Daily Deals: Prediction, Social Diffusion, and Reputational Ramifications Daily deal sites have become the latest Internet sensation, providing discounted offers to customers for restaurants, ticketed events, and services. We undertake a study of the economics of daily deals on the web, first by analyzing a dataset we compiled by monitoring… Continue reading »
Reflections on Trusting Trust, Part 2: The Cloud More than two decades ago, Ken Thompson gave an ACM Turing Award Lecture called “Reflections on Trusting Trust”, in which he showed how our trust in the software we run is based on chains of reasoning with many hidden and vulnerable… Continue reading »
Dr. Fill: Crosswords and An Implemented Solver for Singly Weighted CSPs We described and demonstrated Dr.Fill, a program that solves American-style crossword puzzles. From a technical perspective, Dr.Fill works by converting crosswords to weighted CSPs, and then using a variety of novel techniques to find a solution. These techniques… Continue reading »
Following the recommendation of the Committee on Appointments and Promotions, the Williams College Board of Trustees has promoted both Brent Heeringa and Morgan McGuire to the position of associate professor with tenure. The promotion will take effect July 1, 2012. In total, eight professors… Continue reading »
Longtime administrative assistant Lorraine Robinson retired in June after working in the Department of Computer Science for over a decade. Continue reading »
All majors are well to join the department for bowling and chinese on Friday, 06 April 2012 at 17.00. We will roll a few rounds at Mt. Greylock Bowl and then have Chinese food at Chopsticks. Continue reading »
Programming with People: Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation Humans can perform many tasks with ease that remain difficult or impossible for computers. Crowdsourcing platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk make it possible to harness human-based computational power on an unprecedented scale. However, their utility as a general-purpose computational platform remains… Continue reading »
Class of 1960s Scholars Lecture in Computer Science Beyond Jeopardy! The Future of Watson Computer systems that directly and accurately understand and answer people’s questions over a broad domain of human knowledge have been envisioned by scientists and writers since the advent of computers themselves. Toy solutions are… Continue reading »
Transiently Powered Computers Demand for tiny, easily deployable computers has driven the development of general-purpose transiently powered computers (TPCs) that lack both batteries and wired power, operating exclusively on energy harvested from remote supplies or the environment. TPCs like the Intel WISP and the UMass Moo offer sensing, computation, and… Continue reading »
Tools for Improving Software Right Now Many areas of technology have enjoyed spectacular advances in recent years: the number of transistors on a chip, the density of memory and storage, the bandwidth and speed of networks. Software quality, however, is not one of them. In spite of considerable effort, the… Continue reading »