One of the things that I learned in grad school is that even if you’ve picked an important and unsolved problem, you need some reason to believe it is solvable–especially if people have tried to solve it before! In other words, “What’s different this time?” This is perhaps a dreary way of shooting down otherwise promising research directions, but you can flip it around: when the world changes, you can ask, “What can I do now that I couldn’t do before?”
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I just presented Blame Trees at the 13th Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium. Blame trees are a functional data structure which support an efficient merge operation by incorporating information about the “blame” (think git blame) of any given part of the structure. It’s a theory paper, so the constant factors are not so good, but the asymptotics are much better than traditional merge algorithms used by modern VCSes.
This was joint work with David A. Wilson, Pavel Panchekha and Erik D. Demaine. You can view the paper or check out the slides. I also have a slightly older version of the talk recorded on YouTube (20 minutes) which I had used to help get feedback from my out-of-town collaborators before actually giving the talk. Thanks also to David Mazières for giving useful comments on the presentation in person.
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NDSEG April 5, 2013
Humbly presented for your consideration: Exhibit A, an NDSEG essay that did not get accepted; Exhibit B, an NDSEG essay that did get accepted. It’s pretty cool what making a statement more focused can do. (See also Philip Guo’s page on the topic.)
“…so that’s what we’re going to build!”
“Cool! What language are you going to write it in?”
“Well, we were thinking we were going to need three programming languages…”
“…three?”
“…and they’ll be research programming languages too…”
“Are you out of your mind?”
This was the conversation in streaming through my head when I decided that I would be writing my latest software project in Coq, Haskell and Ur/Web. I had reasonably good reasons for the choice: I wanted Coq because I didn’t actually want to implement a theorem prover from scratch, I wanted Ur/Web because I didn’t actually want to hand write JavaScript to get an AJAX interface, and I wanted Haskell because I didn’t want to write a bucket of C to get Ur/Web and Coq to talk to each other. But taken altogether the whole thing seemed a bit ludicrous, like an unholy fusion of a trinity of research programming languages.
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If you haven’t noticed, these are coming in the order of the visit days.
Whereas the weather at UPenn was nice and sunny, the NJ Transit dinghy rolled into a very misty Princeton. Fortunately, I had properly registered for this visit day, so the hotel was in order. I was a bit early, so I met up with an old friend who had recently penned this short story and we talked about various bits and bobs (“I hear you’re up for a Hugo!”) before I meandered over to the computer science building.
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I’m hoping that this will be the beginning of a series of posts describing all of the visit days/open houses that I attended over the past month. Most of the information is being sucked out of the notes I took during the visits, so it’s very stream of consciousness style. It’s kind of personal, and I won’t be offended if you decide not to read. You’ve been warned!
I arrive at the Inn at Penn shortly before midnight, and check in. Well, attempt it; they appear to have no reservation on hand. It appears that I hadn’t actually registered for the visit weekend. Oops.
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