I read Luke Stark and Jevan Hutson‘s Physiognomic AI paper last night and it’s sparked some thinking about additional reading I could add to my graduate course on statistical theory for engineering next semester (Detection and Estimation Theory). “The inferential statistical methods on which machine learning is based, while useful in many contexts, fail when applied to extrapolating subjective human characteristics from physical features and even patterns of behavior, just as phrenology and physiognomy did.” From the (mathematical) communication theory context in which I teach these methods ..read more

One upon a time, there was a University whose administration was enthralled by a religion called Canvas. The central tenets of Canvas were held in the highest esteem and those who followed Canvasitic doctrine were expected to prepare their course materials through prescribed rituals and incantations. When preparing the course, problems for homeworks and quizzes (assessments) could be organized into Question Banks stored in the professor’s office. To create an assessment, a special place was prepared on the wall of the classroom. The professor would photocopy the Questions from the Question Ba ..read more

I attended the IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSOC) Board of Governors meeting at ISIT in Paris this week and found something gnawing at me afterwards from the presentation about the Distinguished Lecturer (DL) program. The presentation said that “IEEE denied the selection of a DL based in Iran due to U.S. sanction.” The name of the particular DL nominee does not appear in the public record. Why can IEEE deny the selection of a DL? In part, there are requirements for DLs now: DL should visit IT Society local chapters. DL program pays for airfare and travel. Local chapter pays for local exp ..read more

Reviewing has started for NeurIPS 2019 and this time around I am an area chair (AC). We’ve been given a lot of instructions and some tasks: bidding on papers, bidding on reviewers, adjusting reviewers, identifying what we think are likely rejects in the batch of papers we are handling, and so on. It’s a little more involved than being an AC for ICML, but that’s to be expected since the whole reviewing game has been evolving rapidly to adapt to the massive increase in submissions. Since there is yet another tier of TPC above the ACs (the Senior ACs), how should one approach the meta-review? One ..read more

November 11 London, UK Colocated with CCS 2019 Differential privacy is a promising approach to privacy-preserving data analysis.  Differential privacy provides strong worst-case guarantees about the harm that a user could suffer from participating in a differentially private data analysis, but is also flexible enough to allow for a wide variety of data analyses to be performed with a high degree of utility.  Having already been the subject of a decade of intense scientific study, it has also now been deployed in products at government agencies such as the U.S. Census Bureau and compa ..read more

Passing a message along for my colleague Waheed Bajwa: As the US Liaison Chair of IEEE SPAWC 2019, I have received NSF funds to support travel of undergraduate and/or graduate students to Cannes, France for IEEE SPAWC 2019. Having a paper at the workshop is not a prerequisite for these grants and a number of grants are reserved for underrepresented minority students whose careers might benefit from these travel grants. Please share this with any interested students and, if you know one, please encourage her/him to consider applying for these grants ..read more

ICML 2019 had an optional code submission for papers. As an area chair, I handled a mix of papers, some more theoretical than others, but almost all of them had some empirical validation. Not all of them submitted code. For a paper with a theorem, the experiments can range from sanity checks to a detailed exploration of the effects of some parameters for problem sizes of interest. For more applied/empirical papers, the experiments are doing the heavy lifting of making a case. A survey just went out to Area Chairs asking to what degree code submission was taken as a factor in our recommendation ..read more

I’m on sabbatical now, which ostensibly means having a bit more time to read things (technical and not). I’m not exactly burning through books but 2019 has already had a few good ones. Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata): The book has a lot of critical acclaim but I can see many readers being put off by it: the story is pretty disturbing in the end. The narrator and protagonist is (I think) neuro-atypical, which comes across in the writing (I’d love to read some notes from the translator). On the other hand, it is also a critique of Japanese work culture, I think, although not the usual of ..read more

I submitted a paper to ISIT in which I tried something different. It’s about communication models with a jammer, so there are three parties: Alice, Bob, and the jammer. Alice wants to send a message to Bob. The jammer wants to prevent it from being reliably received. We always use Alice for the encoder/transmitter. Knowing nothing more than the name, I would use the pronouns she/her/hers to refer to Alice. We always use Bob for the encoder/transmitter. Knowing nothing more than the name, I would use the pronouns he/him/his to refer to Bob. What about the jammer? In previous papers (and in our ..read more

I recently had a conversation about ordering of author lists for papers. Of course, each field has its own conventions but as people start publishing in multiple communities’ venues things can get a bit murky. There are pros and cons and different people have different values, etc. This is all standard and has been hashed to death. But what happens when you merge two papers with different author lists? Alphabetical makes things very easy, but if you go a different route, then the primary authors have to slug it out to see who gets first author credit. To split the difference, you could put a f ..read more