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Fencing
CMU hosted a small USFA open tournament today, so I went since it was so convenient and I miss competitive fencing. I haven't been a USFA member since I was in high school, since at Princeton I only fenced NCAA meets. At one point senior year I was a D, but since my membership expired I went into this tournament unrated. I went 3-1 in the pool, ( Read more... ) -
Academic Genealogy
simrob just posted a link to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which is an attempt to link students with advisors so that mathematicians can see their academic genealogy, which is a pretty neat idea. Rob was noticing that pretty much any of his possible advisors at CMU or Penn or Harvard link back to Alonzo Church, which is awesome. I decided to look ( Read more... ) -
Fun
I actually went into school yesterday, which was very unusual -- I hardly ever go in on the weekends. But I needed to do a lot of reading and finish up a machine learning theory homework, and there was no way I was going to get work done at home with the olympics on. I ended up spending most of the day in the lounge, reading papers on various ( Read more... ) -
Good for work, bad for fun
Anupam, Hubert, and I have made some fairly decent progress on our spanners project in the past few weeks. Now we're working on a new construction to get gracefully degrading spanners, which is much more difficult but hopefully possible by using a layering approach with our non-gracefully degrading spanners. I'm at the point where I find it hard ( Read more... ) -
Boring me
Not too much going on lately. Anupam, Hubert, and I found another construction for slack spanners that's even better than our previous one, which is really cool. It's basically optimal, but the construction is so simple that It's not clear there's enough there for a SODA paper, much less a STOC paper (which is the next paper deadline). There's ( Read more... ) -
Classes
This semester I'm signed up for two classes, Machine Learning Theory with Avrim and Approximation Algorithms II with Anupam and Ravi. I'm also sitting in on Theoretical Cryptography with Manuel and Steven Rudich. I took a theoretical crypto class my junior year at Princeton taught by Amit Sahai, and the syllabus for this class looks pretty much ( Read more... ) -
From Jack
Best Blonde Joke Ever
Oh, and I redid my official webpage, since I got sick of looking at all of the nasty HTML generated by FrontPage. It should be a little cleaner, now. Take a look and tell me if anything's odd. -
Long time no update
It's been a while since I last wrote. The holidays were fine -- I left Pittsburgh on the 23rd and hung out with my family in Ohio until New Years. It was fun to see everyone again, and I got some good presents (yay for George Forman grills!). It was also a much more comfortable drive than usual -- usually I go home first and we all go together, ( Read more... ) -
skiing, random walks
Not much going on lately. Dan's party on Friday was fun. It's weird socializing with faculty now that I'm a grad student instead of an undergrad -- one of Dan's advisors, Dave Anderson, showed up and played a drinking game version of Trivial Pursuit with us (although he didn't drink as much as he was supposed to :-)). We also got some people ( Read more... ) -
Black Friday
Happy Black Friday! For those of you that aren't CMU CS students, at the end of each semester the entire faculty of the CS department gets together and evaluates every graduate student, to make sure that we're making satisfactory progress etc. This is called Black Friday, and was today. While the faculty were off discussing us, we (as per ( Read more... )