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.
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.
(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.
Last week I flew back home with no luggage, with only a handbag. This was due to the fact that I left my luggage at my brother’s house in Saarbrücken. I will pick the luggage up when I return to Dagstuhl (and my brother) in October.
However, then I will be flying from the US and back, and thus will be able to carry the luggage left at my brother’s house in addition to whatever luggage I fly with to the US.
So, how do you fly handbag only? I checked in for my flights the day before and printed out an electronic boarding pass. I then used this boarding pass to go directly to the gate and board the flight without even passing the checking counters. Even my Silver status was mentioned on the boarding pass, so I got to use priority boarding as well.
In the Amsterdam - Tel Aviv leg I was assigned a whole row, but shortly before departure the flight attendants had to move two children who sat near the emergency exit to my row.
Upon landing at Ben Gurion airport, I head directly outside and wait for a shared taxi that (after three hours) brought me home.
Tonight I went to see my sister in law, Osnat Kaydar perform the lead female role in the cantata Camina Burana by Carl Orff. I am not a big classical music fan (to say the least), but I enjoyed the show very much.
It turns out that the opening and closing movement of the piece called “O Fortuna” is very well-known from movie trailers and many other uses in popular culture. Here it is for your listening enjoyment:
This piece is actually a 1936 adaptation of a medieval collection of poems by the same name. The text is almost entirely in Latin, which means I understood it just as well any other in the audience. The performance was amazing and I couldn’t get the “O fortuna” out of my head for some time afterwards.
After the concert, we went to eat at a good steak restaurant in town, and then back to sleep. I have packed my luggage, which I will leave here until I return in October. Tomorrow I’m going to fly home with a handbag only.
* By the way, as I said, this was not an opera but a cantata, but I chose to bend the title a bit.
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.
Last week I flew back home with no luggage, with only a handbag. This was due to the fact that I left my luggage at 