The next N posts will be about ISIT 2008 (which is where I am right now). Alex Dimakis will hopefully be guest blogging as well, so that’s something to look forward to!
As a quick comment — the exchange rate is very painful right now, as an American.
A. Doig, Fewer academics could be the answer to insufficient grants, Nature 453, 978 (19 June 2008). One’s first reaction is “of course!” Seems a bit too back of the envelope. Why not do a cycles of fear analysis?
Peter Greenaway takes on Da Vinci.
A scholarly article on being in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Michael Mitzenmacher notices the absurdity of the correspondence rules for the Transactions on Information Theory. Of course, they are doing away with correspondences entirely, so eventually it should be less of a problem.
Patterns for designing a reputation system — this has been a little topic of discussion in the office recently.
Apparently I am going to attend the Electrical Enginnernig & Computer Science Commencement on Saturday. Riddle me this: enginnernig is:
A. The sound an engine makes
B. The learnin’ you do in engineering
C. Fake “academic” engineering
D. All of the above
Also, the department’s official name is Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Because, you know, there’s more than one computer science.
This is why I’ve not been posting, but hopefully that will change.
Beyond the ABCs of AVCs : robust and adaptive strategies for future communication systems
Anand D. Sarwate
Advisor : Michael Gastpar
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences
University of California, Berkeley
Thursday, May 15
1-2 PM
521 Cory Hall
Cutting-edge application areas such as cognitive radio, ad-hoc networks, and sensor networks are changing the way we think about wireless services. The demand for ubiquitous communication and computing requires flexible communication protocols that can operate in a range of conditions. This thesis adopts and extends a mathematical model for these communication systems that accounts for uncertainty and time variation in link qualities. The arbitrarily varying channel (AVC) is an information theoretic channel model that has a time varying state with no statistical description. We assume the state is chosen by an adversarial jammer, reflecting the demand that our constructions work for all state sequences. In this talk I will show how resources such as secret keys, feedback, and side-information can help communication under this kind of uncertainty. I will present results on list coding and rateless coding for discrete channel models and coding with side information for continuous channels.
And of course the most important part: refreshments will be provided!
Over at Crooked Timber, guest blogger Eric Rauchway has a set of links about academic freedom. Over here at Berkeley there’s a bit of a push to get the law school to fire John Yoo, author of the infamous “torture memos,” which provided the (il)legal justification for contravening the Geneva Convention. Yoo has tenure, so firing him is quite an extreme move. The argument for firing him is that he engaged in gross professional misconduct and is a war criminal and letting him teach constitutional law is questionable given his willingness to toss out the Constitution. The other side says that as a matter of academic freedom, he should be allowed to engage in whatever political activities he likes outside the academy and that he has already been judged an excellent scholar by the standards of his discipline. Firing him would set a dangerous McCarthy-esque precedent and we should err on the side of caution.
In my view, unless Yoo is formally censured by his own peers, public pressure to fire him is just that — public pressure. Jane Kramer wrote a fascinating piece in The New Yorker about the tenure battle of Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist at Barnard who drew the ire of some fringe pro-Israel because her book, Facts on the Ground tries to eludicate the discourse (in a Foucauldian sense) of archaeology in Israel and its relationship to Zionism and the concept of the Israeli state. These groups organized a petition threatening Barnard and Columbia in order to get them to deny her tenure. There too we saw a public outcry over perceived harmful actions of an academic. In Abu El-Haj’s case, her detractors basically made up things about her, selectively and misleadingly quoted from her book, and pretty much didn’t have a leg to stand on. Yoo’s case is different — he clearly wrote some odious memos that have had horrible consequences. However, unless he is disbarred (which is possible), I tend to side with those who say finding a loophole to fire him would do more harm than good.
Somewhere, languishing on my shelf is the book Academic Freedom after September 11. I read half of it and then switched to something less dry, but maybe I should go back to it now that my interest has been re-whetted.
The title says it all. I guess the cyclical nature of trade magazines doesn’t compare to the steady income they can derive from gouging academic libraries.
There’s an discussion going on over at Crooked Timber on how many papers one should agree to review. Most of the commenters are in the social sciences, but one pointed to an essay by William F. Perrin in a recent issue of Science that suggests the following formula:
where 
Alex and I were talking this week about what the syllabus for a course along the lines of Arora’s Theorist’s Toolkit or Kelner’s An Algorithmist’s Toolkit (HT to Lav for the link on my last post on this topic). I think developing a course along these lines with interchangeable 2-4 lecture “modules” would be a great thing in general. Modular design is appealing from an engineering perspective (although, as my advisor might say, separation of design is in general suboptimal). The question is, what would a good set of topics be? Here’s a partial set:
If any readers have ideas for additional topics, please leave a comment.
The point of such a course would be to give students some exposure to analysis and modeling techniques and more importantly a set of references so they could learn more if they need to. It’s like having a kind of cultural literacy to read systems EE papers. Of course, if you’re going to go and study LDPC codes, the brief introduction to message passing wouldn’t be enough, but if you want to understand the issues around BP decoding, the 3 lectures may be sufficient for you to follow what is going on. The list above has some items that are too narrow and some that are too broad. There are a lot of different tools out there, and some exposure to what they are used for would be useful, especially for graduate students at schools which don’t have an extremely diverse seminar series.
I realize this is a bit rambling.
One thing that I’ve done for the last few years is act as an associate reviewer for graduate applications for our department. Basically this means I can chip in my 2 cents on applications during the initial review. I’ve already written about my shock at the kinds of letters people write (although I was certainly more naive then). One thing that I’ve come to realize over the years is that it is possible to write a full, good letter for someone whom you don’t know too well that both indicates the basis on which you can evaluate them (e.g. took your class and got an A, did research with your grad student, or did research with you) and is not ambiguous due to “conspicuous omission.” Writing a recommendation letter is an art — if you could just talk to the committee it would be a lot easier, but with N-hundred applicants of whom you admit at most 4 N, the written word is most of what they have to go on.
I often wonder about the total statistics of people who apply to graduate school, especially domestic students who apply to graduate school. At a state school like Berkeley there is a policy to encourage the admission of US citizens and permanent residents (a good thing, in my opinion). But how many of domestic students are interested in graduate programs? Are there many potential strong candidates who don’t even consider a career in graduate school? My gut feeling is that yes, there are many graduates who would benefit from and enjoy some exposure to engineering research at the graduate level who never even consider it. But that’s just a gut sense, which may be off.
The whole process raises a lot of big questions, ranging from “what is the purpose of the graduate program?” to “what can we do at the undergraduate level to bolster interest in postgraduate research?” to “where should the future of academic research in engineering go?” None of these has an answer, and I think that succinct answers are impossible unless you subscribe to some inflexible dogma. But they’re good to keep in the back of my head, I think, especially since I am (hopefully) looking towards a future in the academy.
Dear Web of Science,
When one is doing a citation search and actually looking at the papers that are turned up, having your search engine decide your session times out after 5 minutes is pretty inconvenient, especially since it means starting the whole search process over again each time. Saying “oh you can save a search” is pretty ridiculous too, since it requires your little cookies to infest my system.
Sincerely yours,
A Frustrated Graduate Student
An Ergodic Walk 