Yesterday night, I have felt an earthquake of magnitude 5.6 on the Richter scale. At the time, I was playing boardgames in Mountain View and all the tables started moving slightly and then stopped. No damage or injury was caused by the earthquake, but immediately people called their friends on cellphones to check on them and to tell them they are OK. I didn’t call because it was 4 AM in Israel. I decided I’ll blog on it when I get home. When I did get home, I started writing this post, but I fell asleep due to jet lag.
In other news, I’m giving a talk today at the group lunch as the person who was planned to talk today had to cancel. I’m giving the same talk I gave at Dagstuhl, so it should be easy for me.
October 31st, 2007 at 14:58
Posted by
epsalon |
USA |
4 comments
Yesterday I have given my planned talk at the Dagstuhl seminar about Selection Games and Deterministic Lotteries ( it’s always good to have an oxymoron in your titles). The talk went well and people were quite interested, given that many of the reviewers in the AAMAS conference where I submitted this paper were in the audience, I think my chances are good.
However, what I really wanted to talk about are the talks I gave today. Today we had a rump session, which is a special session where anyone can give 5 minute talks on any topic he or she wishes. Out of six talks, I gave two. One of the talks was about my work-in-progress regarding the manipulation of academic conferences.
The second talk of mine was humorous, and talked about manipulating the seating arrangements in Dagstuhl. Recall that researchers are seated randomly for meals in order to facilitate communication. My talk was a joke about this issue. If you are interested, take a look at the talk slides, posted exclusively on my blog. The issues of Manipulation, Bribery and Control are common considerations in the world of voting, all photos were taken during the seminar with my iPAQ camera.
Now I’m back at my brother’s house until Sunday when I am going to fly FRA-EWR-SFO and return to Stanford.
October 26th, 2007 at 18:10
Posted by
epsalon |
Funny Stuff, Academia, Germany |
2 comments
I am having a good time at Dagstuhl Seminar 07431 on Computational Issues in Social Choice. Almost all talks are very interesting and I had some good conversations with some of the people here.
On Tuesday there was an open discussion about complexity of voting. While participating in this discussion, it became clear to me that there is something very wrong with most of the existing works on complexity of manipulating elections, and only very few papers dealt with the problem in the approach I consider more correct.
[If you are not interested in details about my research, skip the next two paragraphs]
It turned out that the principal authors of two of these papers are here at the seminar. I spent the night* between Tuesday and Wednesday thinking about this problem, and on Wednesday morning I had a developed idea. After telling Vince about it, he reminded me of the general Gibbard theorem, a corollary of which removes any hope of pursuing my crypto idea.
So, I let go of the crypto direction, and instead considered voting under partial information. There was limited work done on the subject, and I had some good ideas on how to model the problem. On Wednesday after lunch I got Vince interested, and together we managed to prove two interesting impossibility results and have some very important observations regarding this problem. As it seems, this work is on the way to become a paper.
I am very happy to be able to write a joint paper with Vince Conitzer. I have known him since the first conference I attended in my PhD, which, as luck may have it, was a Dagstuhl seminar. Since then, I have met him in every conference I have attended. He has published over 40 papers, even though he has just recently finished his PhD, some of them with groundbreaking results.
* The reason I am working nights is my partial adaptation to jet lag, I go to sleep after dinner at 19:00 and wake up at about 3:00, I get enough sleep and don’t miss any talks, even though I don’t really live in the right timezone.
October 25th, 2007 at 07:45
Posted by
epsalon |
Academia, Germany |
2 comments
(that is, departure to Germany for those of you who don’t know German)
Yes, I’m flying again, this today my itinerary is SFO-IAH-AMS-FRA (that’s San Francisco, Houston, Amsterdam, Frankfurt), and then a train to Saarbruecken. The plan is to fly to Germany for a conference and visit my brother on the way. I’m going to be there for 10 days. I’m all packed (well, except my laptop) and in an hour I’ll be boarding the shuttle to the airport to start my journey.
In order to qualify for platinum I need about 3000 more miles. If I do not get any other trip funded this year, I’m considering doing a mileage run to West Palm Beach or to Boston. In the case of Boston, I might want to stay there for up to a week. Honolulu is also an option, although more expensive and with less miles.
October 18th, 2007 at 17:50
Posted by
epsalon |
Frequent Flyer, Germany |
one comment
On Monday I spent my evening playing board games at Yahoo! If you are thinking I spent my time staring at a computer screen, then you are wrong. I drove to Yahoo’s campus in Sunnyvale (about 16 minutes from my house) and joined a meeting of South Bay Boardgamers, a group that meets every Monday on Yahoo!’s campus to play board games.
Today I played Vegas Showdown and Clippers. The former has (surprisingly enough) nothing to do with gambling (but a lot to do with bidding), and the latter features ships of different colors that do not belong to any of the players. Both games were interesting and full of strategy (Clippers more so).
This is the second time I attend such a meeting (last time it was Silicon Valley Boardgamers). In both times I’ve learned new games I’ve never seen before. I’m enjoying myself very much here.
October 17th, 2007 at 08:22
Posted by
epsalon |
USA |
no comments
