My paper from last summer with Matthew was just accepted at INFOCOM! This is awesome because it's another paper, and it's in a networking-ish conference which is kind of cool. But most of all, it's in Rio de Janeiro. So hopefully I'll get a free trip down to Brazil.

Quick note: last night I went to the gallery crawl in the cultural district for the first time. It was a lot of fun, although it was extremely crowded. One fun thing about the crawl is that it's in many ways a big party -- many of the galleries give out beer or wine and some kind of hors d'oeuvres. A lot of them also have background music. So ( Read more... )

I'm currently sitting at a talk at DISC that I don't really care about, so I might as well write a quick entry. DISC this year is in Arcachon, France, a beach resort about a hour away from Bordeaux. It's really beautiful -- you can see the Atlantic Ocean behind the speaker at the talks, which makes it somewhat difficult to pay attention :-). ( Read more... )

Last night I went to D's with the normal PL group plus some extras (Abe and Aaron in particular), and had an experience similar to the recent experience of letters-in-sand. In particular, I randomly ran into two people that I hadn't seen in a long time. First, at some point I went into the beer cave to grab another beer and ran into Morgan, who was a barista at ( Read more... )

Our discounted/weighted secretary paper was accepted at SODA! I'm a little surprised, but definitely psyched.

We now have a MATLAB-assisted NP-hardness proof for our problem. We basically came up with a gadget, and could easily prove by hand that in the good case the gadget was feasible, but an NP-hardness proof clearly also requires a proof that in the bad case there's no way of doing well on the gadget. We were completely unable to prove this by hand, ( Read more... )

I finally found a coffee shop near where I live -- it's about a 10 minute drive, over in Morristown. I spent a fairly significant fraction of Thursday and Friday trying to find a coffeeshop in Madison (the twon where I'm staying), but somehow nothing that google said was a coffee shop actually was. It was incredibly frustrating, since I like to ( Read more... )

OMG Reunions are amazing. Time to pack it up and head to Bell, though :-(.

Pittsburgh people -- anyone want to go to a concert Sunday night? British Sea Power is playing at Mr. Small's -- doors are at 7, the show starts at 8, but there are some opening acts. Gabe got me into British Sea Power a couple years ago (I think as I was visiting him in Seattle post-STOC), and I still listen to their album The Decline of British ( Read more... )

I just submitted a final version of my paper on online ultrametric embeddings to PODC. This paper isn't as good as the paper I just submitted to EC, but oh well. This one is single-author, although I offered to make Dahlia (my summer mentor at MSR-SVC) a coauthor since she's the one who started me working on this area and on these types of ( Read more... )