Gautam Kamath

📢💥 Call for AAAI-26 Bridge Program Proposals (Deadline Extended to August 29)💥📢

We invite proposals for the Bridge Program of the 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26). The Bridge Program will be held January 20-21, 2026 in Singapore!

@realaaai.bsky.social

How to Ask for a Letter of Recommendation The end of the year is approaching at an alarming rate, which means that many students will require letters of recommendations for graduate school or jobs. These letters are written by more senior …

Full blog post here:
kamathematics.wordpress.com/2021/08/18/h...

I updated my blog post on how to ask for a letter of recommendation, with two tips for more established researchers:
- Describe some of your selected works and their significance/impact
- If you ask someone for a letter repeatedly, highlight the diffs wrt the previous version

Wow, NeurIPS is making reviewer scores disappear after Mandatory Acknowledgment, this is so mysterious! I wonder what the reviewer updated their score to... Oh.

Press X to doubt.

🚨 Got a great idea for an AI + Security competition?

@satml.org is now accepting proposals for its Competition Track! Showcase your challenge and engage the community.

👉 satml.org/call-for-com...
🗓️ Deadline: Aug 6

Congratulations to the entire🇨🇦Canadian team🇨🇦, which also includes Ryan Bai, Tiger Li, Zhekai Shen, Leo Wu, and Ming Yang (who tied for 12th place overall). We are proud of all of you.

How do I know him? I met him at the Canadian Computing Olympiad (CCO) last year, since he also is a top level competitive programmer. He won a silver medal at IOI 2023, and will be representing Canada again at IOI 2025.

Everyone's talking about AI performance on the IMO. Let me highlight 🇨🇦Canadian 11th grader Warren Bei🇨🇦, one of five participants with a *perfect* 42/42.

This is his *fifth* (and final) IMO representing Canada, with three golds and two silvers. (➡️ MIT undergrad in the fall)

New post on the Learning Theory Alliance blog, by Arsen Vasilyan. This covers the recently introduced testable learning paradigm of Rubinfeld and Vasilyan, from their STOC 2023 paper. A great chance to catch up on all the exciting work that's happened in this area!
www.let-all.com/blog/2025/07...

Youtube is borderline unusable on Chrome after adblockers have been disabled. Super annoying ads every 3-4 minutes.

Other relevant factors in conference location include civil rights, and carbon emissions.

Focusing on immigration, the truth is there's no perfect host country. Some are unable to enter the conference country. Some to be unable to leave the country they reside in.

There has generally been advocacy for having the conference in countries that have more permissive immigration for conference attendees. US is the most prominent country which has resulted in immigration challenges (Canada has issues on this front too).

For years, people have suggested having alternate NeurIPS locations, outside the US. 2025 is the first time it will be done, with satellite locations in Copenhagen and Mexico City.

I wonder if this will be a one-off thing, or whether the trend will continue.

L to R: Chengnian Sun and Hongyang Zhang in the Davis Centre

Chengnian Sun and Hongyang Zhang have each received $60k USD through the Google Research Scholar Program. Professor Sun’s project will focus on enhancing compiler optimizations; Professor Zhang’s project aims to improve the speed and efficiency of reasoning in LLMs.

cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/chengni...

There are many great researchers out there.

But the ones that really stand out to me are the ones who are also kind, even when they don't need to be.

Aseem Baranwal with Professor Fountoulakis at spring 2025 convocation

Aseem Baranwal has received the 2025 Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award. His PhD thesis, Statistical Foundations for Learning on Graphs, explores the theoretical underpinnings of machine learning methods for graph-structured data.

Congrats, Aseem!

cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/aseem-b...

Re-upping this post for any just landing at #ICML2025!

Some tips on how to make friends and socialize with other researchers at a conference

New podcast episode of "Probably Approximately Correct Learners," featuring guest Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io!

Check it out on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe so you don't miss out! (links in the next post) 1/2

Matthew Regehr awarded 2025 CPI Graduate Excellence Scholarship | Cheriton School of Computer Science | University of Waterloo A new article about Matthew Regehr, a PhD student who has been awarded the 2025 Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute Graduate Excellence Scholarship.

Congratulations to my PhD student Matthew Regehr (@matt19234.bsky.social) on winning the University of Waterloo CPI Graduate Excellence Scholarship!
This $10,000 prize recognizes his incredible achievements and potential in privacy research.
@uwcheritoncs.bsky.social
cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/matthew...

You would think that with so much competition to acquire top AI talent, very smart and competent people would make the choice to not use their abilities for pure evil

System is so broken:
- researchers write papers no one reads
- reviewers don't have time to review, shamed to coauthors, use LLMs instead of reading
- authors try to fool said LLMs with prompt injection
- evaling researchers based on # of papers (no time to read)

Dystopic.

Professor Xiao Hu at a blackboard

Professor Xiao Hu and her collaborators Binyang Dai and Ke Yi at HKUST have received a 2025 SIGMOD Research Highlight Award for their paper, Reservoir Sampling over Joins. This award marks the third recognition of her research excellence this year!

cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/xiao-hu...

Last week, a student asked me why I was carrying a crayon in my pocket.

Today, I have a panda keychain, a fridge magnet, and three rocks.

Some of you may understand.

Call for Competitions Competition proposal deadline: August 6, 2025 Decision notification: August 27, 2025

We’re happy to announce the Call for Competitions for
@satml.org

The competition track has been a highlight of SaTML, featuring exciting topics and strong participation. If you’d like to host one for SaTML 2026, visit:

👉 satml.org/call-for-com...
⏰ Deadline: Aug 6

Publishing great work can take many rejections and needs some confidence in the quality of your work

Professor Sepehr Assadi stands by a bench in Waterloo's Peter Russell Rock Garden.

Professor Sepehr Assadi has won the 2025 Presburger Award, a prestigious honour recognizing his exceptional contributions to theoretical computer science, in particular his pioneering work on establishing lower bounds for multi-pass streaming algorithms.

cs.uwaterloo.ca/news/sepehr-...

IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML), March 23-25, 2025, Munich Submission deadline: September 24, 2025

We're excited to announce the Call for Papers for SaTML 2026, the premier conference on secure and trustworthy machine learning @satml.org

We seek papers on secure, private, and fair learning algorithms and systems.

👉 satml.org/call-for-pap...
⏰ Deadline: Sept 24

"TMLR liked this" @tmlrorg.bsky.social

Thanks for the kind words Somesh!