Special Interest Group on CRAP

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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. [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

I should first issue a disclaimer since I work for Google. This doesn’t reflect the opinion of my employer, so any inaccuracies are my fault alone. If it’s any consolation, at least Google isn’t trying to sell Mapreduce as a product. David J. DeWitt and Michael Stonebraker recently wrote an article titled Mapreduce: a giant [...]

[Read more →]

I recently submitted a paper with the title “income Inequality in the Attention Economy’. This is my first paper in welfare economics, and the results in the paper came as a surprise to me. Among other things it shows that an increasing amount of attention is concentrated on a tiny number of websites. Among over [...]

[Read more →]

Neal Koblitz recently wrote an article in the Notices of the American Mathematical Sociey titled The Uneasy Relationship Between Mathematics and Cryptography. This article is actually the third by Koblitz, following two previous articles with Alfred Menezes: Another Look at “Provable Security” Another Look at “Provable Security”, II There’s something weird about the division in [...]

[Read more →]