Special Interest Group on CRAP

I went today to look at the program for CIKM, which is being held two hours away from my house. There are a few interesting talks, so I briefly thought about going. Then I looked at the fees for attending the conference. The fees range from 755 (if you already paid the ACM tax of [...]

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As I look around at what is happening in the world today, I keep seeing evidence that it all comes down to trust. As someone who spent a great deal of time working on information security, the subject of trust is one that I tried to design for, but I always regarded trust as a [...]

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I have been growing increasingly insistent that scientific publishing should move toward open access. This is caused in part because, as an employee of Google, I have very little access to commercially published literature, in spite of the fact that we drive most of their traffic. For example I have access to almost none of [...]

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I was having a hard time summarizing my thoughts from the Crypto conference. As always it was nice to see old friends and engage in discussions about the state of the art in crypto, but in retrospect I think the field of mathematical cryptography has dug itself into a hole and has a hard time [...]

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I started working on cryptography as a way to do something more practical than pure mathematics. Waaaaaaay back in 1985 I discovered the Crypto conference in Santa Barbara at UCSB, and I was enthralled because I could interact with computer scientists, electrical engineers, business people, and other mathematicians on a subject that seemed to make [...]

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I recently signed up for 23andme.com. I was motivated in part because I don’t know the genetic background on my mother’s side (she was essentially a stolen baby, without any knowledge of her parents). I’m optimistic about science being able to make use of genetic information to improve the human condition in the future, but [...]

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I recently declined to referee a paper for a closed-access journal. This particular case was an ACM journal, which is one of the least objectionable of the closed-access publishers, but it still bugs me that we continue to turn over science to people who then sell it back to scientists. This does not benefit science. [...]

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For years I have listened to people argue that parallel sessions are harmful to scientific discourse, and how we need to maintain “quality”. While I strongly believe that quality of scientific publication should not be sacrificed, I think there is a harmful aspect to avoiding parallel sessions that is being overlooked. The problem is that [...]

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There was a time when commercial publishers provided a crucial service in the printing and distribution of scientific publications. That need has diminished to the point where it doesn’t make sense to continue to use this model. USENIX has announced that they will make all of their conference proceedings freely available online. This marks a [...]

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I’ve written in the past about the interpretation of the PageRank probability distribution as an economic utility function. Recall that one interpretation is PageRank(url) = probability that a random surfer arrives at the url. This can be used to estimating monetary value for advertising on the page, because it is correlated to the number of [...]

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