Sasho Nikolov (thesasho@bsky.social) @thesasho Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

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@PatrissiaGamboa

Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

11 months

It's absolutely wild to me that anyone finds this python code easier to read than the equation. Does anyone who follows me feel this way? Can you please explain yourselves?

Jeremy Howard

@jeremyphoward

11 months

If you're like me and find it easier to read *code* than *math*, and you have access to @OpenAI GPT 4V (or use @bing or @google Bard), try pasting a image of an equation you wanna understand in there. It might just blow your mind. 1/🧵

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

2 years

One of most challenging things about getting a PhD degree is finding a time when four professors are all available to meet for two hours.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

The probationary period is over: just got the news that I got tenure! 🎉 🎉 🎉 extremely grateful for the support of so many over the years!

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

1 year

"What is the definition of twice differentiable? Is the term related to differential privacy?" is from now on my favourite paper review quote. It will be hard to beat this one!

Nando Fioretto

@nandofioretto

1 year

@MountainOfMoon I once got this batch (two different reviewers, same paper) -- the paper was eventually saved by an AC

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

Shouldn’t we disentangle publication from conference attendance in CS? Seems to lead to a lot of inequality, and, honestly, I think it’s total nonsense. Why does one need to pay a flight ticket, a hotel stay, and potentially get a visa in order to publish?

Rohan Padhye

@moarbugs

5 years

A female student could not travel to present her paper at a top CS conference because of her national origin. PC chair responds to her advisor's query about alternatives: "If you knew in advance that the authors would be unable to attend, you should not have submitted." Yikes!!

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

Today it’s (Twitter) official

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

I see grad school applications from undergrads with three STOC papers, and wondering if there should be a "straight to postdoc" admission option.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

1 year

Today I decided to look up what an “R1 university” is, and the methodology of dividing doctoral institutions into R1 and R2 is kind of wild. They do PCA onto 1d in two different ways and then recenter and compute ell_2 distance from the lower left corner?

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

May be petty, but I’m really annoyed how “crypto” has now become a shorthand for cryptocurrency rather than for cryptography.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

Excited to announce some joint work with @theannasu : we made this bundle of cuteness!

Anna Su ([email protected])

@theannasu

3 years

Had a twitter hiatus for the past three weeks because this little guy showed up. Since i have no time for sleep, i can now go back to complaining about the slow vaccination rates in Ontario and other ridiculous things you find online

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

How does anyone summon the energy or focus to do #icml2020 reviews right now? I forced myself to start, and the second paper I looked at is taking an inner product of a vector and a set, and calling the result a distribution, and now I have lost all motivation again.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Who else has to google Cauchy-Schwarz to make sure there is no 't' in 'Schwarz'?

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

11 months

@sp_monte_carlo In this particular example the code feels harder to parse for me, because reading the code requires thinking about a variable changing its state, whereas I think of the sigma notation more directly as a macro for an n-term summation.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

It may be that before I’ve had my first coffee I’m slightly conscious.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

As a resident of Canada, it is my duty to retweet this beaver.

Dick King-Smith HQ

@DickKingSmith

4 years

Studies have shown that listening to the sound of beavers enthusiastically munching on white cabbage can temporarily reduce stress levels by up to 17%.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

Apple do a better job than most on privacy, but this is complete nonsense. "Mathematical representations" can still have all the information needed to reconstruct your face, and this has been shown to be true for deep learning models, too. h/t @ilyaraz2

Apple

@Apple

5 years

Face ID only stores a mathematical representation of your face on iPhone, not a photo.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

“Is this obvious or is it false?” sums up a lot of my research life.

〈 Berger | Dillon 〉

@InertialObservr

4 years

just spent 5 hours figuring out whether or not a proof was obvious

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Let me present to you this thread, which is the perfect Friday morning treat. It has all the greatest hits: (1) spurious correlation with GDP. The plots go up, can it be an accident?!! (THREAD for more amazingness)

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

2 years

Here is the annual "How the hell is SODA so freaking expensive?" tweet. This year, non-member in-person registration is 940 Euro. That's more than $1300 Canadian. Even more astounding is the virtual registration fee: 835 Euro!

