- Luca Trevisan is soliciting ideas for building a schedule/recommendation engine for FOCS using collaborative filtering. He's on a short time frame, so you need to know what you're doing, but I dare say there's an excellent ALENEX submission waiting for anyone who has the time to work on this.
- Anand Kulkarni is proposing a theory overflow site, much like Math Overflow (which many of you inhabit already). I've been relatively happy with MO, and they're quite friendly towards algorithms folks (although sometimes a little confused about the difference between theoryCS and programming). But I do often tire of wading through pages and pages of unrelated questions to get to interesting ones.
I don't know if there's enough global support for theory overflow, but I do know that MO has been a fantastic resource for research-level mathematics, and with enough participation, theory overflow could get there too. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to mathoverflow.net. If you think that it's a waste of time, I'll mention that among the ACTIVE participants there are Terry Tao, Timothy Gowers, Richard Stanley and Bill Johnson (as in Johnson and Lindenstrauss) - Mark Reid has built a discussion site for ICML 2010 (ICML has been doing this for a few years now). Each paper at the conference gets a page, and anyone can post comments on the page. Authors can opt to get email whenever someone posts a comment, and can in this way interact with discussants. I wonder if something like this might soon become a de facto part of all conferences.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Social theory...
as in, doing theory socially. Three points of interest:
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Each paper at the conference gets a page, and anyone can post comments on the page. Authors can opt to get email whenever someone posts a comment, and can in this way interact with discussants. I wonder if something like this might soon become a de facto part of all conferences.
ReplyDeleteIt is a part of SIGCOMM.
It still remains to be seen whether there's enough community demand to justify a separate Overflow site dedicated to TCS. Hopefully we'll see some more discussion of reasons for and against opening such a site on the proposal. Depending on how the proposal goes, we might conclude instead that we should do more to encourage TCS activity on MathOverflow rather than opening a separate site.
ReplyDeleteMathOverflow is quite open to theory questions, since I've seen some quite thorough and well-considered responses to TCS questions there. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, there don't seem to be many theory questions on MathOverflow, and it seems not to be frequently used by the theory community.