The list of papers accepted to Graph Drawing is now online here, and a booklet of abstracts is also available.

If you want your work represented at Graph Drawing, there's still time to submit it as a poster for the poster session. The poster submission deadline is July 31.

Anyone know of a skating rink near Cooke Town ?

(The one in Coles Park is apparently for children under 12 years.)

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1198

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "Great Tweets of Science" - originally published 7/13/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2009/07/complexity-proposal.html

Tonight I fly off to Paris for the 24th IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity, the namesake conference of the blog. If the plane arrives on time I should just make it for my paper's presentation (which will be given by Ryan Williams in any case).

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bombaylives/SSIK/~3/WHDO5IFuibI/niagara-falls-in-andheri.html

http://www.bombaylives.com/index.php/niagara-falls-in-andheri.html

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bombaylives/SSIK/~3/uEtciPy-S4w/andheri-mumbai-rains.html

http://www.bombaylives.com/index.php/andheri-mumbai-rains.html

</p>

I got out of the arrival lounge and spotted the man holding a placard with my name on it. Soon I was inside a cab taking me down the beautiful but narrow road outside the airport.

In about half an hour of driving through beautiful narrow roads, we entered a residential complex with black fences, black gate and lots of greenery. There was a military establishment across the street. I was shown into a ground floor flat and given keys to one room in the flat. The room had a small attached balcony and a huge attached bathroom.

Century Park Apartments, Richmond Road, Bangalore

It was 14^th of July, 2004, a little before 9 AM. In a couple of hours I was to take the 5 minute walk from Century Park Apartments, Richmond Road to Yahoo! SDC, Esquire Centre, #9 M. G. Road.

Around this time 5 years ago, my life changed forever. I became a Yahoo.

Tags: 5 years, bangalore, half decade, mgr, nostalgia, viabb, yahoo, yblr

 

It is half past 2 in the night.  Most have chosen to rest their sore muscles and embrace sleep. The lonely street lights cast brooding shadows on the roads used to hustle-bustle. They, no longer the pointer to the destination, no longer the faithful friend throughout the journey, lie meek and downtrodden by known and unknown shadows.

Like light reflected by far away planets, waging their way through the eternal darkness of the space, two of the windows let neon light perforate them and pass through to join the brooding shadows on the road.

Silence

***

Earth shattering music drums against fine membrane, the outlet cushioned so that the sound doesn’t spill outside the tunnel. Beyond the cushion, it is drunken peace that pervades dreamy gamma waves of the unity conscious state, floating only to be rejected by the antenna part of the object that the membrane also shares. Only if it would have been
accepted, the gamma rays would have been successful in simulating stupor in the object.

***

Scene-1

Brrrrr Brrrrrr

The cell phone vibrates on the study table. The girl with a bushy curly mane stopped reading from her laptop screen to check the cell phone. Who could be it, at this hour? Her mind is flooded  with all sort of possibilities.

( What happens half past 2 in the night??? )

Tags: 3 am, cell phone, good night, half past 2, humour, life, midnight, sms, suspense, thriller
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Girl like me - Rihanna

http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2009/07/icalp.html

Ryan O'Donnell, reporting from last week's ICALP in Rhodes.

ICALP has a pretty large number of papers, divided into three tracks. Track A is roughly algorithms and complexity ("Amero-theory"?). Track B is roughly Logic, Semantics, and PL Theory ("Euro-theory"?). Track C, formerly cryptography, is now Foundations of Networked Computation; this seems to appeal most to the Track A people, and sometimes there were mixed A/C tracks.

Three highlights for me were:

• Amin Coja-Oghlan's outstanding paper A better algorithm for random k-SAT, which quite deservedly won Best Paper in Track A. I was very sorry to miss the talk, the earliest in the schedule, as my hydrofoil from Bodrum did not get in till just after it finished. In this paper, Amin gives an O(n^3/2)-time algorithm for random k-SAT which finds satisfying assignments for clause densities up to (ln k / k) 2^k. Much work has gone into this problem, and the previous best algorithm only worked up to density (1.8 / k) 2^k. Although the threshold for satisfiability is (ln 2) 2^k, Amin's work may in fact be "tight": his FOCS 2008 result with Achlioptas gives significant theoretical evidence that (ln k / k) 2^k may be the "algorithmic barrier".
• The special session devoted to Papadimitriou. This proved to be a birthday Festschrift, although it was not advertised as such. Laci Lovasz gave it away (repeatedly) in his invited talk, and the rumour floating around afterwards was that Papadimitriou is indeed "nearly 60" (cf. this). The invited talks here were excellent: Karp, on algorithmic problems from biology; Lovasz, on graph limits; Nisan, on auctions; Roughgarden, on improved methods for analyzing the price of anarchy; and Yannakakis, on complexity-theoretic aspects of Papadimitriou's research. Normally these events are good for getting amusing anecdotes about the fest-ed person, but most stories were quite heartfelt ones about the influence of Papadimitriou on the speaker's work. Possibly the most interesting thing was learning that one of Papadimitriou's most notable contributions to TCS was convincing fellow PhD-student Yannakakis to switch from EE-style information theory to TCS.
• Philip Bille and Mikkel Thorup's paper in which they made the first running-time improvement in 17 years on the problem of regular expression matching; they got it down from nm/log(n) to nm/log^3/2(n) (modulo log log factors). Naturally, Philip name-checked SLOGN in his very nice talk.

