I’m a little dismayed at SODA being outside of North America.  As a graduate student I would have probably been excited in my responsibility-free state.  But now I’m thinking “How much is this going to cost? How can I afford to miss what will probably end up being a full week of teaching?  I’m going to go all that way to just go to the conference and not be able to travel? How are our grossly underfunded faculty and grad students going to afford to go?  Would I justify going if I don’t have a paper?”

SODA is my favourite conference.  And there’s no other conference like it in North America.  Going without it for a year would result in some withdrawal.

I’ve been thinking about what I like about conferences. Of course I appreciate meeting wih friends and colleagues – working on new and old problems. I do enjoy the talks too. But for me, the 20 talk is problematic. I can only imagine two possible uses of 20 minutes: an advertisement to go read the paper, to educate people of the definition of the problem/topic/solution statement, or to actually go into technical details.

For topics that are directly in my area, 20 minutes are too short to delve into any technical details for which I would have questions. Nor do I need an advertisement. I am probably already aware of the paper (thanks archiv and its users) and perhaps already read the paper.

For topics not in my area 20 minutes is probably too long for an advertisment and too short for me to absorb definitions in order to appreciate any technical content.

That said, I miss theory seminars. I am the only traditional TCS person at OSU and am too far from theory strongholds to attend a theory seminar. I would love to get that content from a conference. The plenary talks provide a little of that, but they are not usually on recent results of a technical nature (nor would I want that to change).

What I propose is having two types of talks – short 10-15 minute “advertisements” and long 45-60 minute seminar style talks. The committee could choose the best results to give longer slots to. Perhaps (and probably controversially) longer slots could be biased towards better speakers.

Someone at the party suggested that next year they hold a Yankee swap version where, rather than simply draw and donate, people may later “steal” causes by agreeing to donate more than the current donor.  However, I thought this might be unfair to those attending who happen to be unemployed or wracking up student debt.  I was wondering if there is an algorithmic-game-theory person out there who could come up with a way to deal with this that might meet the following conditions:

• the total amount donated is maximized (or at least the price of anarchy is bounded)
• each person ends up matched to a cause (that is not their own)
• each person can cap their donation according to their means
• one’s cap does not hinder the ability to steal a cause
• the game doesn’t take forever and the rules are simple enough for a smart crowd to understand

I suppose one could hide everything and have causes bid on like Google AdWords, but I think a game of stealing in the spirit of Christmas would be more fun.

I gave a version of my talk on constrained knapsack problems (joint work with Brent Heeringa and Gordon Wilfong).  It was a lot of fun!  The discrete math crowd was fun and patiently sat through my discussions of applications and algorithms and approximations until I finally got to the meat of the talk.  I don’t normally attend discrete math events, but this was a great way to meet people in the area who are graph-minded that I otherwise might not meet.  I also hope that all their best undergraduates will be pointed my way for grad school (hint hint hint).

Louis Deaett (University of Victoria) gave a talk on a (orthogonal) generalization of graph colouring to vector colours where one must assign linearly independent vectors to adjacent vertices while minimizing the dimension of the vectors.  This is certainly not something I had ever dreamt of before.  Only after having let the problem stew for a couple of days am I wondering if a notion can be (or already has been) used in the frequency assignment problem.  Rather than a node transmitting over one frequency, transmit over several; use independence to overcome interference.

Omer Angel (University of British Columbia) spoke on graphs that look the same everywhere from a local perspective.  Given a local pattern centred at a vertex, what kind of graph is such that every vertex has the same local pattern?  Can the graph be finite? Must it be infinite?  For example, if the local pattern is a degree-2 star, then the graph could be a cycle or an infinite path – there is no way of telling which it is.  Certainly, I thought, you could never tell if it is finite or infinite.  Not true.

So, thank you Nancy Ann Neudauer for inviting me, Luis Goddyn for arranging the superb location, and Rob Beezer for quickly correcting that I am a proud beaver, not a duck.

* The host institution provides a room and math-fuel (coffee).

In the agonizing months** between interview and job offer at Oregon State University, I gave a lot of thought to “what do I do if I don’t get an academic job?”  I had the option of staying on as a postdoc through summer 2010 – an option that made me cringe.  ”If I stay as a postdoc and next year’s market is terrible and then take another postdoc … where does the cycle end?”

I have many friends in the biosciences where two 3+ year postdocs is the norm.  One has started a blog devoted to advocacy for postdocs; a recent post encourages the cycle of postdocing to end.  I worry that CS could “get worse” and end up like bio.  I hope that the competition offered by industry will help keep the postdocking length down.  But Ph.D. enrollment is going up – where are these students supposed to go?  Does anyone know if there are stats on the average postdoc length in computer science?

* I officially propose postdocking as the verbal of postdoc much like trafficking to traffic.
** Days became months due to budget hoop-jumping.

I broke a lot of standard rules in giving this job talk.  First and foremost, I did not practice it.  *gasp*  Practice would have removed a lot of my “um”s and “uh”s.  In my defence, when I practice a talk too much, I find it gets stale.  However, practicing it once from start-to-finish would have been a good idea.  In watching this talk (as painful as it is), I think the best thing I could have done was to tape myself once.

