- A collection of AGT-related courses (more complete and up to date than the one on the sidebar of this blog) was compiled by Haris Aziz.
- The “Privacy Enhancing Technologies award” is given to Cynthia Dwork and to Frank McSherry and Kunal Talwar for their work on differential privacy as well as its relation to mechanism design. Congratulations.
- The NYT had a piece on whether Game Theory can predict whether Iran will get the bomb. The political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita says so also in this TED talk. Skepticism is of course in place. (Hat tip to Edna Ullmann-Margalit and to Gil Kalai.)
- It seems that the ever lasting discussion of which programming language to use for CS1 is heating up again. This round seems to be about moving from Java to Python. MIT’s switch from scheme to python last year is getting attention.
Assorted links
August 16, 2009 by algorithmicgametheory
Once more I must apologize for the misleading title of my blog post. The actual point of the essay is that MIT did not set out to switch languages. Rather, they set out to re-orient the freshman core courses (not the whole curriculum) in a certain way, and the language decision was merely a consequence of that. It has become clear to me that I did not express this clearly enough, so I’m adding this comment to avoid any confusion.
I agree with you, but that is usually the case: the language in a course is changed as a by product of changing the emphasis or focus of the course. (Still, the cacm blog did not put it this way.)
OT: I’m wondering if anybody can tell me where the best place is to study algorithmic game theory in North America, Australia or Europe…..preferably somewhere with both a strong economics department and a CS department active in algorithmic game theory. Thanks.
Once more I must apologize for the misleading title of my blog post. The actual point of the essay is that MIT did not set out to switch languages. Rather, they set out to re-orient the freshman core courses (not the whole curriculum) in a certain way, and the language decision was merely a consequence of that. It has become clear to me that I did not express this clearly enough, so I’m adding this comment to avoid any confusion.