Author Archives: wilson.mark.c

Moshe Vardi on CS conference talks

In CACM, Moshe Vardi opines that conference talks must be improved by force, in order to justify even having a physical conference. I have long shared this opinion, although the CS talks I have heard seem better overall than the ones I recall hearing in mathematics conferences. Lance Fortnow thinks conferences as a means of scoring publication credit must give way to their core function of promoting discussion and dissemination, while journals assume the other function. I definitely agree with this.

Southern Hemisphere Summer Scholarships

(From University of Auckland science faculty . Anyone seriously interested in working with me should contact me directly. I have several ideas available).

The Faculty has the opportunity to access 100 Summer Scholarships funded by the university (as opposed to Faculty funds) for special categories of students–this includes international students. The Faculty management team has agreed that we should use our recent Northern Hemisphere summer scholarship experience to try to win up to 20 of these scholarships for international students to come over the NZ summer.

The terms of the scholarships will be as for the normal Summer Scholarship: targeting final year undergraduate students; $5000, plus $1000 available for expenses to the host. No costs to the hosting Department or supervising academic are incurred. The student is responsible for all fares, accommodation, etc. Scholarship to be paid as $3500 on arrival, $1500 on presentation of final report. We are preparing an advertising poster for (southern hemisphere) universities now.

Our Northern Hemisphere scholarship experience showed that these scholarships are extremely useful for academics wishing to enhance links with overseas groups, by providing funding for a student from a collaborating group to come to New Zealand for a short period.

AAMAS 2012

It looks as though I will be a (junior) PC member (= referee/reviewer).

Details:

AAMAS will be co-located with EC next year, June 4-8, 2012, Valencia, Spain.  Among other topics the CFP includes

4. Social choice theory
5. Voting protocols

Electronic Abstract Submission: October 7, 2011 (11:59 PM HST)
Full Paper Submission: October 12, 2011 (11:59 PM HST)

more info at
http://aamas2012.webs.upv.es

Call for papers CATS 2012

I am a PC member for the first time.

—

Call for Papers

CATS 2012 — Computing: The Australasian Theory Symposium
Melbourne, Australia, January 30-February 2, 2012
http://cats.it.usyd.edu.au/

The 18th Computing: The Australasian Theory Symposium (CATS) will be
held in Melbourne, Australia, in January/February 2012. CATS is an
annual conference held in the Australia-New Zealand region, dedicated
to theoretical computer science.

Authors are invited to submit papers that present original and
unpublished research on topics related to theoretical aspects of
computer science, including (but not limited to):
– algorithms and data structures
– algorithmic game theory
– combinatorial optimization
– computability
– computational complexity theory
– computational geometry
– graph theory and combinatorics
– parallel and distributed algorithms
– logic and type systems
– program derivation, analysis, and verification
– theory of programming languages

Important dates:
– Paper submission deadline: Monday 15 August, 2011
– Acceptance notification: Monday 10 October, 2011
– Final version due: Monday 7 November, 2011
– Conference dates: Monday 30 January – Thursday 2 February, 2012

The proceedings of this event will be published by the Australian
Computer Society (ACS) in the CRPIT Series (http://crpit.com/), and
will also appear in the ACM digital library. CATS 2012 is part of the
Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW), an international annual
conference event, supported by the Computing Research and Education
Association (CORE) in Australia. ACSW 2012 is hosted by RMIT
University in Melbourne, Australia.

For more information please visit http://cats.it.usyd.edu.au/
Contact: Julian Mestre <cats2012@easychair.org>

The logic of journalism?

From BBC:

Intelligence tests are as much a measure of motivation as they are of mental ability, says research from the US.

Researchers from Pennsylvania found that a high IQ score required both high intelligence and high motivation but a low IQ score could be the result of a lack of either factor.

It looks like “P implies A and B” BUT “not A or not B implies not P”. This seems a strange way to write a news story, since the second statement is logically equivalent to the first.

Another interpretation is that the event “low IQ score” is not the complement of  the event “high IQ score”. This gives a little more content: “non-high” is implied a priori by lack of either factor, but in fact “low” is implied.

Of course “could” might mean that “not A and not B is not inconsistent with not P”, but that would be very much less newsworthy. Perhaps we need a standard language for journalists to deal with such issues.

Christopher Hitchens by Martin Amis

I have conflicting feelings about the other side of the “two cultures” divide. Often the relentless verbiage used to disguise the trite opinions irritates me – why can’t they just use evidence, and write systematically so that people can understand, eschewing the verbal pyrotechnics? However, the beauty sometimes does attract me despite such misgivings.

Martin Amis has written a kind of obituary for Christopher Hitchens, who is not yet dead, but expected to be so soon. Not only is it very interesting and attractively written, it is clearly motivated by real feelings of friendship.