I have accepted an offer to join the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago this fall as a Research Assistant Professor. I’m excited by all of the opportunities there; it’s a great chance to dig deeper into some exciting research problems while learning a lot of new things from the great people they have there. It’s in Hyde Park, which is a great stepping stone for future career opportunities…
Author Archives: Anand Sarwate
Readings
Robert Tavernor, Smoot’s Ear : The Measure of Humanity – This is an interesting, albeit dry, history of measurement in Europe, starting from the Greeks and Romans, more or less, up through the development of the metric system. It’s chock full of interesting little facts and also highlights the real problems that arise when there is no standard as well as when trying to define a standard.
Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk – The first in Mahfouz’s masterpiece trilogy, this novel follows a very traditional family of an Egyptian merchant, who spends his time partying every night while terrorizing his family during the day. It’s set during the end of the British occupation at the end of WWI and the protests against the British that start at the end of the novel seem eerily relevant today.
Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People – This is a popular history of theories of race, beauty, and intelligence and how they became entwined with skin color, head-shape, and other measurable quantities. It was an interesting read but felt a little incomplete somehow. Also, she uses the work “pride of place” too many times. It was distracting!
Vivek Borkar, Stochastic Approximation : a Dynamical Systems Viewpoint – This slim book gives a concise, albeit very technical, introduction to the basic methods and results in stochastic approximation. It’s fairly mathematically challenging, but because it’s to-the-point, I found it easier going than the book by Kushner and Yin.
The strong converse for the MAC, part 2
The last time we saw that a packing lemma, together with a good choice of reference output distribution 
where the distribution on 
A little puzzle
This came up as sub-problem during Young-Han’s group meeting today and we mulled over it for a few minutes but didn’t come up with a non-ugly answer. I’m sure, given the number of Real Mathematicians ™ who read this, that someone out there knows of an “obvious” explanation.
Suppose I give you p integers in an arbitrary order (where p is prime). While maintaining the order and using only addition, multiplication, and parenthesis, is it always possible to make an expression which evaluates to 0 mod p?
I think it’s true, but I’m sure there’s some special property of 
Greetings from the School of IT in Austin
I’m at the 2011 School of Information Theory at UT Austin — I’m mostly here to help out with the activities on Monday, which I will blog about after they happen (it’s a secret!) I missed most of the talks, but I went to the first part of Bob Gray’s lecture this morning on stationary codes and the connections between information theory and ergodic theory. Here’s his set of inclusions of the different species of random processes:
IID 
B-processes are the result of applying stationary codes to IID process and K-processes are those which satisfy the Kolmogorov 0-1 law. The last one implies that sample averages converge. It’s only appropriate to mention it, given the title of this blog.
The School is a nice event with a mixture of classical and “hot topics” in information theory. Even though my own research interests have shifted a bit away from the hard core of IT, there are still fun things to think about and it’s nice to see some new new and new old results.
the job market : so many applicants
I just got a rejection from the CS department at Brown, and they sadly neglected to Bcc the recipients, so I now know that they rejected 362 people in one fell swoop. Just glancing through the addresses I recognized several of the recipients. I think, based on my limited expertise in privacy-preserving algorithms, that this is pretty much satisfies the Dinur-Nissim definition of blatant non-privacy: if there are 
Update: I just got a followup saying that the sender “would like to recall the message…” Alas, no.
Update 2: Another followup came in saying to “please ignore and delete” the previous message. Does this mean I still have a chance?!? (Again, alas, no).
Linkage
I never knew Jell-O could be so graceful.
I kind of like this version of Take Five from Sachal Music.
Sometimes the Library of Congress does awesome things. This jukebox is up there.
I wouldn’t have believed before that there is money in a bannass stand, but I could be wrong.
The clarity in this press nugget leaves a lot to be desired. The statement “the trio has found a way to determine the smallest number of nodes that must be externally controlled to force a given network from any initial state to any desired final state,” is so vague! The full article is here. It turns out they are looking at a linear control problem 
The strong converse for the MAC
I have been reading Ahlswede’s paper on An Elementary Proof of the Strong Converse Theorem for the Multiple-access Channel, J. Combinatorics, Information and System Sciences, Vol. 7, No. 3, 216-230. The preprint is here but I have a scanned version of the journal version thanks to the intrepid UC Libraries staff — they are a great resource!
In Memoriam Jack Wolf
By now, many of those in the Information Theory community have probably heard that Jack Wolf passed away last week. I didn’t get much of a chance to interact with Prof. Wolf during my time here at UCSD, but every time I did talk to him he was very warm and welcoming. He will really be missed.
Responses to reviewers : raw TeX please
I am revising a paper now and one of the reviewers sent their comments as a PDF what looked like a Word document or RTF containing the LaTeX, rather than a rendered version. So it was a little annoying to read, what with all of the $’s and so on. The beauty of it was that I could just cut and paste from the PDF into my document of responses to the reviewers without having to reformat and it (almost) rendered without a hitch. There were some lingering issues though with quotation marks (I hate smart quotes) and itemizing/enumerating lists.
As a recommendation, I think that the raw .tex file of the review should be uploaded instead. That will make it much easier for the authors to revise, no? I plan on doing this in the future. What do you do?
An Ergodic Walk 