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

A recent CACM article, supposedly about the limits of differential privacy (DP), reminds me that often arguments against DP are really arguments against *any* meaningful privacy protection. Let me give one example from the article: composition👇

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

A good number of these are *not* algorithms. What is the neural networks algorithm? The decision tree algorithm? The k-means algorithm? As a theorist, it really grinds my gears when people don't distinguish models, problems, and algorithms.

Santiago

@svpino

3 years

There are thousands of machine learning algorithms out there, but you'll rarely need more than a handful. A good start: • Linear/Logistic Regression • Decision Trees • Neural Networks • XGBoost • Naive Bayes • PCA • KNN • Random Forests • K-Means

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

1 year

Achievement unlocked: I see a result in a paper and I am not sure how to prove it; I check the reference they give, and it's an old paper of mine.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

How the 1958 Fields Medal was decided: ‘Hopf began by crossing off the list the two oldest nominees, Gårding and Bers...he ruled out Hirzebruch who “did not need further encouragement”...the 1958 awards went to Roth and Thom, [for being] promising but not too accomplished.’

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

The response by Williamson contains an interesting story: he and Goemans had been working on SDPs for Max-Cut, got stuck, and Williamson instead wrote his thesis on primal-dual approximation algorithms. Once the thesis was submitted, they had the random hyperplane idea.

SIAM Activity Group on Dynamical Systems

@DynamicsSIAM

3 years

Michel Goemans and David Williamson will receive the 2022 AMS Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research for their paper "Improved Approximation Algorithms for Maximum Cut and Satisfiability Problems Using Semidefinite Programming":

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

2 years

When I try to do math and my toddler gets hold of the iPad

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

11 months

@mattdsegal Not sure, how many hours does it take to learn what the sigma notation means?

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

1 year

A while ago I discovered that Theorem 10 in my 2014 paper was also proved in a 1989 article by Keith Ball. Today I decided to open this famous 1950 paper by Dvoretzky and Rogers, which has "my" theorem as their Theorem 5B.

Absolute and Unconditional Convergence in Normed Linear Spaces | PNAS

Absolute and Unconditional Convergence in Normed Linear Spaces

www.pnas.org

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

I was recently in a meeting with a *very* prominent biologist and a few other young scientists. One asked him how he picks people for his lab. He said, “If they ask about work-life balance, I don’t want them…If you are not going to be first then why do it?”

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

Please don’t be this guy!

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

@radcummings @markmbun I just spent half an hour freaking out if Jensen again goes the wrong way.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

Grad school me must’ve been the dorkiest person

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

Seriously..nothing against these three, but why are they the hobbies of 85% of academics that I meet?

Beliz Gunel

@belizgunel

5 years

There is a desperate need in academic research environments for people whose top 3 outside-work activities don’t include rock-climbing, hiking and board games. #academichatter

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

@roydanroy As an outsider to DL, I think this is bonkers. If your results are not robust to choosing a seed, then I don't see how you have any understanding of what's going on. If you don't have understanding, then I don't see the scientific value. Happy to hear if/why I am wrong.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

Let me amplify this one: I am looking for students interested in differential privacy or geometric algorithms. Please apply. Also if you are looking for a postdocs in algorithms or differential privacy, definitely apply to our group

Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

Many of us at our (large) theory group are also looking for PhD students! Please apply and mention the theory group and faculty you are interested in working with.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

I just sent off two 40 page papers to STOC, and I am very proud of both of them, but I also need someone to promise me they will read them, because academia can feel too much like shouting in a void.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

6 years

New paper with two amazing U of T undergrads . The problem is geometric transportation/Earth Mover’s distance: transport one discrete distribution on R^d to another to minimize total distance traveled. We get (1+eps)-apx in time n*polylog (n=total support)

Preconditioning for the Geometric Transportation Problem

In the geometric transportation problem, we are given a collection of points $P$ in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space, and each point is given a supply of $μ(p)$ units of mass, where $μ(p)$...

arxiv.org

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

@suriyagnskr Recently I checked reviews for a paper that was rejected from ICML because of many nonsense proofs, but made it into NeurIPS. The NeurIPS reviews were all “I don’t know this area but seems cool” ..I generally check reviews when I’m wondering “how the hell did this get in?”

