Yesterday, was my birthday, and my friend Jesse and I went over to “the city” known as San Francisco. At start, I drove and she navigated (with the aid of my friend Miss GPS). We went to see city hall and the opera house, then to Japantown and ate an American lunch. The next stop on our journey was Coit Tower (nothing to do with the radio station KOIT).
Here we switched places, with Jesse driving and me navigating, and didn’t get much out of the car. We saw the palace of fine arts, and the golden gate bridge. The route took us by the Pacific shore, though we couldn’t see anything due to heavy fog. At this point we decided to head back home. We ate dinner at a nice pie restaurant and back to Jesse’s house where we saw the movie Garden State.
Pictures from the Tour
November 19th, 2007 at 23:58
Posted by
epsalon |
Leisure, US Travel, Personal, USA |
3 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
I am experimenting with some photo gallery software. I have just installed Gallery on my hosted server and uploaded my pictures from Mexico including pictures taken by the other travellers on the trip to the pyramids.
You can visit the gallery site at http://gallery.8LN.org/. I will probably upload more photos later.
You can also try an experimental map showing where some pictures were taken using GPS coordinates.
October 4th, 2007 at 06:20
Posted by
epsalon |
Mexico, Tech stuff |
no comments
Yesterday, was my birthday, and my friend Jesse and I went over to “the city” known as San Francisco. At start, I drove and she navigated (with the aid of my friend Miss GPS). We went to see city hall and the opera house, then to Japantown and ate an American lunch. The next stop on our journey was Coit Tower (nothing to do with the radio station KOIT).
