Peter Lee @ December 29, 2007 # One Comment
About a year ago, maybe earlier, various low-budget outsourcing/freelancing sites started advertising for CAPTCHA-breaking services. Recall, a CAPTCHA is a Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, developed by Luis von Ahn. For example, if you want to post a comment on an article in this blog, you are required to take […]
Peter Lee @ December 20, 2007 # One Comment
Remember in the old days when people used to talk about the “paperless office”? Frank Pfenning, who runs our Ph.D. program, was just in my office extolling the time-saving virtues of our new on-line system for managing the “Black Friday” assessment of our graduate students. Still, in the end, a hardcopy letter gets printed and […]
Peter Lee @ December 19, 2007 # One Comment
Well, it’s pretty much final now — the 2008 federal budget eliminates virtually all of the planned increases for science funding. This, despite bipartisan support and a new law, the American COMPETES Act. See the article in Science here. An examination of the appropriations shows that — Democrats and Republicans alike — opted to preserve […]
Peter Lee @ December 18, 2007 # No Comment Yet
Rankings are a big topic around here, as I suspect they are at any top-rated department. On the other hand, I’ve never noticed that we do anything to influence how we are ranked, other than do great research and teaching. Probably that’s how it should be, though at times I’m sure many of us wonder […]
Peter Lee @ December 17, 2007 # No Comment Yet
Peter Harsha, the Director of Government Affairs for the Computing Research Association, is reporting on his blog today that the possibly-final FY08 appropriations bill severely cuts back on the budget increases that were previously proposed for NSF and NIST.
In a nutshell, the earlier appropriations proposals were roughly in line with the Administration’s American Competitiveness Initiative […]
Peter Lee @ December 14, 2007 # One Comment
It’s Black Friday.
No, this isn’t the shopping frenzy after Thanksgiving day. This is the end-of-semester evaluation of the Computer Science Ph.D. students. All of the faculty involved in advising Ph.D. students in our program gather together for a full day meeting, to discuss in detail the progress of each student — about 160 of them, […]
Peter Lee @ December 14, 2007 # No Comment Yet
A few years ago I was lucky enough to attend a Moot Corp Competition (with a CMU team winning!). This is among the nation’s premier business start-up competitions, with one of the highlights being a series of rapid-fire “elevator pitches” for new start-ups. One of the great things about Moot Corp, besides being fun, is […]
Peter Lee @ December 12, 2007 # One Comment
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about “next-generation computing” — computing structures, algorithms, and applications on very large-scale distributed computing platforms, to enable scientific discovery. The amount of activity in this area just keeps growing. This has been particularly intensive lately with Yahoo Research. Randy Bryant pointed out to me, for example, that the […]
Peter Lee @ December 10, 2007 # No Comment Yet
We have a wonderful new home for the Computer Science Department under construction right now. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I would like to have art in it.
In case you don’t already know, what is actually being built is a complex of three buildings, which is why you sometimes hear it referred […]