23 de noviembre de 2010

Back to blogging in spanglish

Following the momentum given by Alejandro, I will also start writing in english. Well, actually I will do it either in english or spanish. I don't think I'll do it at the same time, mostly due to my increasing lazyness in the last couple of months.

The last two months I was simply overloaded with work at school, from TA work, reports, msc thesis, etc etc. Now, I'm finishing the thesis (but surely my advisors are going to give something else to add), passed the qualifying exam, finished sending two grant proposals (and writing a third one), I feel that I can start writing some posts.

It pains me to say that although my native language is spanish, I feel more comfortable writing in english. In the last 5 years, I only wrote one technical paper in spanish, so I think it's only a matter of practice though.

Well, what happened the last 2 months? For me, what I already mentioned above, but in the academic/internet world some very interesting stuff happened. For example, the recent breakthrough in computational complexity by Ryan Williams, i.e. NEXP not included in ACC0 (paper here). NEXP is known as the exponential NP and ACC0 is the class of languages with polynomial size circuits with bounded fan-in and constant depth with mod gates. Although ACC0 is a very low class, and NEXP is waay above, this "was" a open problem for more than 20 years! This paper presented a real progress in circuit lower bounds after all this time.

Also, the CSTheory stackexchange site is blooming! I was very disconnected from here also, but seeing the questions and answers today I can see that a lot more of people joined.

Finally, the QIP2011 programme is out!. Many interesting talks, but one caught my eye. "Quantum One-Way Communication can be Exponentially Stronger Than Classical Communication" by Oded Regev (paper here). This has been an open problem for around 10 years, and is very much related to what I'm doing.


0 comments:

Publicar un comentario