Recent Comments
non-theory
theory
Archives
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- November 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- September 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
a
Tags
Additive Combinatorics
Apple
Avi Wigderson
CCA security
circuit lower bounds
Conceptual contributions
cryptography
CS254 2010
eigenvalues
Expanders
Fields Medal
FOCS 2006
FOCS 2010
Hard-Core Sets
ICM 2006
Integrality gap
Leonid Levin
linear programming
Luby-Rackoff
maximum flow
Metric embeddings
Oded Goldreich
Proposition 8
pseudorandom function
Pseudorandomness
pseudorandom permutation
public-key encryption
quadratic residue
Random Oracle Model
Regularity Lemma
RSA
SAT
signature schemes
sparsest cut
Spectral partitioning
STOC and FOCS
Szemeredi Theorem
Tamar Ziegler
Terence Tao
things that are excellent
Tim Gowers
Turing Centennial
unique games
World Cup
Zero Knowledge
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
January 22, 2011 at 5:53 pm
Kamalika
Interesting site!
But as a machine learner, I should point out that the sample size seems way too small for the rankings to be stable,
particularly at the top and bottom. Of course unless they are doing some fancy active sampling, which I don’t think they are 
Currently, they have ~4800 votes for 68 schools; assuming uniform sampling, a certain pair of schools has appeared in a comparison about 2 times on an average; so the relative positions of say MIT vs. UC Berkeley, is really non-robust, and depend on just a few votes. Of course the coarse-grained positions are still okay…
January 22, 2011 at 7:59 pm
noamnisan
Comparing these results to the only other serious ranking that I know of — http://www.arwu.org/SubjectCS2010.jsp — these ones are similar but look a bit more “correct” to my eyes.
January 24, 2011 at 1:49 am
E. D.
All these rankings are useless. It is obvious, for instance, that in TCS, MIT is no better, if not worse, than any of the top 30 places.
January 26, 2011 at 11:54 pm
Varsha
Actually, more serious than Kamalika’s objection of small sample sizes is the fact that the site is pretty indiscriminate about how the data are collected. As far as I can tell, it will allow you to submit inconsistent votes (“A better than B” and “B better than A”, or “A better than B better than C better than A”, or “A better than B” and “I don’t know anything about A”). It also doesn’t seem to mind if you do something like always vote for the school on the left. Finally, as far as I can see, there is no limit on the number of votes cast, nor is there even a rudimentary check to see if the voter is human. So if one had the inclination and time, one could get these ratings to be whatever one wanted (although of course there is the separate question of why one would bother…)