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

11 months

Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

11 months

Here, for the people who say they find python easier to read than an equation. What is the output of np.sum([[0, 1, 3], [0, 5, 4]], axis=1)? (Don't look it up or run the code)

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Taught the first online lecture of my graduate Private Data Analysis course yesterday. The lecture was about attacks (a cat modelling the attack 👇). This year the course is hidden behind our LMS, but I will be posting updated lecture notes here

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

@ilyaraz2 Definitely taking care of this man who turned 10 months old recently. It’s the year I got tenure too, but I’ll remember it as the year I became a dad

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

Whenever I correct or simplify a proof in a review and then see a new version of the paper on arxiv, I check the acknowledgements and think, “Damn right you thank the anonymous reviewer!”

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Teaching these days

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

9 months

We have postdoc positions available at U of T’s theory group. I, in particular, would love to have a differential privacy postdoc. Lots of amazing people working in TCS, ML, privacy in the area! Here is the ad . Feel free to apply or share

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

Stages of a math proof: (1) “This is trivial. QED” (2) “Wait..it’s not trivial..is it even true?” (3) “I just hit this with the heaviest hammers I know, so it’s true. QED”

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

@ccanonne_ Cool fact: for any symmetric matrix A with eigenvalues λ=(λ1, ..., λn), the vector diag(A)=(A_11, ..., A_nn) is in the convex hull of permutations of λ. So for any quasi-concave symmetric function f you have f(λ) <= f(diag(A)).

Schur–Horn theorem - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

2 years

Some reviewer objects to the use of Byzantine in a paper (as in “Byzantine generals”), says it’s offensive because it’s used in a derogatory way. But who is it offensive to? The slit nosed ghost of emperor Justinian II? I’m so confused!

Kosta Derpanis

@CSProfKGD

2 years

#ICLR2023 review debate: Unethical use of language or nothing wrong? Share thoughts below. Full review:

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

1 year

A reviewer thought my proof had an error because they didn't believe asymptotically good codes existed. To be fair, it's one of those simple but amazing facts. I am excited to tell them about Gilbert and Varshamov .

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

My Facebook statuses from my grad school days are wild. What was I even doing..?

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

Happy birthday to our little man! 🎂

Anna Su ([email protected])

@theannasu

3 years

Don't often post personal stuff here but my son just turned a year old today and I just can't contain myself

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

One of the FOCS 2020 best paper awards goes to the beautiful work of @markmbun Roi Livni and Shay Moran showing that differentially private and online learning are equivalent (and video ). Congrats to them and all other winners!

TCS+ Talk: Mark Bun

Title: An Equivalence Between Private Classification and Online PredictionAbstract: We prove that every concept class with finite Littlestone dimension can b...

www.youtube.com

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Proud of you, Toronto! I wish I had seen this earlier, I was right where the plaque is last Sunday.

Jon Weier (he/him)

@jonweier

4 years

This is by far my favourite "historical plaque" ever. It is truly spectacular.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Accepted to COLT 2020, despite the fourth reviewer whose entire review was "..."

Gautam Kamath

@thegautamkamath

5 years

Locally Private Hypothesis Selection, with Sivakanth Gopi, Janardhan Kulkarni, Aleksandar Nikolov ( @thesasho ), Zhiwei Steven Wu ( @zstevenwu ), and Huanyu Zhang. How much does it cost to pick the best-fit distribution from k choices, under LDP? A thread. 1/n

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

I hope to see a response from @BellLabs or the Instahide authors to this post by Nicholas Carlini. I still don’t understand what Instahide is supposed to achieve and what the theorems in the paper have to do with it

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

2 years

It's almost two years later and I just had to do this again.

Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Who else has to google Cauchy-Schwarz to make sure there is no 't' in 'Schwarz'?

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

I'll bite: here I am, as a very eager 20 year old.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

I can’t believe I’m watching a guy on tv click counties for hours and tell me to be patient. Also things like “if you add you gotta subtract” #ElectionNight

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

I can’t stop thinking how perfect of an ending the Four Seasons Total Landscaping thing is for Trump’s presidency. Rudy Giuliani denying reality in front of a garage door next to a porn store while Trump is golfing.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Apparently Google is daycare for programmers who cannot care for themselves.

rat king 🐀

@MikeIsaac

4 years

praying for this googler who now has to work from home during these trying times

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

6 years

New paper where we analyze Brownian motion as an SDP rounding algorithm for CSPs. I feel there is a lot more out there that can be done with these techniques. Side benefit: a bunch of cool complex analysis goes into it.

TCS blog aggregator

@cstheory

6 years

Sticky Brownian Rounding and its Applications to Constraint Satisfaction Problems

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

2 years

@shortstein Gotta commit to a branch

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

(3) My old favourite, lines through point clouds. Regression don't lie, amirite?

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

New paper up, with amazing U of T student Deepanshu Kush and Haohua Tang (who was an undergrad while working on this): Near Neighbor Search via Efficient Average Distortion Embeddings . 🧵 [1/9]

Near Neighbor Search via Efficient Average Distortion Embeddings

A recent series of papers by Andoni, Naor, Nikolov, Razenshteyn, and Waingarten (STOC 2018, FOCS 2018) has given approximate near neighbour search (NNS) data structures for a wide class of...

arxiv.org

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

This is one of the more condescending and privileged things someone can say to a PhD student.

Andrew Fitzgibbon

@Awfidius

4 years

Q. "But, but, but.. mumble mumble scooped." A. Yes, that's likely to happen if you're doing the blindingly obvious next thing in a crowded field. Don't do that. Do something harder.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

Dream come true: I’m featured in @thegautamkamath ’s new coauthor series!

Gautam Kamath

@thegautamkamath

5 years

New co-author 4 is Aleksandar " @thesasho " Nikolov. Sasho is an assistant professor at @UofTCompSci . He's interested in high-dimensional geometry through applications to a number of areas, including differential privacy, NN search, and discrepancy. 1/n

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

We need to change this “attend to publish” system. It’s ridiculous and it hurts people 👇

Pin-Yu Chen

@pinyuchenTW

4 years

@FeiziSoheil My academic brother at Univ. Michigan, who is from Iran, received best paper award, but the conference didn't give it to him eventually, bc the conference was held outside US and he can't be there in person due to visa constraints. My advisor strived very hard but still in vain😐

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

So how do I explain to my 8 month old baby to sleep one hour longer on an arbitrary day in November? This is so stupid #DaylightSavingTime

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

@thegautamkamath Been rejected from grad schools, conferences, journals, jobs, fellowships.. It gets easier when you have had some success too, but still stings. Also, failing to solve math problems I’ve spent years on gets me down sometimes, and makes me doubt myself.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

11 months

Here, for the people who say they find python easier to read than an equation. What is the output of np.sum([[0, 1, 3], [0, 5, 4]], axis=1)? (Don't look it up or run the code)

array([4, 9])

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array([0, 6, 7])

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something else/show me

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

After years of talking about DP, Jon Ullman and I finally wrote a paper together . Also first paper with Alex Edmonds, supervised by me and Toni Pitassi. We give an essentially optimal algorithm to answer any set of statistical queries in local DP.

The Power of Factorization Mechanisms in Local and Central...

