Stop Cheating—Again
More than just stopping carelessness
Sholto David is featured in this past Tuesday’s New York Times Science section for his work on cheating in papers on medical research.
Congrads to NAE’24
The 2024 class of new members
The National Academy of Engineering has just announced its new members for 2024. The webpage has a graphic announcing:
In Britain, your class year is your year of entry, as appropriate here. But on this side of the Pond it is one’s year of graduation—that is, of leaving. Our American usage does not “scale up,” as one might put it. Anyway, I say “congraduations” to the new members.
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Predictions 2024
Would an AI-powered meta-prediction be smarter?
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Punxsutawney Phil is our populace’s perennially percipient prognosticator. Every February 2, Groundhog Day, at dawn, he is summoned from his burrow to look around. If he sees his shadow and recoils from it, he predicts six more weeks of winter. If not, an early spring is proclaimed on the way.
Today we discuss some predictions for 2024.
Phil has been doing this since 1887. It must be said up front, his track record is not great. The previous three years, he saw his shadow but was judged wrong by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA scores him only 3 out of 10 for the past decade, and various sources put Phil under 40% over all time. Part of the problem is that his choosing “shadow” almost 85% of the time has bucked the trend of a warming planet.
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Some Fun Today
Today is a double NFL day. The main game for us is the Detroit Lions against the San Francisco 49ers. My dear wife, Kathryn Farley, is a dedicated fan of the Lions.
She and I are busy all today thinking about the game until it starts at 6:30pm and so I cannot do a more technical post. Hope that is okay with our followers.
A Talk at TTIC on Experiment Design
Jessica Hullman of Northwestern University is visiting TTIC this coming Monday. She is giving a talk at 10am Central Time (11am Eastern) on “Hypothesizing About Effects in Experiment Design and Interpretation.”
Hullman is the first holder of one of two professorships in AI and Machine Learning created in a $5 million gift by IBM to Northwestern in honor of the retired IBM chairman Virginia Rometty, a Northwestern alumnus. Yes, the article says “chairman” but Rometty was the first female to lead of IBM as CEO and in other chairing capacities until her retirement at the end of 2020. Rometty is also vice chair (no “-man”) of Northwestern’s Board of Trustees.
Hullman’s webpage says that her research “addresses challenges and limitations that arise when people draw inductive inferences from data.” She has contributed multiple visualization and interaction techniques for improving reasoning under uncertainty from data-driven interfaces, as well as theoretical frameworks for understanding the role of visualization in statistical workflow. All this has been recognized with best paper awards at some top visualization and HCI venues, a Microsoft Faculty award, and NSF CAREER, Medium, and Small awards as PI, among others. (Are our quotes “transitive,” per question 1 here?)
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The Turing Award Winner Speaker Series
A new series of publicly available lectures at Georgia Tech
Zvi Galil has been a good friend for a long time and came to Georgia Tech as my Dean from 2010 until my retirement. He ended his term as Dean in 2019 but stayed active faculty. He currently holds the Frederick G. Storey Chair in Computing—does that sound familiar?
He has teamed with the programming and software systems pioneers Bjarne Stroustrup and Andi Gutmans to create the Georgia Tech Turing Award Winner Speaker Series.
This is a series of talks by Turing Award winners to be held at Georgia Tech, interspersed with their regular colloquium lectures. Of course, the Turing Award is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to individuals for their contributions of major importance to our field—see here.
ICTS 2024 — Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science
In case the Berkeley Simons Institute (1/30–2/2) feels warmer than where you are now
Venkatesan Guruswami (University of California, Berkeley) is the chair of the ITCS 2024 conference. See here for details. Some of the program committee include: Avrim Blum (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago) and Dana Randall (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Michael Saks (Rutgers University).
One Day, Three Stories
NYT Science puzzlers, Claudine Gay’s resignation, and in memoriam Frank Ryan
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Roxanne and George Miller, Claudine Gay, and Frank Ryan are in today’s news. We started drafting a post on today’s New York Times Science section article by Siobhan Roberts on the first two. Then at midday came news of Claudine Gay’s resignation following the unveiling of plagiarism instances in an eighth paper of hers. Then we saw that Frank Ryan, an NFL quarterback who taught mathematics at Case Western, passed away at age 87.
Today we will say more about all three stories.
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Things We Did Not Know How to Compute
Artificial Intelligence and P=NP
Enio Moraes is the Product and Engineering Director of Semantix in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Semantix provides AI platforms for businesses. He recently blogged on LinkedIn on what P=NP would say about AI.
Today we pose the converse question: how do this past year’s advances in AI influence our thinking about P versus NP?
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Harvard’s View of Plagiarizing
And other views and questions to ask
Dr. Claudine Gay, the 30th president of Harvard University, was accused of plagiarizing by Dr. Carol Swain, who retired in 2017 from Vanderbilt University. Swain said that Gay used sections of her 1993 book and a 1997 article without proper citation.
This followed allegations by others earlier this month, culminating in a column by Ruth Marcus in yesterday’s Washington Post calling on her to resign.
Marcus does not mention Swain, but Ken covers their main academic examples below. Marcus also references the Free Beacon article linked under “month,” which has more-recent examples than the others. Update 1/2/24: Gay resigned today after new plagiarism instances surfaced—see section of our new post here.
