So, of the three (now two) courses that I am registered for this semester, one of them is Microeconomic Theory – it’s the first course in the PhD economics sequence. I think almost every economics student, no matter what school they are at uses one of two textbooks for the course. The texts are either: Microeconomic Theory (otherwise known as “Mas-Colell”) or Microeconomic Analysis by Hal Varian.  At Northwestern, we use a combination of the two texts but mostly work out of the dreaded “Mas-Colell”.  I was talking to a friend at Michigan, he informed me that they strictly used Varian until last year, now they use Mas-Colell too.

As as aside, anytime that Amazon lists a one of the key phrases from your text as “Mathematical Appendix” – you know you’re in for a fun ride.

Monday is the big micro midterm. So, over the past 24 hours, I’ve been living, eating, and breathing micro theory.  The elementary micro stuff is terrifying: choice theory, utility function constructions, expenditure minimization, utility maximization, and so on.  In order to get to what I’m really interested in: information economics, mechanism design, networks, etc, I have to pay my dues to “Mas-Colell”.  I’m not completely sure that I will even pass this course – I simply don’t have enough formal math background to construct the proofs to the level of quality they expect.   I’m giving it everything I have so at least if I fail, I’ll get as much information out of it as possible.  I’ll eventually catch up with the math, just not sure when…

Fortunately, it sounds like I’ll have far more scheduling flexibility next semester (taking linear programming this semester was a bad idea, I had to drop it). I think I am going to take one class in each department: communications, economics, and computer science.  I think this load may be more reasonable than what I am doing this semester.

Today is the third day of the FOCS conference here in Atlanta.  A couple of my colleuages are guest blogging over at Lance Fortnow and Bill Gasarch’s Computational Complexity blog this week.  You can go there if you want to see better coverage of the conference (and meaner comments).  Overall, the conference has been an interesting and horrifying experience.  The entire field of computational complexity and computational theory is so new to me and I have not even scratched the surface. There was not a single paper in the proceedings I was able to work through and by the fifth slide of most presentations, I was lost.  Not that the papers are bad or poorly written but I need to be exposed to this stuff over-and-over and seek to build expertise (they say it takes 10 years to become an expert in a field).  Hopefully, the next conference I’ll go to will be the ACM E-Commerce Conference in Cambridge this spring. I’ll be more familiar with the material presented there.  Also, there was some discussion about going to DEFCON next summer, just for kicks.

Atlanta is a weird city. We are staying at a hotel near Georgia Tech, in the “Midtown” neighborhood. I’ve never seen a city so empty! There are brand new high rises all over the place and the streets are consistently empty – sans the local homeless population.  Even the expressway outside of our hotel window seems to be empty, even during rush hour. Where is everyone?  The whole city looks like it was built since 1996 – I guess the olympics really did the town a favor (Sorry Chicago!).

My flight leaves at 10pm tonight, from Atlanta airport and arrives at O’Hare at 11pm. All that time in the airport should give me time to play Out of the Park Baseball 10, one of the best simulation games I’ve ever played. Then, I start studying for my micro theory exam next week.

Today is day 2 of the FOCS conference in Atlanta. Here is my current view from the back of the room.

FOCS from the back

I’m not really sure I got a whole lot out of the talks today. I’m still at the point, where all of this theory work is miles ahead of where I am at.  Futhermore, many of these talks are really specific to really narrow fields of computer science. For example, there are many people interested in problems of geometry, set theory, computational complexity, etc. My field (mechanism design, algorithmic game theory, and statistics) is represented here but only a handful of talks covered my field.  I think the talks at the “E-Commerce” seminar might be more useful and applicable to my interests.

So, since I don’t really understand most of the talks, I can get work done during the presentations. I’ve been working hard on the material for my micro theory course (tough!) and a couple websites for a friend that need to get done.

Well, hello. I’m sitting here in a hotel in Atlanta currently in the middle of the Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) conference. I’m not currently in a session, I’m sitting in the lobby of the hotel where the internet is free.  I would be sitting in my room but this hotel (Renaissance Atlanta) charges $13.00 a day for wireless access to the Internet. It irks me when hotels do that.

The content of this conference is very intense and since my theoretical computer science knowledge is limited (but growing), I can usually only follow the first 5 minutes of any given talk. After that, I get overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of discrete math. This morning, I had the chance to catch:

• Linear systems over composite moduli
  Arkadev Chattopadhyay and Avi Wigderson.
• Multiparty Communication Complexity and Threshold Circuit Complexity of AC^0
  Dang-Trinh Huynh-Ngoc and Paul Beame.
• The Communication Complexity of Set-Disjointness with Small Sets and 0-1 Intersection
  Eyal Kushilevitz and Enav Weinreb.

• On Allocating Goods to Maximize Fairness
  Deeparnab Chakrabarty, Julia Chuzhoy and Sanjeev Khanna.
• Online Stochastic Matching: Beating 1-1/e
  Jon Feldman, Aranyak Mehta, Vahab Mirrokni and S. Muthukrishnan.

I enjoyed the latter two more, since they were more applied than some of the other research being presented. The “Online Stochastic Matching” paper was presented by some guys from Google – who are looking to increase the effectiveness of their ad words system. As an applied guy in a theory program, it is refreshing to see an application of theory.

The first couple presentations I had a hard time following, not because of the speaker but because as a neophyte to Linear Programming it is hard to follow along with complex “LPs” (linear programs). I’m taking a course in linear programming at the moment, which is completely overwhelming. Fortunately, I feel like I understand much more linear programming than before but I have an enormous way to go still.

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