Second, I climbed on a chair.  I was offered a laser pointer, but I hate laser pointers.  They are hard to keep steady and the point is very small and hard to see for the audience.  I find it about as useful as the speaker pointing to their laptop screen while they give a presentation.  So, at some point I wanted to point at something that too high for me, so I climbed on a chair.

Another minor thing that I wish I would get in the habit of doing is repeating an asked question. Taking two seconds to summarize the question both confirms that you are answering the intended question and allows the entire audience to hear both the question and the answer.

The slides for the talk are available for Keynote and Powerpoint here.

For the unenlightened, the smart grid is the idea of changing the price structure of electricity as well as the appliances that use electricity to manage congestion.  As we move toward more electricity use (i.e. from gas-powered cars, to electricity-powered cars) and electricity generated from renewable and time-constrained resources, congestion could cause more frequent brown-outs than we’ve seen.  Some concrete examples of “smart” include:

• Appliances equipped to decide when it is best to run: refrigerators that turn off and on to minimize draw on the grid during high-demand hours, dishwashers that wait for low demand hours to run.
• Batteries equipped to charge by use time: if you arrive home from work in your car (which I’ve been told is possible, but have yet to experience), and plug your electric powered car in along with everyone else who works 9-5, but you don’t need your car again until 6 AM, then the battery will decide to not charge until the middle of the night, perhaps according to some neighbourhood schedule.
• Batteries used as storage devices on the grid: if you don’t use your car during the week because you do walk or bike or bus to work (congratulations), then the grid could use the battery as a storage device on the grid, charging during low-demand hours and discharging during high-demand.  (Of course, if you don’t need a car during the week, consider not owning a car.  Renting a car almost every weekend is often cheaper than owning a car.)

Of course, for such a system to work, there are significant engineering (after all, even my dishwasher’s simple “delay-start” timer doesn’t work), design and optimization challenges.  The market will become much more complex – will every appliance be considered a player on the market?  Sheesh!  Currently for the (much simpler, I imagine) pricing problems, the cost functions are linearized, which apparently isn’t a great approximation – essentially treating AC current as DC current.  In a system that is worth $10^12/year, a 1% savings is huge news.

I worry though … what if my laptop tells me I can’t write an email at 2AM because I woke up in the middle of the night wracked with algorithmic thoughts because my battery has been discharged so my neighbour can run their washing machine.

In algorithms, there have been a lot of postdoc positions advertising on the two main email lists, TheoryNT and dmanet.  In my experience, many of the positions are in Europe.  I’ve found that a lot of postdoc’s get their position by word of mouth.

I think, by far, the best thing is to get a postdoctoral fellowship.  Freedom!  It seems NSF doesn’t have a fellowship program for people in computer science.  (Is that actually true?) But I have seen (and ignored, as I am not an American citizen) plenty of postdoc fellowship programs for Americans.  If you aren’t American, try your home country.  NSERC has great fellowships for Canadians that you can take out of the country if you got your Ph.D. in Canada and is tax-free if you take it to McGill.  The short of it is, if you have a fellowship you have the academic freedom to study what you want to study.  You can work with whoever you want, whether or not they have a research grant to pay a postdoc.

I’ve also thought that if you plan far enough in advance you could contact someone you really want to work with and convince them to write a grant with your help that includes funding for a postdoc.  Any thoughts of whether that would work?  I know NSF now asks for an “advising plan” when requesting funds for a postdoc salary.  Would having the potential postdoc involved in the writing process help?

And there are schools and departments that have their own postdoc program – I think U. Penn and U. Toronto do.

Any other suggestions?

Since the time is going by so quickly, I realize the need to consider more systematically what should be taught in this course. As you might know, I am the only algorithms/TCS person in the department (who isn’t emeritus) and so I will likely be able to quite easily affect the graduate curriculum.  I’m impressed by the amount of theory that the CS Ph.D. students are required to take here (at least in comparison to Brown, a theory-heavy school).  Each student must take the (10-week long) courses called “Algorithms and Data Structures” and “Theory of Computation and Formal Languages”.  Beyond that, there are several other optional algorithms and complexity courses offered every second year.

There has been some discussion on My Biased Coin on what every theory Ph.D. student should know. My question is: given 20 weeks of class time (three 50 minute lectures a week), what topics in TCS should every CS Ph.D. student know?

This blog will likely be YATB (yet another theory blog) – hopefully I will have something new and interesting to say.  I’d been subscribing to the Theory of Computing Blog Aggregator for some time now (a tool I am very thankful for), but of the 20 or so blogs it contains, Sorelle Friedler’s is the only one by a woman.  If we want to balance the gender inequity in our field, we need to get more women into the system.  If we raise the profile of the women already in TCS (or CS or math or engineering), then perhaps it will seem more desirable to undecided female high school and undergraduate students.

I can’t remember the reference, but someone pointed out on a TCS blog that a particular program committee was rife with TCS bloggers, so yes, my motivation is also selfish.  I am hoping that this blog will gain me exposure, particularly in TCS, and garner me advice.  After all, I’m on my own out here.  Already it feels less lonely.

So I’m not sure what I will blog about.  It will likely be a mix of technical posts and posts about my professional life.  I will feed the TCS-related posts to the ToC blog aggregator.