Christos Anesti

Christ is Risen! to all the Orthodox out there.

At MIT, we use the opportunity to cook some Romanian food and have a party (and an after-party at my house, it seems). As prototypes of our post-communist generation, we don't really believe in anything, including religion. But it is a cool opportunity to get together.

To celebrate this atheist Orthodox party, let me share a timely joke told tonight.

Yitzhak is very sad: his son converted to Christianity. His friends advise him to talk to the Rabi.

He goes to the Rabi and tells him his story.

The Rabi says: "You know, Yitzhak, I had the same problem, and I asked God about it..."

"And what did God say, Rabi?"

"He said: You know, Rabi, I had the same problem... "

Incidentally, I flew back on Friday night, and I'm flying away in the morning... I promise to get back to some blogging in about 1.5 weeks, when my interviews and visits are over.

SWAT'08 accepted papers

Via Dense Outliers, the SWAT'08 list of accepted papers is out.

Evidently, if your paper was rejected, it is because *I* thought it was too good for this worthless conference.

Now seriously... if you've never been on a PC, the way these things get decided is the following:

• people vote on what they want to review, by reading the author names (primarily), the titles, and maybe the abstract.
  
  
• papers get distributed, and PC members may outsource them to external reviewers. I think it is a good idea to outsource the paper, because an expert might see things that you're missing (like "the main idea appears in this other paper that is not cited"). Alas, for some papers the class of experts on the topic coincides with the list of authors.
  
  
• in addition to outsourcing the paper, you absolutely should read it yourself, to adjust the paper evaluation based on the average level of the submissions. Outsiders can easily overestimate or underestimate the level. I got comments like "this paper is crap, but it's good enough for something like SWAT" (for some terrible papers that we trashed very quickly), or "they give a better running time for an important problem using novel ideas, so I'd say it's a borderline accept" (for some of the best papers at the conference).
  
  
• after all comments get uploaded, a blogging-style discussion starts, by leaving comments for each paper. Yes, ultimately, your fortunes are decided by some sort of blogging. And no, the comments for your paper are not much better than regular comments on blog posts, though they are more polite because people are not anonymous.

Rankings

The well-known (and very often criticized) US News Rankings have been released this year. Here are the ranking for computer science, and specifically for theory. Apparently, you don't need an account to access them.

As we all know, it is a bad idea to take these ranking too seriously, but at least they contain a list of the top schools in some order. For the theory rankings, I would diagree with the position of Stanford (too high) and Princeton (too low).

Romanian keyboards

This is a public service announcement for the Romanians in the audience.

Romanian needs 5 letters outside the Latin alphabet (ă, â, ş, ţ, î). In the dark ages of computers, we would just substitute the Latin/ASCII letter for the Romanian letter, sometimes with comic effects (consider tata=father vs. ţâţă=breast :P ). Fortunately, Unicode has been the Internet reality for quite a few years, so we should now spell correctly.

But how can we generate the Romanian letters easily? Romanian keyboards are terrible in my opinion, because they banish these highly used letters to the edge of the keyboard. The alternative I have found is a little bit of freeware called ER1. This keyboard layout replaces unused Latin letters, which are very conveniently located on the keyboard, with the Romanian letters (e.g. q-->ă, w-->ş etc). I found I was able to type at high speed in a matter of minutes.

In Windows, you can change between keyboard layouts with LeftAlt+LeftShift, so switching between English and Romanian text is extremely easy.

Searching for the right word

In a true liberal-arts school, searching for the right word may take two weeks...


Later:


Attachment:

Easter Aggregates

We celebrate the western Easter (incidentally, not our Orthodox Pascha) with news from around the world:

• via IHT, we hear the opinion of Zhang Qingli (张庆黎), the party secretary in charge of Tibet: "The Communist Party is like the parent to the Tibetan people, and it is always considerate about what the children need. The Central Party Committee is the real Buddha for Tibetans."
  
