Blog Articles 91–95
Published on Friday, May 23, 2014 and tagged with
career.
I’m pleased to announce that my job search has reached a successful
conclusion. I have accepted a faculty position in the computer science department at Texas State University in San Marcos,
beginning this fall.
I don’t have time to say a lot more right now — I have a thesis to
finish and defend, after all — but I do plan to continue working on
LensKit there.
I’ve been working through some of my backlog of
started-but-not-yet-finished books and finally finished Asimov’s Robot
Dreams collection.
I’ve read a fair amount of Asimov before — robot stories, novels, the
Foundation trilogy (which I greatly enjoyed), the Foundation
sequels (Foundation and Earth accomplished the rare feat of
retroactively damaging the trilogy; I prefer to pretend it does not
exist) — but this collection would stand as my recommendation for
someone seeking a starting point for Asimov. At least if they don’t want
to dive into the world of Foundation. It has a smattering of
robot stories, Multivac stories, and other things, many of them
excellent.
Some highlights:
- ‘The
Martian Way’ is a fascinating medium-length piece (nearly a novella)
on the political turmoil leading to the independence of the Martian
space colony.
- ‘Eyes Do More than See’ and ‘Does a Bee Care’ are slight, haunting
pieces with grand themes. Brilliant examples of what can be done in 6
pages of well-chosen sentences.
- ‘The Feeling of Power’ is strange and fun — what happens in a future
where we have computers but forgot how they work, and basic mathematics
are rediscovered?
- ‘Jokester’ — where do jokes come from? What happens when we find
out?
- ‘Franchise’ is premised on the perfection of social psychology, but
in a lighter-weight fashion than Foundation. If we can
thoroughly understand people, do we need elections?
I had a great time this week at Computer Supported Cooperative Work and
Social Computing. Met lots of interesting people, heard good talks,
enjoyed Baltimore.
One of my favorite papers of the conference was AskSheet:
Efficient Human Computation for Decision Making with Spreadsheets by
Alex Quinn and Ben Bederson. The concept is
brilliantly simple: embed crowdsourcing capabilities in a spreadsheet,
allowing decision makers (and others) to use the tools they already know
to solicit information via Mechanical Turk and process the responses. To
make it all work, they did some very interesting work on batching
queries, estimating the likelihood of actually needing a piece of data
and using this to order the crowd data requests, and other things to
improve the efficiency of an application’s use of the crowd.
It’s not hard to envision an extension of this work into functional
programming more generally. Someone could create a Crowd
monad with an API something like this:
--| Create a crowdsourced query.
ask :: String --^ Descriptive text for this query.
-> Schema a --^ Schema for user responses.
-> Crowd a
--| Run a crowdsourced query, returning the results (after processing). Runs in
-- IO because it needs networking, etc.
crowdsource :: CrowdProvider -> Crowd a -> IO a
Published on Saturday, February 1, 2014.
Academics — at least those actively involved in computer science
research — do a fair amount of travel. Making this go smoothly is
something of a learned and practiced skill. Here are some things that
have helped me.
Published on Thursday, January 2, 2014 and tagged with
education and war.
This crossed my Twitter stream today, thanks to Mark Guzdial:
The original
article has posted an important correction — the funds spent on the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (not just Iraq) would fund public higher
education for 52 years (not 58). The numbers are weakened a bit, but
don’t really undermine the point.