Yesterday we submitted our paper on extensions of the secretary problem to EC. I don't want to post the paper before it's accepted, but I do think that it's a cool problem that deserves wider exposure, so I'll give a quick overview.

( Cut for extreme algorithmic nerdiness )

So apparently I haven't updated since Dan's wedding. Too much to recap since then, so I won't even try for the details. Basically last semester was pretty unproductive, partially because I TAd undergrad algorithms for Avrim. TAing was pretty fun, but ate up tons of time. I had one good insight into the relationship between the Nagata dimension ( Read more... )

On my way to Dan's wedding in Wisconsin. 6:30 am flights suck.

Last week I went to STOC in San Diego. It was pretty fun, with a fair number of interesting talks (especially the ones about embeddings). I came away with more problems to work on, which is always good. When I was an undergrad I used to wonder how professors could possibly think of so many problems to think about, but now I'm definitely in a ( Read more... )

It's weird how everyone here leaves so early. In Doherty everyone is a grad student, so lots of people stay late pretty regularly. There are a few interns here, but mostly it's full time people who tend to leave at around 6-7. It's only 9 now and there are only a couple people left in the whole building.

I am now in California. I arrived last Sunday, and my internship started on Tuesday. The travel was surprisingly easy -- both of my flights (Burlington to Chicago, Chicago to San Jose) actually arrived early. It was crazy. I can't remember the last time that happened. Then after a lot of paperwork I got my rental car (thankfully subsidized by ( Read more... )

My paper on compact routing was just accepted to PODC! Looks like I'll be going out to Portland in mid-August, which should be fun. If nothing else, I'll get to visit mdmbuttafly and catch up a bit ( Read more... )

I don't feel like working on the midterm report for our networking project, so I'm procrastinating by writing my first entry in over a month. This weekend was the prospective open house, which was more fun than I thought it would be. Due to the current number of students and some funding issues, CMU accepted very few theory students this year, so ( Read more... )

Last night I submitted a paper to PODC -- I should hear back in a couple of months. I was paper 218, so my guess is there are about 300 submissions for about 30 slots. Not great chances, but we'll see. I think my paper is timely and interesting, but it's not very technically sophisticated. We also seem to be making pretty good progress on one ( Read more... )

I am such a fan of this weather. Last week sucked -- it was absurdly cold, even by VT standards. Definitely below 0 most days when I came into school. But now it's relatively warm out (20s), there's basically no wind, and it's snowing pretty hard. Awesome. Apparently it's supposed to tstay like this all week.