To Eat Turkey and Rest

(Title sounds better in Hebrew)

Today is the 4th Thursday of November, which means Thanksgiving Day is celebrated throughout the United States. This is the day where Americans celebrate their conquest over the native Americans ("Indians"). This is the most family-inclined of all US vacations, and most people use this holiday to meet with their families and eat together, similar to the Jewish Passover.

As a tribute to this togetherness, the family I live with have invited me to join their Thanksgiving celebrations. I got to meet many members of their family in their house in Palo Alto. They have invited me for dinner as well, but I have already booked dinner at Stanford.

The Stanford dinner included Turkey and mashed potatoes. I met there someone I have met while walking "the dish" on one of my first days here.

Tomorrow is Black Friday. While in most cultures calling a day "Black" implies a negative context, Black Friday actually celebrates the most American tradition of them all: Shopping. The use of the word "black" comes from the fact that retailers start making profit, and thus are "in the black" after this day. It turns out that the day after Thanksgiving marks the start of the US Winter Holiday Season, and specifically the shopping season before Christmas. Many retailers have sales on this day, and unless your are shopping-crazed it's advised that you stay home, which is exactly what I plan to do.

To the city

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

Happy Birthday to me!

November 18th is my birthday, which is tomorrow. My plans for my birthday is to go with my friend to San Francisco and act like tourists. Specifically, we plan to take the 49 mile scenic drive all around the city. If you want to greet me, comment here, or use the info in the about page.

Univarsity

Americans love sport. They simply define it differently than the rest of the world. According to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, sport is defined as:

Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively.

In American popular culture however, the idea of physical activity does not really exist. For most Americans, sports are somet/hing you watch not something you do.

This relates to the true aim of US colleges and universities: To house sports teams for people to watch. Research is what they do behind people's backs when they're busy watching sports.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, yesterday I decided to go to the pool I heard was open at Stanford. I looked through Stanford's athletics website and found no relevant information. You see, the athletics website is for people who want to watch sports. So, there is information about events and how to buy tickets. Even when you do locate the page about the pool (or "aquatic center") there is no information about using the pool. Why would there? Athletic facilities are for varsity athletes and people coming to see them.

Anyway, after finding the much more obscure site for Stanford recreation and wellness, I found the very limited opening hours of the pool, and headed there yesterday afternoon. What a mistake I have made. Stanford was full of cars, all parking lots in the north side of the campus were full, a high school located just off campus sold parking for $10. All this on a Saturday. Why? Because there was a football game, and when I say football, I mean the strange American sport similar to rugby.

So, I decided to try again today (Sunday). I arrived and parked my car and headed at first in the wrong direction. It seems Stanford has stadiums for many strange sports, and they are all used by the few select athletes who compete in that sport. Same goes for the aquatic center. It is clear that is was designed for training and competition, and not for recreational use. One pool is surrounded by audience seating and the only open pool is also designed for competition. It is deep almost all way across, with no shelf in the deeper end, and with ladders only in the shallow end. On the other hand, there are jump boards all around the pool and a big scoreboard. There is no clock anywhere around the pool, but there are many timers all around the pool.

So, after a few laps of swimming, I head back home. I'm not sure if I'd be returning there any time soon.

Quake 5.6

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.

My talks at Dagstuhl

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.

A paper with Vince

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.