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Thursday, August 09, 2007
Theorists who got jobs for fall07-where?
Posted by GASARCH
Aravind Srinivasan: I have a great idea for a Blog Post!
Bill Gasarch: What is it!
Aravind Srinivasan: We all know where Scott Aaronson ended up- MIT, but where did the other theorists on the market end up!?
Bill Gasarch: Living in a cardboard box with a sign saying ``will prove theorems for food'' !?
Aravind Srinivasan: No, thats for Math PhD's! The blog should ASK theorists who got a job in Fall 2007 to tell us where they got their jobs so we'll all know!
Bill Gasarch: Okay, I'll do it!if you are a theorist who got a job starting in Fall 2007, please leave a comment telling us where it is and anything else you want to add about the job market, or life, or whether pi should be 2*pi, or anything else you care to expouse on.4:49 PM #
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I am starting at SUNY Buffalo this fall.
--Atri Rudra
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This is a communication problem, so why not use the "number on the forehead" model?
Subhash Khot -> NYU
David Woodruff -> IBM Almaden
Vitaly Feldman -> IBM Almaden
Julia Chuzhoy -> TTI, Chicago
Jason Hartline -> Northwestern
Nicole Immorlica -> Northwestern
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pi should be 2.71828182845904523536...
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Two more:
abhi shelat --> University of Virginia
Hoeteck Wee --> Columbia University (postdoc)
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Nir Ailon -> Google
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bill, you are fairly accurate in what you have attributed to me, but not in the slander of Math PhDs :)
aravind
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Sean Hallgren -> Penn State
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It's amazing how bad the job market is, with people going to places that are much below what their deserve!
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To the contrary, I am very heartened to see theorists getting these many positions (perhaps more that will be posted here soon) in good places. It's a safe bet that this list is comparable to any other field of CS for this year's hiring.
aravind
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Following up on my previous post, I also suggest to the prior anon-poster to take a broader view of what makes a place "good" etc. A few great hires can be transformational -- see, e.g., the GATech theory group! Similarly, Courant has always been very strong in theory, but more in algorithms than in complexity -- with Naor and Khot there now, we can probably expect very good things to happen. Similarly, I am very glad to see two strong algorithmic-GT folks go to NWU .. aravind
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A bunch of theorists joined Microsoft Research Theory group as postdocs.
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who? give us a list! (interesting post)
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Following up on my previous post, I also suggest to the prior anon-poster to take a broader view of what makes a place "good" etc. A few great hires can be transformational -- see, e.g., the GATech theory group!
What makes a place good is not just your colleagues but also the quality of students that you will get to work with. Granted that a few good hires will ensure a really strong faculty, but will it drastically change the quality of students that they are going to get? GATech is a non-example because they get good students anyway. Those excellent hires just made their department stronger and ensured that these students had faculty members to work with.
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Outside North America:
Harald Racke -> Warwick
Rahul Santhanam -> Edinburgh
Amin Coja-Oghlan -> Edinburgh
Postdocs:
Satyen Kale -> Microsoft Research
Yuri Makarychev -> MS Research
Anup Rao -> IAS
Sergey Yekhanin -> IAS
Adi Akavia -> IAS
Nikhil Devanur -> TTI, Chicago
Emanuele Viola -> Columbia
Andrej Bogdanov -> Tsinghua
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Konstantin Makarychev -> IBM TJ Watson
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Xi Chen --> IAS (postdoc)
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Aranyak Mehta -> Google Research
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Google Research
What is "Google Research"? Isn't that just good ol'Google? Or did they start a research division (meaning, people there will actually publish)?
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Ryan Williams -> Carnegie Mellon (postdoc)
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Anon#18: Maybe you should try googling up "Google research".
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Lance Fortnow -> Northwestern
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Anon #20:
The best information seems to be at http://research.google.com, but it hardly says anything. My guess is that "Google Research" is not in fact a separate organization within Google, but is just a web site meant to advertise the papers published by Google employees. However, I can't be sure based on this vague web site. Am I wrong?
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Fortnow to Northwestern? Unless the Wildcats drove a dumptruck full of money up to his house, I find it awfully hard to believe. Is there anything to back this up???
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How about a symmetric post: who is going to be on the job market next year?
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...who is going to be on the job market next year?
Didn't you know? Everyone's always on the job market, it's just a matter of how actively they are looking. =)
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Irit Dinur --> Weizmann
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The comment about "Google Research" is funny. It may not match your definition of a research group, but the group definitely exists. It's definitely not a place to hide and do complexity.
