Monday, September 17, 2007

China (II)

As announced, I am attending China Theory Week in Beijing.

Sadly, this puts me behind the Great Firewall of China, which hates blogspot. I will wait until I leave China to express my opinion on this :) Lots and lots of thanks to Erik and Elad Verbin (currently postdoc here), for teaching me how to get around the firewall.

My talk here was: "Round Elimination — A Proof, A Concept, A Direction."

Round elimination, which can be traced back to [Ajtai 1989], has proven to be one of the most useful tools in communication complexity, playing a role similar to PCPs in approximation algorithms. We describe the history of its many variants, including the simplest known proof, and the most illustrative applications. We also describe possible future work, including conjectures that would bring significant progress in applications.

Based on literature survey, and joint publications with Micah Adler, Amit Chakrabarti, Erik Demaine, Sudipto Guha, TS Jayram, Nick Harvey, and Mikkel Thorup.
Slides are available in pptx or exported as ppt. The PDF didn't look decent enough to be posted; sorry.

If you know my usual style of giving talks, you know the slides are somewhat unorthodox. Since I will hopefully give a nonzero number of job talks in the spring, I am especially curious what readers think of the advice on slide 2 :)
Learn from Holywood: sex and violence are the key to a successful job talk.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Slide 2 will almost certainly be offensive to some in your audience (whether it's a job talk or China theory week), but you must realize this already or you wouldn't be asking.

Anonymous said...

Slide 2 can only hurt you -- it's not that funny, and might potentially offend someone in the audience.