We give new characterizations of the sample complexity of answering linear queries (statistical queries) in the local and central models of differential privacy: *In the non-interactive local...

arxiv.org

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

2 years

One time in college another student (from the US) asked me if we celebrate Thanksgiving in Bulgaria, and when I said "no", they followed up with "is it because of your religion?" Anyways, happy Thanksgiving, Americans!

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

The theoretical computer science blogs I used to read as a grad student have largely become sad parodies of themselves.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

I do wish that in computer science we had more of a culture of telling complete stories in our papers. Of course you can't always do that, and sometimes you realize you didn't understand the story after all, but that's ok.

Gautam Kamath

@thegautamkamath

4 years

Comment from #ICML2020 reviews: "Reading it, one definitely feels this is a 'complete' research project --- studying a highly relevant problem in (area)." I love this! I make an effort to tell the "complete story" in a paper. It frustrates me endlessly when I can't.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

Hey, SICOMP, "native speakers", whatever that means, are not the keepers of good English. @TheSIAMNews

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

This makes the random hyperplane rounding algorithm one of the more remarkable “side projects” in a PhD.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Today was the last class of this deeply strange semester. My favourite thing about the last day is when students kindly send me off with applause. This time the applause was in the form of emoji. This is a weird new world and I can't wait for it to be over.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

Here is your reminder not to condition on zero probability events.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

New paper with PhD student Lily Li . We prove some algorithmic and hardness results about linear discrepancy, a quantity related to rounding (e.g., LP rounding). We also leave lots of problems open! To appear in ESA 2020. Small teaser in thread 👇 (1/4)

On the Computational Complexity of Linear Discrepancy

Many problems in computer science and applied mathematics require rounding a vector $\mathbf{w}$ of fractional values lying in the interval $[0,1]$ to a binary vector $\mathbf{x}$ so that, for a...

arxiv.org

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

Oh look, SMBC did a comic about research in theoretical computer science (h/t @sapiopath )

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

2 years

Same. Everyone moans about bad reviews in ML conferences, but no one can properly review 5 theory papers in 12 days. Please remind me to reject these invitations in the future

Yen-Huan Li

@yenhuan_li

2 years

I did not expect that ICLR would assign me 5 theory papers to review in 12 days. I should have rejected the reviewer invitation.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

As a high school student in Bulgaria I somehow ended up on the paintball team of the local technical university, for a tournament. Our first matchup was against the naval academy. We were all taken out in five minutes or less.

jon drake

@DrakeGatsby

3 years

Paintballing is fun but only if you go with people of comparable skill. The second I see somebody pull out a paintball gun with a collapsible shoulder stock I’m going to the bar.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

So Mochizuki is publishing his papers, gaps in proofs be damned, in the journal of his own institute, and he’s the editor in chief. Very classy

Davide Castelvecchi

@dcastelvecchi

4 years

After an eight-year struggle, Shinichi Mochizuki has finally gotten his 600-page proof of the abc conjecture accepted in a peer-reviewed journal. But some experts are still unconvinced. Photo credit: Kyoto University

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

11 months

@cjmaddison That's a very interesting theory

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

I keep getting scooped from the past too

Mad Men Quotes

@MadMenQts

3 years

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

2 years

This is more or less how I like to open my differential privacy grad course. While I aim to make my course accessible to non-theory students, there are theorems in it, because privacy guarantees require proofs.

Jelani Nelson

@minilek

2 years

I'm not the first to say this, but I'll repeat: an interesting thing about differential privacy is it needs theorems even in practice. You can implement heuristic algs that are fast on your data, but 'heuristic privacy' doesn't exist. A mechanism isn't private without a theorem.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

9 months

This looks really cool! With the right priority queue, Dijkstra's algorithm is universally optimal: for any graph G and any other algorithm A, there exist weights on the graph edges for which A would make at least as many comparisons as Dijkstra's.