We also saw the Greek and Turkish national youth basketball teams at the conference lunches; I believe they skipped all the talks, though.

More from Noam Nisan.

Pictures: view of hotel grounds; view of hotel beach; view of basketball players at the conference lunch.

I recently helped my girlfriend move her stuff from Chicago to Oakland. The movers were scheduled to arrive at 8AM on the 5th of July, and we were stressing the day before about all the things that could go wrong with a move. We realized that if we knew where her stuff was, it'd make us feel better. This is a post about using the $99 iPhone to help us out...and about a somewhat surprising potential use of Find My iPhone.

( find my iphone-in-a-box )

http://www.bombaylives.com/index.php/qualcomm-ventures-qprize-competition.html

http://www.bombaylives.com/?p=1641

More than $500,000 in Early Stage Financing for Companies and Entrepreneurs

Qualcomm Ventures Launches QPrize Business Plan Competition Supporting Global Entrepreneurship

QPrize is an initiative to identify and strengthen novel business ideas while in the concept stage.

Business Sectors

QPrize competition is open to international entrants whose business plans accelerate wireless technology development in the following business sectors:

• Consumer/enterprise applications and services

• Communication devices

• Semiconductor and component technologies

• Mobile platforms

• Digital media and content

• Healthcare technologies and services

• CleanTech

Additional details on candidate eligibility and submission guidelines are available at www.qprize2009.com

Timelines

May 7th, 2009                   Public Launch
July 31st, 2009                 Deadline for submitting completed business plans
August 28th, 2009               Notifications will be sent to all  semi-finalists
September  2009                 India Regional event to pick India Region Winner
October 16th, 2009              Deadline for submitting revised business plans for the final competition
November, 2009                  Finals at San Diego, CA

For more information, please visit www.qualcomm.com/ventures

The Qualcomm Ventures QPrize™ competition is open to entrepreneurs in India, North America, Europe and China and will provide US$550,000 in total seed funding to help entrepreneurs transform their innovative business plans into reality. India Regional winner will receive US$100,000 of convertible note funding. The India Regional Winner will also have the opportunity to compete with other Regional winners for a Grand Prize of an additional US$150,000 of convertible note funding.

http://www.bombaylives.com/index.php/are-we-waiting-for-a-disaster.html

http://www.bombaylives.com/?p=1638

http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_king-long-bus-catches-fire-no-casualties_1273253

This is the second time that King Long BEST bus got completely burnt and luckily no one was injured or killed,  I wonder if the BEST guys are waiting for some deaths or casualty to happen before they decide to ban these buses.

Am not surprised that these buses are Made in China.

Pic courtesy : Platform7

My small tribute to Wing Commander K.K. Srinivasan, who died on 10th July at Bengaluru, India.

Tags: hearing-impaired, tribute

Have a service that takes an audio file, then recommends a relevant web page. Possibly via Mechanical Turk.

Apply it as follows: have your iPhone listen to your current conversation, then send the audio to the service, display the relevant web page. Repeat every minute or so. (Of course you can show this on glasses but it would probably be fun even with a standard iPhone.)

Now for more fun, is there a way to do this without revealing the content of the conversation? (Secure multiparty computation? Compiling a Mechanical Turk task into a boolean circuit is certainly a research level problem.)

http://arnab.org/blog/microsoft-researchs-data-related-launches

Microsoft Research has been making a bunch of cool data analysis-related launches at the upcoming Faculty Summit.

