University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) researchers have developed the Koopman Mode Analysis (KMA), an algorithm they say can predict future massive instabilities in the power grid and make power outages a thing of the past.
Author: Michael
Modern Chairs
There is an interesting article about the role of Chairs in the December issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The position of a modern Chair includes, beside the standard academic duties, new duties that traditionally belonged to middle management: coordinating assessments and accreditations, fund raising, contacts with industry, etc.
Chairs are put in this difficult position where they are held accountable for documenting that their programs are succeeding, that their faculty are succeeding, and that they’re staying in budget,” says Mr. Buller, author of several books on academic administration. “We’re seeing a professionalization of higher-education administration—and that’s not such a bad thing. Because the faculty position itself has changed and because we have an accountability culture in higher education, you need people who have managerial training to serve as chair.
The article can be found here:
Tenure-track position in Theoretical Computer Science
The School of Computer Science and Communication at KTH Royal Institute of Technology invites applications for an assistant professorship in theoretical computer science.
STEM graduate shortage? Computer science is where the future jobs are
This is an article written for The Seattle Times by Edward D. Lazowska, an alumnus of McMaster University; here is one excerpt, and see below for the rest of the article:
… nationwide there is a well-documented shortage of graduates in computer science. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 70 percent of all new jobs across all STEM fields during this decade, across engineering, the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the social sciences, will be in computer science. More than three-quarters of a million new jobs. The field is booming.
Ariel Fernández Ph.D.
My Ph.D. student, Ariel Fernández, has successfully defended his thesis on June 10, 2013: Formalizing Combinatorial Matrix Theory.
The results of that thesis were presented at two conferences:
- Ariel Fernández and Michael Soltys, Feasible combinatorial matrix theory, 38th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS), volume 8087 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 777-788, IST, Klosterneuburg, Austria, August 2013. Click here for an expanded proof of Claim in the paper. [doi][slides]
- Ariel Fernández and Michael Soltys, Feasible combinatorial matrix theory: polytime proofs for König’s Min-Max and related theorems, short presentation at LICS 2013. [slides][full version]
Grad students – how to read a paper and how to succeed
A useful & short (two-pages) paper by Keshav on How to read a paper? See either of the two sites:
and here is a great paper on how to succeed in graduate school:
How hard in unshuffling a square?
A shuffle of two strings is formed by interspersing the characters into a new string, keeping the characters of each string in order. For example, MISSISSIPPI is a shuffle of MISIPP and SSISI. Lets call a string a square if it is a shuffle of two identical strings.
In November 2012, Sam Buss and I have succeeded in proving that the problem of determining whether a string can be written as a square shuffle is NP complete. This applies even over a finite alphabet with only 7 distinct symbols, although our proof is written for an alphabet with 9 symbols. This question is still open for smaller alphabets, say with only 2 symbols.
This problem was first posted on the CS Theory Community Blog in August of 2010. The problem received a lot of attention at the Theoretical Computer Science StackExchange. Our solution has been published in December 2013, the Journal of Computer and System Sciences:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002200001300189X
(here is the corresponding StackExchange post)
Making the Web Faster with HTTP 2.0 – ACM Queue
A modern Web application looks significantly different from a decade ago. According to HTTP Archive,6 an average Web application is now composed of more than 90 resources, which are fetched from more than 15 distinct hosts, totaling more than 1,300 KB of (compressed) transferred data. As a result, a large fraction of HTTP data flows consist of small (less than 15 KB), bursty data transfers over dozens of distinct TCP connections. Therein lies the problem. TCP is optimized for long-lived connections and bulk data transfers. Network RTT (round-trip time) is the limiting factor in throughput of new TCP connections (a result of TCP congestion control), and consequently, latency is also the performance bottleneck for most Web applications.
WordPress
I have decided to maintain a Wordpress blog.
Interview with Information Technology
La teoría de la complejidad computacional intenta distinguir entre los problemas que pueden resolverse y los que no, y los recursos necesarios para llegar a una solución. Cuáles son sus aplicaciones según un experto canadiense.
My interview for Information Technology in Argentina, in 2008, conducted by Bruno Massare. Full article here.