Self III

Continuing the theme of Self II:

Yesterday, as I left my building, I ran into an uniformed NY sanitation worker who was rifling through the garbage from my building. I asked him, "Is something wrong?"  He looks up from the black garbage and asks, "Are you the Super?". This is the most natural mapping of (Me -> Role) among strangers in  Tribeca. And when I say, No, he asks incredulously, "Do you live here?". And I was wearing my best clothes. :)

Algorithm and Activism

There is a lot more to algorithms and activism, but for now, take a listen to this page of Adela Wagner and her simple but powerful work.

Data Science and Game Theory Workshop

Interesting:

Third Workshop on Algorithmic Game Theory and Data Science, to be held June 26, 2017 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From the call:

Computer systems have become the primary mediator of social and economic interactions, enabling transactions at ever-increasing scale. Mechanism design when done on a large scale needs to be a data-driven enterprise. It seeks to optimize some objective with respect to a huge underlying population that the mechanism designer does not have direct access to. Instead, the mechanism designer typically will have access to sampled behavior from that population (e.g. bid histories, or purchase decisions). This means that, on the one hand, mechanism designers will need to bring to bear data-driven methodology from statistical learning theory, econometrics, and revealed preference theory. On the other hand, strategic settings pose new challenges in data science, and approaches for learning and inference need to be adapted to account for strategization. The goal of this workshop is to frame the agenda for research at the interface of algorithms, game theory, and data science.

Algorithms in the Field: The PI Meeting

Algorithms in the Field is a program of Algorithms + Other CS researchers working jointly "in the field" of problems. Here is a history of development of this program. Recently I attended the PI meeting for this NSF program:

• Nearly all the talks were interesting, genuinely targeting the middle ground. They didnt go into the rabbit holes of describing the minute technical improvements in approximation ratios or the 6 different data sets they had to cull to compare 4 different algorithms. Each speaker made an effort to cover the field area (special hardware like memristors, SDNs, wireless receivers etc) and also provide an overview of the algorithmic challenges. This was refreshing. 
• There were some very interesting examples of the joint research: Ashish Goel spoke about societal decision making and examples such as budget decisions, viewed as collaborative convex programs; Piotr Indyk, ever-wise with his choices, spoke about the wireless transmitter/receiver setting for most part of his talk, really communicating the nature of the "field" before quickly connecting it to sparse Fourier estimation problems; Vyas Sekar spoke about formulating SDN routing policies using path constraints and posed some open problems, which Bobby Kleinberg who went just after, proceeded to solve at least partially, with his work. This shows (a) Algorithms in the Field research can happen in real time and (b) Dont speak before Bobby and pose open problems. 

ps: Sucheta Soundarajan and Martin Farach-Colton organized the meeting and did an excellent call to include graduate students/postdocs in the invite, graduate students/postdocs being the glue between professors and conduits for communication. 

Documenta 12--14

I think there is a quote that, "I have never seen a good Rothko, but I have seen a great roomful of Rothkos". I dont know who said it, but I am going to attribute it to Assaf Naor who reminded me of this phenomenon a while ago. Anyway, DC has a roomful (or two) of Rothkos.

Likewise, Documenta is an art show (Not Art Basel, but Art Kassel!), it may be good by itself, but great seen in mental juxtaposition. Here are the New York Times reviews of  Documenta 12 from 2007, 13 from 2012 and 14 from 2017 which has just started.