Gerrymandering
Brian Brubach, Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Wellesley College, joins us today to discuss his work "Meddling Metrics: the Effects of Measuring and Constraining Partisan Ger...
22 Jan 202134min
Even Cooperative Chess is Hard
Aside from victory questions like "can black force a checkmate on white in 5 moves?" many novel questions can be asked about a game of chess. Some questions are trivial (e.g. "How many pieces does whi...
15 Jan 202123min
Consecutive Votes in Paxos
Eil Goldweber, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, comes on today to share his work in applying formal verification to systems and a modification to the Paxos protocol discussed in the p...
11 Jan 202130min
Visual Illusions Deceiving Neural Networks
Today on the show we have Adrian Martin, a Post-doctoral researcher from the University of Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He comes on the show today to discuss his research from the paper "Convolut...
1 Jan 202133min
Earthquake Detection with Crowd-sourced Data
Have you ever wanted to hear what an earthquake sounds like? Today on the show we have Omkar Ranadive, Computer Science Masters student at NorthWestern University, who collaborates with Suzan van der ...
25 Dec 202029min
Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus
Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is a desirable property in a distributed computing environment. BFT means the system can survive the loss of nodes and nodes becoming unreliable. There are many differe...
22 Dec 202035min
Alpha Fold
Kyle shared some initial reactions to the announcement about Alpha Fold 2's celebrated performance in the CASP14 prediction. By many accounts, this exciting result means protein folding is now a solv...
11 Dec 202023min
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
Above all, everyone wants voting to be fair. What does fair mean and how can we measure it? Kenneth Arrow posited a simple set of conditions that one would certainly desire in a voting system. For exa...
4 Dec 202026min