Tim Roughgarden

@Tim_Roughgarden

9 months

A new and fundamental instance-optimality result 🤯 (Who knew there was still more to prove about Dijkstra's algorithm?)

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

1 year

Hardness of approximation papers acceptance rate was double that of approximation algorithms papers.

Clément Canonne

@ccanonne_

1 year

Acceptance rates by (self-declared) area at #STOC2023

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Going to appear in FOCS 2020 🎉

Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

New paper with Vivek Madan, @mohitsinghr , and Tao Tantipongpipat, the result of an awesome visit to Atlanta last August (which feels approximately a century ago). "Maximizing Determinants under Matroid Constraints"

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

1 year

When I was a new PhD student, putting full versions of papers on arxiv was not yet the norm in TCS, at least not in every subfield. Trying to fill in missing proofs from proceedings versions was a real struggle for someone who didn’t know the standard tricks yet.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

2 years

@chriswolfvision What I am taking away from this is that you can write any random nonsense in the ethics review and in the worst case it will be labeled an “emerging issue” by the ethics reviewers. What’s emerging here, is the Eastern Roman Empire coming back?

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

@k_leyton_brown I don’t think this says anything beyond “lots and lots and lots of people write lots of AAAI papers and cite each other”.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

If you didn't know, Toronto is now home to @TorontoSRI , an institute focusing on tech & society, with an impressive multidisciplinary leadership team . Excited to see what's coming! Also, some guy Sasho is a faculty affiliate.

Who We Are — Schwartz Reisman Institute

Located at the University of Toronto, the Schwartz Reisman Institute's mission is to deepen our knowledge of technologies, societies, and what it means to be human by integrating research across...

srinstitute.utoronto.ca

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

This thread is a great starting point for learning how differentially private algorithms can exploit problem structure to do better than "add iid Laplace noise". How the geometry of the queries asked affects optimal noise is something I have been working on since my PhD.

Thomas Steinke

@shortstein

4 years

@anonymity_R_Us @TedOnPrivacy Let me dig up a couple of specific references for these examples. It's hard to pick best 2-3 papers, since most of the Differential Privacy literature is about better ways to answer more queries.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

In this incredible 5 page paper , Hao Huang resolves the sensitivity conjecture, one of the best known open problems in boolean function complexity. He proves that sensitivity is at least the square root of the degree. 1/3

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

To the “let’s not publish theory because it’s so hard to verify” people, and to reviewers who think reviews are the place for playing conference politics.

Kunal Talwar

@_kunal_talwar_

4 years

@tourzhao I am sorry you had to read this and expect the AC ignore this. An incredibly bad take and the wrong place to express it. To those who find the points valid, you might also like my revised version below. All reviewers are free to use this to save time and kill the conference.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Another exciting announcement related to @TorontoSRI : I am proud to be among the inaugural faculty fellows, together with my colleague Nisarg Shah. Several terrific @UofTCompSci graduate students are also fellows: @david_madras , Elliot Creager, Evi Micha.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

Going to be presented at STOC in Chicago this summer!

Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

After years of talking about DP, Jon Ullman and I finally wrote a paper together . Also first paper with Alex Edmonds, supervised by me and Toni Pitassi. We give an essentially optimal algorithm to answer any set of statistical queries in local DP.

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

5 years

@mraginsky The second and half of the third line can be replaced by "let ||.|| be the standard \ell_2 norm". Who hurt these people?

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

4 years

Jirka is my favourite mathematical writer. I was lucky to co-author one paper with him, and seeing how he would change wording and notation in what I wrote, and how he would look for simplifications and intuition for every claim felt like a master class in exposition. (1/2)

Tim Roughgarden

@Tim_Roughgarden

4 years

Most underrated author of books in theoretical computer science/discrete math? My vote goes to Jiří Matoušek (taken from us way too soon).

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Sasho Nikolov ([email protected])

@thesasho

3 years

Thank you for the high quality Pens & Stationary content, twitter!

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