worst case stuff, and graph theory, like preconditioners. Runs the theory group web server.
Hubert Chen – 4th year graph algorithms and metric embeddings algorithms
Katrina Ligett – taking over organizing theory lunch, which will be 12-1 on Wednesday in NSH 1507. weekly talk, usually by a student, fairly informal.
Seminars
Seminars – Theory Lunch Wednesdays 12-1, Theory Seminar Friday 3:30-4:30, ACO Seminar Thursday 4-5, Fri 2-3:30 OR seminar.
Should we schedule the OR and Theory seminars so that people do not have to run from one side of campus to the other?
Theory Announce mailing list, email Katrina to get added.
Scribes for theory lunch?
Other places are doing it. Quick thing, posted publicly or otherwise.
Maybe we should just record the questions and answers and post that.
Danny: is that for us or for pr? It could be good for pr.
Anupam: maybe the open questions and concluding comments would be valuable.
Stefano: A 1 page annotated bibliography
or maybe suggest a paper or two.
Blog
Maverick has started a blog, http://magic.aladdin.cs.cmu.edu, which has talks and abstracts and stuff.
Feedback from talks
Should we implement some system to provide feedback to speakers. Maybe an open ended form modeled on the speaking requirement form to give the speaker feedback. Suggestions to Katrina.
Wiki for a huge annotated bibliography
Daniel thinks is would be nice to have a knowledge base, especially for new students to get info on areas. This has already been planned, the Aladdin center’s algorithm depot. But not implemented. Maybe a wiki would work.
Share resources
If you know of other stuff that everyone should know, tell Katrina or post on wiki.
18:04 on September 7th, 2005
Regarding the theory lunch “scribe”:
Does anyone have a digital video camera? If so, perhaps we can record our own videos during theory lunch? I would guess that such videos compress really well. (Maybe 100MB per talk?)
10:28 on September 9th, 2005
For the record, I have updated the talk links this morning. I really think we should have a calendar service that can publish talk schedules and abstracts to our calendars. Right now I do maintain an ICS as in this post: http://magic.aladdin.cs.cmu.edu/2005/04/19/calendar-plugin/
19:56 on September 9th, 2005
I thought of a similar idea but after talking to some people they sort of convinced me that “audio + slides” should be good enough(if the speaker mainly uses powerpoint like most speakers do) and more manageable in terms of bandwidth.
On my iTunes it seems its “1 minute ~=1 Megabyte” at (128,000 bps, 44,100 Hz sample rate) so a full talk will be at most 60 MB. Of course it can probably be compressed much further since quality does not need to be that high.
I have heard that people can make these recordings using their iPods (isn’t that where the term “podcasting” comes from?) so it seems like a real possibility.
11:43 on September 10th, 2005
Maybe your culture is different, but I found that while people may think scribing is a good idea, it’s another thing to have them agree to do it. On the other hand, I can promise you I would almost never look at a video of a talk, even in my area (even if I would have gone to the talk, oddly enough). It’s just so much faster to read a decent report!
16:10 on September 10th, 2005
I actually think I would find it helpful to watch a talk before reading a paper.
But it has never happened that there was a video available of a paper I needed to read so I don’t know how useful it would be in practice.
12:53 on September 13th, 2005
Hmmm, turns out “podcasting” has nothing to do with iPods.
To make an uploadable mp3 audio recording you simply need (1)a good microphone and (2)the appropriate software (say QuickTime Pro or the equivalent free ware) loaded onto a laptop.
At least after the initial setup it should be pretty easy.
Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/podcasting_win.html
12:57 on September 13th, 2005
Did some research and it turns out “podcasting” has NOTHING to do with iPods.
Anyway, so to make the audio file you simply need (1) a good microphone (2) The right software (e.g QuickTime Pro).
Now, If you actually want to insert it into an RSS feed thats a different story…
Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/podcasting_win.html
13:37 on September 13th, 2005
There is a pretty respectable open source audio program, called audacity. http://audacity.sourceforge.net/