New CS Building

Carnegie Mellon will be joining the long list of schools to have a CS building named after Bill Gates. (I'm counting Harvard's Maxwell-Dworkin, which is named after his mom...) See the new building here. The thing won't be complete for at least another two years, so I will still have to do my time in a windowless basement office, but it sounds nice -- collaborative areas, lots of natural light, etc. And BEST of all, "The main north-south axis, however, will make it so that the building can still be easily navigated" -- this is great! It will be possible to navigate the building!

I can't help but think that this is a not-so-subtle jab at MIT's Stata center, which is -not- easy to navigate. Otherwise, this seems like a building feature that would go without saying...

Theory and Systems

A very nice post about the need to study systems, even for theorists. This is good to hear; Some of the people I know are spending all summer studying theory, beginning their research. This gives me hope that learning about engineering challenges at Google will be a fruitful experience as well.

This is getting serious

We graduate in less than a month. On May 16th, John McCain (hopefully) will come speak to us on class day, and I will have a diploma in hand. Or rather, the opportunity to wait in a long line to get a diploma, which will otherwise be mailed to me (Why do I need a diploma anyhow?) All well and good.

On May 18th, Columbia throws me out on the street. So I've got about a month to find an apartment in the city.

Its official.

Without too much extra thought, I just emailed Carnegie Mellon and let them know that I will be enrolling in the fall. I guess this is it then -- I'm going to Carnegie Mellon. This will be exciting!

But first... My summer internship at Google.

Carnegie Mellon

I'm almost there. I sent out emails today turning down Penn and Princeton. In the emails I said I was choosing Carnegie Mellon. I've filled out the acceptance form for CMU. I just have to mail it, and then turn down Stanford and Berkeley (Ouch)

Fiber and making life changing decisions with very little information.

What is the daily recommended fiber intake? Before my graph theory class, I ate a bag of potato chips and a bag of popcorn. The bag of potato chips contained 1 g of fiber, which translated into 4% of my daily value. The bag of popcorn contained 1 g of fiber, which translated into 5% of my daily value. Is this roundoff error, or does the popcorn company play fast and loose with the fiber rules?

I'm leaning very heavily towards Carnegie Mellon now. I'll almost certainly go there. I notified some of the schools yesterday that I would not be attending them (Harvard, Michigan, Washington, Brown). I still have a bit of nagging doubt though... There are still so many areas of computer science that I haven't been exposed to, and maybe I will love. CMU is the best place to do learning/mechanism design. Where is the best place to discover new interests? Today in information theory we covered network coding. Never seen it before. Looks cool. CMU has you take your courses after you pick your advisor, Berkeley does it the other way around. Why can't the faculty I'm interested in work at Berkeley? Then the choice would be clear.

In other news, there's a new young faculty member who might end up at CMU next year, who seems very interesting. He's not going there for sure, but he's definitely not going to Berkeley, so I can add 50% of his value, in expectation, to CMU's column...

Decision in 5 days.

Theory Girl

I just found the University of Washington's rendition of theory girl today (set to the tune of uptown girl). As computer science music goes, its pretty good. Of course the mathematicians may still have us beat with the love ballad "Finite Simple Group (Of Order Two)" , by the Klein Four Group (But aren't there 5 of them?) I like "theory girl" much better than the work of MC++ though -- he's got higher production values, but borders more closely on bad rap than funny CS rap.

Also good: "The Longest Path"

Choosing Where to Go

In nine days I have to make the first major choice that will shape my career as a computer scientist -- where to go to grad school. After the euphoria of admission decisions, I had hoped that the string of visit days would have made my choice clear. It only made it harder -- every school I visited seemed like a wonderful place to study, and I could see myself at all of them. One of the bonuses of the visits was that I got to meet my generation of computer scientists -- they seem like a nice crowd. In fact, it seemed like it was the same people visiting every school, so we became pretty familiar by the end. Unfortunately, since it was the same people everywhere, I can't tell who would be my colleagues at any particular school. I want to go into either theory or A.I. -- My interests so far have been on the fence. I've liked computational learning theory, and algorithmic mechanism design.

The long list is six schools: Penn, Princeton, Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon.

Penn: The only thing drawing me to Penn is the person who would be my advisor there. He's great -- a superstar in the field, his interests mesh perfectly with mine, and he doesn't have too many students. Unfortunately the school as a whole doesn't seem as strong as the other choices. I still feel like I haven't seen enough of the field to decide for sure on one topic, so I probably have to rule Penn out...

Princeton/Harvard: Very similar to Penn in terms of my decision. One advisor that I would love to work with at each school, and that I would be able to work with. Harvard is close to home, which is a big bonus, and Cambridge is a great town. Princeton has an amazing theory group, so a plus if I end up leaning towards theory. But Princeton was the only school I visited where anyone said anything bad about any of the professors, and in the end, both schools are probably too small for me to explore computer science as broadly as I probably should. So that leaves a choice between:

Stanford: Correctly, I think, described as a "research resort" (Of course, I flew into Palo Alto for the visiting day, and it was 68 degrees and sunny in New York, and then 35 and hailing (and then snowing) in Palo Alto. I'm sure the east coast schools are cheering.) The campus is beautiful. And far from everything. The A.I. at Stanford seems to be very applied. It would be a great school to go to if I wanted to build something. They've also got the largest computational game theory group just about anywhere, so if I really want to do mechanism design or something related, Stanford would be hard to beat. I would have to give up on learning theory though. And maybe pick up an interest in automated driving.

Berkeley: Pretty amazing. Beautiful weather. Great town. Theory powerhouse. If I went to Berkeley, I'd have to change my interests a bit. My interest in computational learning theory would have to develop a statistical flavor, and my interest in mechanism design might have to morph into an interest into the complexity of equilibria. Then again, maybe I should be changing my interests anyhow, since I've only seen a few things as an undergrad. Another bonus: The students at Berkeley seem the strongest, and they've got the best academic placement record.

Carnegie Mellon: Less nice weather. Less nice town. Not specialized in theory. Not as strong a placement record. But. Carnegie Mellon is clearly the best place for me if I am indeed interested in mechanism design and learning theory, since some of the best people in each of these fields are at CMU. Plus, if I end up changing my mind, I can do just about anything I want at Carnegie Mellon -- they're huge, and especially if I stray towards AI, very very strong.

So sadly the good features of each school have not all converged into a single institution. I think its come down to Berkeley or Carnegie Mellon, and at the moment, I'm leaning strongly towards Carnegie Mellon. (If only the faculty I am interested in worked at Berkeley!) More to come... April 15 is 9 short days away.