Sijing Tu

A very nice summary by Stefan of our recent publication "Optirefine: densest subgraphs and maximum cuts with k refinements". With @stefanresearch.bsky.social, Aleksa Stankovic, and @aris-gionis.bsky.social

A Simple and Combinatorial Approach to Proving Chernoff Bounds and Their Generalizations The Chernoff bound is one of the most widely used tools in theoretical computer science. It's rare to find a randomized algorithm that doesn't employ a Chernoff bound in its analysis. The standard pro...

I love this paper by Bill Kuszmaul.
His proof of Chernoff bound is much more illuminating than the standard algebraic proof I learned.

Induction of social contagion for diverse outcomes in structured experiments in isolated villages Certain people occupy topological positions within social networks that enhance their effectiveness at inducing spillovers. We mapped face-to-face networks among 24,702 people in 176 isolated villages...

"By strategically targeting a subset of individuals with the appropriate intervention, governments, aid agencies, and NGOs may find a more cost-effective way to diffuse new products." Yes, this is true. For more, see:

www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Found slides by Ankur Moitra (presented at a TCS For All event) on "How to do theoretical research." Full of great advice!

My favourite: "Find the easiest problem you can't solve. The more embarrassing, the better!"

Slides: drive.google.com/file/d/15VaT...
TCS For all: sigact.org/tcsforall/

Bringing leaders of network subgroups closer together does not facilitate consensus - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Bringing leaders of network subgroups closer together does not facilitate consensus

In work out in December 2024, Matt Jones and I conduct experiments to study the role of leadership within factions of larger groups of people who are struggling to reach consensus on a contentious topic.

www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natureportfolio.bsky.social 1/

The theorem, giving Bennett-type concentration bounds for Poisson random variables.

A little tired, so going back to one of my "favorite" results about Poisson random variables: Bennett-style concentration inequalities, both for upper and lower tails.

Now, why do I like it? Besides its usefulness, one of the proofs is really insightful and cute (IMO). (I didn't come up with it.)

YouTube video by Institute for Advanced Study Reading Alan Turing - Avi Wigderson

An advent calendar of some of my favourite TCS/Maths talks. Day #1: Avi Wigderson on Reading Alan Turing.

It is a gem of a talk, full of insights about Turing's work, writing style, and influences on mathematics and computer science. Pure joy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Uk_...

This conversation is the teaching version of a longstanding debate in TCS: is theory worthwhile per se, or should it always be motivated by applications? In the mid-90s, there was a famous debate about this between two pairs of TCS luminaries: blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2016/06/karp.... 1/

Cool paper on political sorting in the US labor market, based on an inventive effort merging LinkedIn profiles with public voter files to create a panel of 35 million Americans with information about employment and political party registration. sahilchinoy.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/chinoy_polit...

Your friends have more friends than you do. This is known as the "friendship paradox."

But, thankfully, your enemies have more enemies than you do, too. In 2023, we called this the "enmity paradox." 1/

A quick thread on this short (3 page) paper appearing in SODA, giving a simple algorithm that makes predictions guaranteeing 2*Sqrt{T} "Distance to calibration" against an adversary. The result so simple I can describe it in thread. Joint with Eshwar, @ncollina.bsky.social, and Mirah:

Hi Chenchen, could you please kindly remove me from the list? Many thanks!
It seems I can not DM you; hence I am commenting here :)

Very interesting findings!

Very interesting findings!

GitHub - brianckeegan/bluesky-datascience: Exploratory notebooks for data science using Bluesky data Exploratory notebooks for data science using Bluesky data - brianckeegan/bluesky-datascience

Here is a @github.com repo where I will share tutorial notebooks on how to retrieve and analyze data from @bsky.app @atproto.com

Feedback, suggestions, and contributions are welcome!

github.com/brianckeegan...

We are hosting the 11th International Conference on Computational Social Science in Sweden
🚀The IC2S2'25 website is LIVE, and submissions are OPEN!
📍Norrköping | July 21-24, 2025
Call for Abstracts (until Feb 24)
Call for Tutorials (until Jan 17)
🔗Explore details & submit: ic2s2-2025.org