It’s been a while since I’ve posted to my blog. The reason is a combination of lots of things happening (so I don’t have time or will to blog) or nothing happening (and thus nothing to blog about).
The news in short: I have missed submitting papers to two major conferences, had some medical trouble (more on the US medical system in a separate post), and my postdoc was extended for a second year.
The title of this post does not refer to a mistake by an admirer, but rather to the message my laptop displays shortly after starting up. I have to send it in for repair, and remain laptop-less for 7 business days or more. I’m writing this post from my green OLPC laptop, after I made it work with the encrypted network at home.
Speaking of home. my next visit to Israel is in two months from now. I can’t wait to be back and meet my family and friends.
February 15th, 2008 at 09:34
Posted by
epsalon |
Tech stuff, Academia |
one comment
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
Yesterday I paid and got a letter confirming that I have completed all requirements of my degree and faxed that letter to Stanford.
I am not used to not having dorms nor an office, but having a car, so I didn’t bring all that I needed. Specifically, I didn’t bring my laptop. As I had an event that evening I had to burn most of the day. I decided to go to the pool (even though I forgot to bring my pool card) and swim a bit.
After the pool I went to the CS faculty hoping to meet some friends. Which I did. Then, I joined him to the games night (I forgot to bring my games with me, but there were lots of games there). I especially liked the game Dork Tower, with all the cute illustrations, 3D tower, and interesting gameplay. So, I played it twice (with two different groups). I didn’t win, but it was fun anyway.
August 14th, 2007 at 12:21
Posted by
epsalon |
Academia, General |
one comment
Today I have finally passed my PhD exam and the final submission of the thesis. By this, I have completed all requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Now I only have to wait till the degrees commitee confirms my degree.
I woke up early (9 am) today and drove to the Technion. I picked up two remaining documents (lack of debt to the graduate students orginizaton and a certificate that I don’t owe books to the library), got some documents signed, and then went on to print three final copies of my thesis and eat some lunch.
At 12 noon the exam began. First, the examiners discussed my work among themselves with me outside the room. Then I gave a short introduction of my research, after which the examiners asked some questions regarding variations and extensions of my work. I got a chance to mention some of the issues we considered that didn’t make it into the final thesis and several directions for future research.
After the exam, I brought the three copies of the thesis in for binding, and in the meanwhile cleared my office. When the bound copies were ready I picked them up and returned all my keys to the faculty. Then, I submitted two copies of thesis to the faculty library and faxed all the documents to the graduate school secretary, while sending a copy in internal mail as backup.
Now I need to pack my luggage for my flight to Istanbul, Turkey tomorrow for the European Debating Championship.
August 2nd, 2007 at 15:15
Posted by
epsalon |
Academia |
2 comments