  
• Bin Laden threatens the EU for implicitly endorsing the Danish cartoons. The message features a cartoon of a spear hitting the map of Europe and blood spilling around. Very professional for a terrorist message.
  
  Sometimes, you may think the bad guys stand a chance (like, when Hitler came close to ruling all Europe; or when all the world hates the American war machine and may think Bin Laden can be excused on some points). But fear not --- the bad guys are driven by their extreme ideology, so they are bound to do something extremely stupid sooner or later (like attacking Russia, or picking a fight with mostly neutral Europe).
  
  By the way, if you're in the US or the UK, there's a high chance that you haven't seen the Danish cartoons, since the press here never actually showed them. To see what the rest of the world sees in their papers, go here. Personally, I like this one the most:
  
  
• If you're not watching the exchange rates, let me tell you that 1 EUR is close to 1.6 USD these days. We all remember the days when 1 EUR was 0.8 USD, no?
  
  It's funny how the funds, banks and Journals can get excited about the stocks going up a bit every once in a while. Guys, those prices are in dollars! A better option for your money might be a European company heading to bankruptcy.
  
  People (e.g. Muthu) sometimes wonder how to build a perfect research environment, and what it would take to move us all somewhere else (Europe). I never had a very good answer to that, but these days I often think I will not be interested in tenure in the US.
  

Correctness, conference ranking, etc

I missed a few events on the blogosphere, because I've been on the campaign trail (aka interviewing), but also because I'm not such a regular reader these days. There was a bit of follow-up to my now-famous post on correctness and SWAT (including whining in emails to the PC chair, which I find hilarious --- but YMMV).

Daniel Lemire writes a post essentially saying that top-conferences are for trend-followers who can't have an original idea. Commenters pick on the opportunity to congratulate themselves for all papers they couldn't get into top conferences (after all, those had truly original insights).

Yes, we do have a bit of trend-following and bias towards some topics, but I like to think that is an unfortunate inefficiency in the system, not the model itself. In any case, until we get the perfect conference system, accept the following reality: top conferences give your ideas a broader audience, generate more following, and make life easier for you in terms of funding, jobs, etc.

So for those of you who think you are the hot shot of hot shots and the first to walk on water in 2 millenia... (and I truly hope most of you think that, since my readers come from a community doing advanced research)

... after you have managed to solve the most important problem on Earth, please accept another challenge: that of explaining to the rest of us why this was the most important problem on Earth, and why we should accept your papers. It doesn't need to work from the first attempt, but eventually your goal should be to get your research accepted in the canon, and hence to top conferences. (Guys who walk on water tend to get attention eventually...)

I will not deny that this is often a serious challenge; most times I feel I am up against the current at STOC/FOCS. But we are living in times of extraordinary activism in research, and if you're lazy about taking on the dissemination challenge after solving the technical challenge, you will soon find yourself in the middle of a research community that is just a wrong fit for you.


Michael Mitzenmacher wonders about the role of conferences, and what our stance on correctness should be. I reiterate my point the conferences are for dissemination, and for the very related goal of marking how important some research contribution looks in the eyes of the community. Journals are bad at that, unless we are willing to revamp the system:

• they have slow turn-around time, in part for an unavoidable reason (correctness checking)
• the paper is not compared against a sample of many papers, rather it is evaluated by a non-anonymous editor
  
• the paper is seen by 1 editor (from a small fixed set), and 1-2 reviewers. In a conference, we have a permanently changing set of people, 3 of which look at your paper, plus a few external reviewers.
  

Of course, conferences are not perfect, but it seems more productive to fight the problems than to trash the whole system.

Now if conference = badge of quality, what should you do about correctness? I am a big fan of the allowing papers to begin with "This is an extended abstract of a paper that has just been accepted to journal ..."

Of course, this mechanism will not be necessary for most papers, but it fixes a big flaw in the system: how to get dissemination/the quality badge for a result which does not sound 100% plausible, and is not too easily verifiable.