5/30/17: The Life of an Academic Socialite

1. 5/30/17: The Life of an Academic Socialite
1. Crazy day! Starts off slow, I wake up late and start on work; but it heats up real fast. I go to a Theory talk that Prof. Suciu mentioned, which is really really fascinating. It’s about extracting information from untrusted data; more precisely, suppose some fraction alpha of your data is drawn from a distribution whose parameters you want to learn; but the rest of your data is either 1) drawn from a different distribution with some constraints or 2) adversarially chosen; the very worst case. Under which circumstances can you recover the parameters of the target data with high accuracy? The game gets even more interesting if you get a constant-size amount of data that you know is drawn from the target distribution. An example is, you have a big pile of Amazon reviews and you want to extract the preferences of the student demographic. But you don’t know which reviewers are students. Turns out, if enough of the reviewers were students, and enough reviewers reviewed multiple products, you can hire a constant number of students (much much smaller than the size of the review dataset) and extract accurate estimates of student preferences even on products that none of your hired students reviewed--all without attempting any classification of the reviewers into students and non-students--using methods in matrix analysis. I thought it was crazy.
2. I talked to Akshay for a bit, then stayed late to ask the fellow a question. He answered me, but then had to go to the Theory lab for the next section of his visit. I shook his hand at the door of the lab, almost left, but then I thought, what am I doing? Why would I pass up this opportunity?!
3. So I crashed the Theory lab, met a bunch of cool people, including one guy Jaden from Thomas’s grad real analysis class and a girl Swati from swing dancing working in convex optimization.
4. From there I wrote an email, changed into nice clothes, and headed to physics to get inducted into Sigma Pi Sigma, the honors society associated with our department :D, along with (of course) Jacob W., Yujin Park, Justin Bureau, and Isaak Nanneman. The one outlier was a dude named Felix Leeb, who I’d never met. Prof. Olmstead ran the ceremony, where we signed our names in a red book from the 30’s--the entertaining bit was that we all couldn’t figure out how to use the twist-tip pen that we got as inductees, to sign the book :D
5. After the ceremony, we dined on delicious food--I got to talk to Logan, a really bright grad student headed to CERN, plus I got to meet Felix. Then Prof. Cobden and research assistants showed up to get the free food, and I got into a good conversation with him and PhD student Boris about the computer vision project. I also managed to ask him about getting paid; unfortunately he says he’s struggling to pay his grad students this summer. I also got to meet a freshman who wants to take grad quantum his first quarter, which is pretty awesome.
6. Dropped off a tray of antipasto at the SPS; took 3 bags of brie, delicious meat rolls, and fresh fruit home; then went to the Glee Banquet (crying laughing emoji)
7. The Banquet fortunately didn’t involve all that much food. Good conversation though! And officer elections for next year were hilarious. I ordered a beer, which was fun.
8. Hit the gym for some awesome games of hoops :D
9. Returned home and started writing down what Jacob and I had come up with for classical mechanics.