Small Food

I am away for a few days in Israel. Here are two disconnected thoughts. Do animals (not humans) have the concept of a dessert? I can imagine a Tiger after some nice rare meat but before some water, smacking its lips and looking around for something sweet and small. What does sushi look like that will fit into a toddler's palm?

Distractions: cartoon, map and video

I am coming out of a hectic season of refereeing. So, I need some distraction: Cartoon on the left. Thank you NYer. Interactive map of population migration in US. Thank you, Forbes. Guggenheim Museum solicits creative videos. Deadline July 31. Thank you, YouTube.

Invited Talks, Take 2

Our community invites researchers to give prestigious talks. In a few recent instances, there have been discussions: should we invite a person when they have given invited before, in the same venue, or equivalent venue elsewhere? In each instance people involved know there are exceptions, so I am not talking about these instances, but the larger context, that we as a community seem to not want to repeat invited speakers. Why? May be we need to spread the honor of these invitations across the field, but function should triumph: researchers are polymaths capable of leadership in 2 or more areas, and capable of having more than one set of important things to say.

How to kill an artist

Two examples:

• A little girl, standing in the Farmer's Market on a Sunday morning, proceeds to sketch the fruit stand on her drawing pad. Her mom, leans over, looks at the sketch says, " That is great, Sweetie, why dont you label the fruits?", thereby killing the artist, making her a draftsman.
  
• A woman in comfortable jeans settles in to take a picture, squinting, adjusting, waiting for the rare moment, when a passerby says helpfully, "You want a picture with you in it?", thereby reducing the artist to a tourist.
  

EC & WSA

I went underground for past two weeks, preparing for my tutorial on ad exchanges at EC. I will put the slides online as soon as I write up some of the new results, but meanwhile the older papers are here. There were like 70+ people in the audience Monday morning. In the first half, I described my AdX model. It is a block diagram with a sequence of 7 operations, and immediately I knew the audience just wanted to get past it and see theorems/results. But diagrams like that hide the nuances of the many decisions one makes in building a system and I took some time to point out to the audience some of these decisions. Then the audience got lively and started poking at the design and after a prolonged back-and-forth, I felt comfortable that the audience had an appreciation for the model and the underlying system. The second half was mainly research results, some old, some new. Tuomas Sandholm, David Parkes and others during after the tutorial had many questions.

In the afternoon on Monday, Aranyak and Vahab spoke about ad allocation problems. These are variants of bipartite matching problems from online to budgeted, stochastic or whatever. Aranyak spoke about online Adwords problem and discussed throttling and quality scores which are difficult areas to theorize, but with deliberate speak, Aranyak managed it. (Puzzle: algorithms to maximize avg value of items in the knapsack.) In a conflict of styles, Vahab who went next, took bigger bites and larger chunks of problems, more focused on social network and display ads problems.

Tuesday was the workshop on sponsored search auctions. Michael Ostrovsky spoke about setting reserve prices in Yahoo!. The discussion for or against reserve prices has swung around a few times, and Michael's work showed, via live experiments at Yahoo! that revenue can be optimized by tweaking reserve prices. He claimed 9-digit $s improvement and there was a lot of debate about this among the audience later. Preston McAfee spoke about Yahoo! as a large publisher network that had to decide how to split its ad impression among various sold contracts as well as when to go to an ad exchange for the spot market. This was the talk I was looking forward to most since it was closest to my interest, and Preston has a good sense of humor ("it is bad when the audience not only looks at the watch, but starts shaking it in disbelief"). Preston basically chose to talk about his paper on representative allocations; many questions still linger in audiences' mind about whether this is a suitable allocation, is it really appropriate to price them by spot market outcome and others (that came up during my tutorial when I discussed this paper), but Preston said Yahoo! uses these ideas.

Tim is always a pleasure to listen: he spoke about all auctions that have VCG equilibriums for sponsored search. John Hegeman gave one of the most interesting talks in the workshop on ad auctions at facebook, including their choice of VCG (not GSP). Susan Athey gave an insightful talk on detailed modeling and understanding sponsored search including price elasticity.

Some important discussions:

• Moshe Tennenholtz, who has been on all sides of the aisle from academia to startups and corporate labs, is a real thinker. Among other things we discussed: how much research/academia does Apple, the company of innovation as most would boast, support?
  
• Chris Dellarocas who has done some very interesting work with reputation mechanisms, asked what parts of sponsored search research could (should) Academia contribute, and is not in the realm of only corporate research.
  

EC + STOC + CCC + Wkshps: collision of many overlapping communities. I could not sample all of the fare.

Women or Men in Research

There is ongoing effort in the CS research world to provide women researchers with mentors, examples of life/work balance, contacts within women peers, and so on. Examples: Women in Theory CS, Grace Hopper, etc. Away from computing, in liberal arts and elsewhere, there is longer history of trying to identify factors that contribute to disparity between genders in research career, and a "language" to discuss them.

What drives me in whatever I do is a latent sense and allure of heroism, I dont mean having heros one looks upto or the overused notion of hero in network television, but that one has a adrenaline sense of accomplishing something like hitting one out of the park, and one knows at any moment in life how close to it you are or how far. What I would love to hear about is such heroic deeds women tell themselves.

Braid Run

I made a run to get my hair braided, a bicycle run of 15+ miles. To go unkempt and return with beaded braids.