First, there’s The academic release of Dryad and DryadLINQ

Dryad is a high-performance, general-purpose, distributed-computing engine that simplifies the task of implementing distributed applications on clusters of computers running a Windows® operating system. DryadLINQ enables developers to implement Dryad applications in managed code by using an extended version of the LINQ programming model and API. The academic release of Dryad and DryadLINQ provides the software necessary to develop DryadLINQ applications and to run them on a Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster. The academic release includes documentation and code samples.

They also launched Project Trident , a workflow workbench, which is available for download:

Project Trident: A Scientific Workflow Workbench is a set of tools—based on the Windows Workflow Foundation—for creating and running data analysis workflows. It addresses scientists’ need for a flexible and powerful way to analyze large and diverse datasets, and share their results. Trident Management Studio provides graphical tools for running, managing, and sharing workflows. It manages the Trident Registry, schedules workflow jobs, and monitors local or remote workflow execution. For large data sets, Trident can run multiple workflows in parallel on a Windows HPC Server 2008 cluster. Trident provides a framework to add runtime services and comes with services such as provenance and workflow monitoring. The Trident security model supports users and roles that allows scientists to control access rights to their workflows.

Then there’s Graywolf :

GrayWulf builds on the work of Jim Gray, a Microsoft Research scientist and pioneer in database and transaction processing research. It also pays homage to Beowulf, the original computer cluster developed at NASA using “off-the-shelf” computer hardware.

Ø  Make up gross secret family traditions and tell them your family stealthily still follows it. Make sure your face brims with contorted sincerity. My favourite is that we (I and my family) drink blood of the human/animal being sacrificed on the Amavasya Nights. :D We are bongs after all.

Ø  Keep a collection of Prankies handy.  Guide to buying the ultimate scary Pranky for dummies 1.0 :

§  The pranky should spook you out sometimes despite the fact you know it is a pranky.

§  The pranky should be extremely touch sensitive. It should wiggle and wiggle for longer stretches of time upon being touched. Even better if it wiggles with change in speed of breeze.

§  Throw the pranky on the shopkeeper, does he / she run away leaving the counter for you to get away without paying? If not, then the pranky ain’t good enough.  

( And some more... )

Tags: asari chan, crap, crazy, family, friends, fun, humour, insanity, life, time pass
Current Mood: crazy

For a friend's wedding I recently traveled to Chicago. Since that's where I did my doctoral work, we have many friends there and love the city. I have previously posted on the architectural wonders of Chicago, the Balaji Temple and have run the Chicago Marathon! On this visit, I additionally got darshan at the exquisitely maintained Hindu Temple of Greater Chicago! Was surprised at their calendar of activities including Yoga, Meditation, Gita Recitation, Discourses and Sunday School. And importantly a cafeteria serving dosas, idli sambar, yogurt rice and else. Reason enough to go! Two more pics!

As I prepare for travel to Mumbai, I cast an eye on monsoon forecasts, particularly when they coincide with high-tides. Excerpt from notice from the US Consulate in Mumbai. During the monsoon, most flooding occurs during high tide. Mumbai's drainage system is designed to run off into the Arabian Sea. If a major storm occurs during high tide, the rainfall backs up and flooding occurs. Particular concern should be paid during the days listed in the table below. ... if there is heavy rain (during these dates), the possibility of the city flooding is very high. Sluice gates, which funnel flood waters from the city to the sea, are also closed on these days, increasing the possibility of flooding ... The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai site is very informative and lists the 27 days during this Monsoon season when tides are expected to crest 4.5 meters (14.8 ft). See entire list of Mumbai High Tide Dates and Times Highlighted are the 11 days when the high tides will crest over 4.8 meters (15.75 ft). In July of 2005, when heavy rains coincided with high tides, caused city-wide flooding and killed over 400 people, the tide had crested at 4.84 meters. So these are dates you should prepare for. The 7 remaining dangerous days this Monsoon 2009!

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1197

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "The wrath" - originally published 7/10/2009 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2009/07/will-real-adam-smith-please-stand-up.html

I thought about doing a post on ADVICE FOR GOING TO CCC 2009, but I recalled that my advice from a 2007 blog posting will suffice..

CONGRADS to Adam Smith and Sean Hallgren for being among the 100 people who won the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers award (PECASE).

Adam Smith (the same one as above) recently began a blog focusing on CRYPTO issues. here it is

To quote Adam Smith:

It was started around the same time as Jon Katz's blog, also with the goal of providing the crypto community a place for online discussions. Here is my explanation of why it's needed: here

If you google Adam Smith you get around 4,700,000 hits. Most are, of course, to the ecomomist or things associated to him (e.g., Adam Smith Think Tank) However, the FIRST Google Page does include our Adam Smith.