DIMACS Workshop on Differential Privacy

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Via Kamalika, I head about the DIMACS Workshop on differential privacy at the end of October:

DIMACS Workshop on Differential Privacy across Computer Science
October 24-26, 2012
(immediately after FOCS 2012)

Call for Abstracts — Short Presentations

The upcoming DIMACS workshop on differential privacy will feature invited talks by experts from a range of areas in computer science as well as short talks (5 to 10 minutes) by participants.

Participants interested in giving a short presentation should send an email to asmith+dimacs@psu.edu containing a proposed talk title, abstract, and the speaker’s name and affiliation. We will try to
accommodate as many speakers as possible, but

a) requests received before October 1 will get full consideration
b) priority will be given to junior researchers, so students and postdocs should indicate their status in the email.

More information about the workshop:

The last few years have seen an explosion of results concerning differential privacy across many distinct but overlapping communities in computer science: Theoretical Computer Science, Databases, Programming Languages, Machine Learning, Data Mining, Security, and Cryptography. Each of these different areas has different priorities and techniques, and despite very similar interests, motivations, and choice of problems, it has become difficult to keep track of this large literature across so many different venues. The purpose of this workshop is to bring researchers in differential privacy across all of these communities together under one roof to discuss recent results and synchronize our understanding of the field. The first day of the workshop will include tutorials, representing a broad cross-section of research across fields. The remaining days will be devoted to talks on the exciting recent results in differential privacy across communities, discussion and formation of interesting open problems, and directions for potential inter-community collaborations.

The workshop is being organized by Aaron Roth (blog) and Adam Smith (blog).

Juggling, (a)synchrony, and queues

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Research often takes twisty little paths, and as the result of a recent attempt to gain understanding about a problem I was trying to understand the difference between the following two systems with k balls and n (ordered) bins:

  1. Synchronous: take all of the top balls in each bin and reassign them randomly and uniformly to the bottoms of the bins.
  2. Asynchronous: pick a random bin, take the top ball in that bin, and reassign it randomly and uniformly to the bottom of a bin.

These processes sound a bit similar, right? The first one is a batch version of the second one. Sort of. We can think of this as modeling customers (balls) in queues (bins) or balls being juggled by n hands (bins).

Each of these processes can be modeled as a Markov chain on the vector of bin occupation numbers. For example, for 3 balls and 3 bins we have configurations that look like (3,0,0) and its permutations, (2,1,0) and its permutations, and (1,1,1) for a total of 10 states. If you look at the two Markov chains, they are different, and it turns out they have different stationary distributions, even. Why is that? The asynchronous chain is reversible and all transitions are symmetric. The synchronous one is not reversible.

One question is if there is a limiting sense in which these are similar — can the synchronous batch-recirculating scheme be approximated by the asynchronous version if we let n or k get very large?

Postdoc Announcement : wireless network information theory

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Salman Avestimehr has a postdoc position open in his group at Cornell. He says it is quite flexible (not tied to a very specific topic) and is broadly in the area of wireless network information theory. Current students and postdocs should contact Salman at avestimehr [at] ece.cornell.edu for more information.

Irving S. Reed

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USC announced today: “Professor Irving S. Reed passed away this morning, September 11, 2012, at the age of 88.  Professor Reed was a member of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering faculty from 1963 until his retirement in 1993 as Powell Chair of Engineering Emeritus.”

Prof. Reed had made significant contributions in radar design theory, programming languages and, of course, coding theory.  Reed-Muller and Reed-Solomon codes have been incredibly influential in electrical engineering, theoretical computer science and mathematics.

Reed-Solomon codes are used to protect data in countless applications including CDs, DVDs, DSL and RAID. They were also used to encode the digital images sent back by space probes like the Voyager. RS codes are my favorite example of something practically useful and at the same time theoretically deep.

The announcement mentions: “Millions of people today enjoy the benefits of Reed’s many inventions and contributions of technology, without being aware of their remarkable benefactor.”

What we want are young fresh faces

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Via SEK I read about a job ad at Colorado State which specifies that applicants should have received their PhD from 2010 onwards. Sorry 2009-ers, you’re not eligible.

According to the Colorado State jobs site:

Colorado State University does not discriminate on the basis of race, age, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex, gender, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression. Colorado State University is an equal opportunity/equal access/affirmative action employer fully committed to achieving a diverse workforce and complies with all Federal and Colorado State laws, regulations, and executive orders regarding non-discrimination and affirmative action. The Office of Equal Opportunity is located in 101 Student Services.

Because I was interested, I called the Office of Equal Opportunity at (970) 491-5836 to see if their office had vetted the ad and whether or not requiring a post-2010 PhD constituted age discrimination. This is what they told me, not specifically about this position, but in general about ads of this type:

  • Fort Collins is a nice place to live and they get lots of people who apply to jobs who have more experience (even at the associate level, so they claim). They want to make it very clear that those people are not welcome to apply.
  • It’s a salary thing where they don’t want to pay for the experience of someone with a PhD pre-2010.
  • They want to be “very clear about what they are looking for” (sounds ominous!)
  • This is a way of cutting down on the number of applications they have to read. Sure they may lose out on some qualified candidates. Implicit in this is that it’s an employer’s market out there.

All in all, this is not a sanguine situation for job applicants. I bet it would be nice if Michael Bérubé could weigh in on this in his capacity as MLA President.

Linkage

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I’m a big fan of 99% Invisible, a podcast about design and architecture and… stuff. They rebroadcast a longer piece about U.N. Plaza in San Francisco, and it’s fascinating. I was living in Berkeley at the time much of this went down, and I was semi-unaware of it.

A post from the new desi blog, Brown Town, about Freddie Mercury.

My cousin Supriya has e-books in Hindi, Marathi, and Gujarati available. You know, for kids!

My very dear (but not so near) friend Charlotte has a new blog : Mary Magdalene Girl in which she will discuss gender and her un-diasporaing (not a word) by moving to Ireland.

Photos of yakuza. Unrelatedly, construction worker fashion in Japan.

Approaches to the research statement

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It’s job season again and I am revising my research statement. I was pretty happy with the last iteration of it, but as things change I might need to find a new story for my life. As I get farther along, it has become a bit harder to cram all of the things I’ve worked on into a single consistent story. There are even some grad students I know who have worked on several distinct things and they probably have the same problem. There’s a tension in the research statement between coming up with a coherent story and accurately representing your work. There are a few generic ways of handling this, it seems.

The omnibus. You can write many mini-stories, one about each of the major projects, and then have a section for “miscellaneous other papers.” This approach eschews the overarching framework idea and instead just goes for local internal consistency.

The proposal. Instead of talking about all of your work (or mentioning it), you propose one research direction and give short shrift to the rest. This has the advantage of letting you write more fully about one topic and provide sufficient context and exciting new research directions, but then again you’re mis-representing the actual balance of your research interests.

The tractatus. You develop some principles or philosophical underpinnings for your work and then try to connect everything you’ve done to these and explain your future work ideas as further developing these themes. This approach goes for consistency above all else. The advantage is coherence, and the disadvantage is that some projects may have to get strong-armed into it.

I am sure there are more varieties out there, but on the whole the research statement is a weird document — part description, part proposal. You can’t make it only about your existing work because that’s looking to the past, but you can’t make it a proposal because the reader is actually trying to learn what you are interested in.