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Thanks for the post! Given that the number of positions appear to be shrinking each year, I think we should as a community maintain some awareness of whether everyone graduating who wants to stay in research does manage to do so.
It seems like we have fairly comprehensive coverage of the Princeton graduates and Microsoft post-doc/staff. How about the Harvard graduates, the Stanford graduates and the Israeli cryptographers?
It'd also be interesting to get tallies of other kinds, e.g.
-- How many people ended up joining google as developers/software engineers or hedge funds? I'm aware of two in each of the two categories, three of whom had definitely done some very very nice work in grad school.
-- Which places apart from the usual suspects of Microsoft, IBM, TTI and IAS ended up offering post-doc positions? Were there many such positions?
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p.s.: cornell folks are glaringly unaccounted for!
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(unconfirmed)
Danny Harnik -> CWI (postdoc)
Enav Weinreb -> CWI (postdoc)
Benny Applebaum -> Princeton (postdoc)
Shien Jin Ong -> finance (by choice)
Hovav Shacham -> UCSD
What other Stanford/Harvard students were there?
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"cornell folks are glaringly unaccounted for!"
I am always annoyed by such stupid comments. There are several great students in other universities (with 4-5 STOC/FOCS papers by the time of graduation, if this is your metric) that are unaccounted for also.
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I think my comment about cornell folks was misinterpreted at two levels:
first, I was just picking a school from which I'm guessing quite a few students should be on the post-doc or permanent job market this year (e.g. look up Kleinberg's list of students).
second, I was pointing an omission, that's glaring only because of the number of people that'd fit the criterion (which in this case, is a grouping by school). I wasn't saying everyone else whom I didn't point out as having been omitted are unimportant.
In fact, I also agree that "several great students in other universities that are unaccounted for also". I'm omitting the quantification in parentheses because that isn't my metric. That said, I wasn't about to start listing individuals.
It's unfortunate that the remark was misinterpreted from such a myopic perspective.
As written earlier, part of my motivation for asking is to understand whether "everyone graduating who wants to stay in research does manage to do so".
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p.s. I looked over my comment and realized there were a few dangling references:
1. the quantification in parentheses refers to anon #31's quantification on number of FOCS/STOC papers.
2. the remark (second last line) refers to my earlier p.s. note about cornell folks.
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Robert Krauthgamer -> Weizmann
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Well, "theory grad student, sorta", it's you who brought up this silly grouping by school. We're interested in theory as a discipline here, rather than in these absurd clannish divisions.
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...part of my motivation for asking is to understand whether "everyone graduating who wants to stay in research does manage to do so".
Having just had a student who graduated and will be going to industry, I don't think raw statistics will give you the answer you are looking for. (Instead, you will need to speak to people individually.) In my student's case, he had offers from low-ranked academic institutions, but decided that an industry (non-research) job would be more fulfilling. (He's probably right.) Does this count as someone who "wanted to stay in research but couldn't"? Or does this count as someone who looked at research life at a non-top university, and made a conscious decision that it was not what he wanted?
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Sadly, I see that another brilliant young theoretical computer scientist has also been glaringly unaccounted for in this discussion. If you know who I am talking about, please be sure to give us an update on this person.
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Chiu Yuen Koo -> Google
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This post has been removed by the author.
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Vladimir Trifonov -> UIC (postdoc in math)
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Since the STOC/FOCS metric was bad-mouthed here, can you please explain how exactly do you define "brilliant"?
Some people listed here have very few publications. So what's the metric? How long can you be very promising without publishing??
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The STOC/FOCS metric was discussed ad nauseum in a prior thread, and it was generally agreed upon that it does not measure brilliance unless one calibrates against sexual magnetism. The point being that anyone can write many STOC/FOCS papers if that's all they spend their time doing.
This led to the introduction of the L-index: Your L-index is at least k if you have k papers such that during the writing of each paper, you went on at least k dates.
This resulted in the first ever accurate comparison of Mihai Patrascu and his advisor Erik Demaine whose L-indexes are 18 and 2, respectively.
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To anon 42: Please write more! I am dying to know everyone's L-index. What is yours?
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okay, i know im real late but i havent read this in a while. i really like comments #21 and #23, though i guess its only in retrospect since i read Lance's later post which confirmed comment #21 first. also, i really like comment #42, and as a result, agree with #43 (to some degree). too bad i cant add anything of substance.
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