Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

Robin McKie from Guardian Books reviews a biography on Grigori Perelman , the mathematician who turned down a million dollars.

ICALP 2011 papers : abstracts are also available.

IJCAI 2011 accepted papers are now public.

 Boston Globe profiles Al Roth : Academically speaking, Roth is a pioneer of so-called market design: finding situations where a market is failing — often, a place that most people wouldn’t even recognize as a market — and making it work better. Roth has influenced a cadre of young, energetic market designers, many of whom have taken up prominent positions at top universities. Inspired by Roth’s work, these rising economists are also setting their sights on real-world problems. Some are looking at dating websites; others are interested in how universities could do better at scheduling their students’ classes. Like Roth, all of them envision a world in which economists, as unlikely as it may seem, are recognized as society’s mechanics.

AAMAS 2011 program is now public: http://www.aamas2011.tw/DailyProgram.html

Les Valiant has won the 2010 Turing Award .  (Citation from the ACM website) Over the past 30 years, Leslie Valiant has made fundamental contributions to many aspects of theoretical computer science. His work has opened new frontiers, introduced ingenious new concepts, and presented results of great originality, depth, and beauty. Time and again, Valiant's work has literally defined or transformed the computer science research landscape. Valiant's greatest single contribution may be his 1984 paper "A Theory of the Learnable," which laid the foundations of computational learning theory. He introduced a general framework as well as concrete computational models for studying the learning process, including the famous "probably approximately correct" (PAC) model of machine learning. This has developed into a vibrant research area and has had enormous influence on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and many areas of computing practice,...

NYT has an article on the use of AI in I.B.M.’s question-answering computer Watson and also Google ranking algorithms.