Bocconi Hired Poorly Qualified Computer Scientist

Today I received an interesting email from our compliance office that is working on the accreditation of our PhD program in Statistics and Computer Science.

One of the requisites for accreditation is to have a certain number of affiliated faculty. To count as an affiliated faculty, however, one must pass certain minimal thresholds of research productivity, the same that are necessary to be promoted to Associate Professor, as quantified according to Italy’s well intentioned but questionably run initiative to conduct research evaluations using quantifiable parameters.

(For context, every Italian professor maintains a list of publications in a site run by the ministry. Although the site is linked to various bibliographic databases, one has to input each publication manually into a local site at one’s own university, then the ministry site fetches the data from the local site. The data in the ministry site is used for these research evaluations. At one point, a secretary and I spent long hours entering my publications from the past ten years, to apply for an Italian grant.)

Be that as it may, the compliance office noted that I did not qualify to be an affiliated faculty (or, for that matter, an Associate Professor) based on my 2016-2020 publication record. That would be seven papers in SoDA and two in FOCS: surely Italian Associate Professors are held to high standards! It turns out, however, that one of the criteria counts only journal publications.

Well, how about the paper in J. ACM and the two papers in SIAM J. on Computing published between 2016 and 2020? That would (barely) be enough, but one SICOMP paper has the same title of a SoDA paper (being, in fact, the same paper) and so the ministry site had rejected it. Luckily, the Bocconi administration was able to remove the SoDA paper from the ministry site, I added again the SICOMP version, and now I finally, if barely, qualify to be an Associate Professor and a PhD program affiliated faculty.

This sounds like the beginning of a long and unproductive relationship between me and the Italian system of research evaluation.

P.S. some colleagues at other Italian universities to whom I told this story argued that the Bocconi administration did not correctly apply the government rules, and that one should count conference proceedings indexed by Scopus; other colleagues said that indeed the government decree n. 589 of August 8, 2018, in article 2, comma 1, part a, only refers to journals. This of course only reinforces my impression that the whole set of evaluation criteria is a dumpster fire that is way too far gone.

Time Flies When the World is Falling Apart

It has been exactly one year since I moved to Italy.

Coming here a year ago, I expected that I would face some challenges and that there would be major life changes. Obviously, I did not know the half of it.

Tested by time

I was delighted (and not at all surprised) to hear that this year’s Turing Award will go to LeCun, Hinton, and Y. Bengio for their work on deep learning.

Like public-key cryptography, deep learning was ahead of its time when first studied, but, thanks to the pioneering efforts of its founders, it was ready to be used when the technology caught up.

Mathematical developments take a long time to mature, so it is essential that applied mathematical research be done ahead of the time of its application, that is, at a time when it is basic research. Maybe quantum computing will be the next example to teach this lesson.

By the way, this summer the Simons Institute will host a program on the foundations of deep learning, co-organized by Samy Bengio, Aleks Madry, Elchanan Mossel and Matus Telgarsky.

Sometimes, it is not just the practical applications of a mathematical advance that take time to develop: the same can be true even for its theoretical applications! Which brings me to the next announcement of this post, namely that the call for nominations for the FOCS test of time award is out. Nominations are due in about four weeks.

ERC vs NSF

The EU is often criticized for being a big, unwieldy bureaucracy. Here, however, are the review criteria for European Research Council proposals (from page 10 of this document):

Excellence is the sole criterion of evaluation

Here are the review criteria for the US National Science Foundation:

Reviewers evaluate all NSF proposals through the use of two National Science Board approved merit review criteria: Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts, which are based upon Merit Review Principles. Reviewers are asked to consider five elements in the review for both criteria. For more information on merit review principles and criteria, see PAPPG Chapter III.A.

(If you are keeping track, that’s two criteria and ten principles)

Guest post by Chris Brzuska: LGBTQIA Meeting at Eurocrypt

[I was delighted to receive the following guest post by Chris Brzuska about a meeting that took place last week during Eurocrypt in Tel Aviv. This piece will also appear in Omer Reingold’s blog. Let me take this opportunity for a couple of shoutouts. Next week it’s going to be two years since Italy, last among Western European countries, has instituted same-sex civil unions (yay!) and the parties that opposed it now have an absolute majority after the last elections (boo!). The Berkeley EECS department has an LGBT+ graduate student organization called QiCSE that organizes a very visible breakfast meeting during the visit days for prospective grad students and regular meetings during the school year – as much as I value Berkeley exceptionalism, think about creating something like this in your own school. It would be great if there was a LGBT+ meeting at STOC this year; I am not going to STOC this year, but maybe someone else can take the lead. And now, on to Chris’s beautiful essay. Congratulations, Chris!. — Luca]

I gender-transitioned two years ago, and Eurocrypt 2018 in Tel-Aviv is the first major conference I attend since then. I am a bit nervous. How much time does it take for 400 people to update my name and pronouns to use “Chris” and he/him? Two years feels like an eternity to me, but surely, some people will not have heard about my gender-transition. I will need to come out to some people.

Coming-out is very empowering, but after two years and uncountable coming-outs, I really wish that everyone knows that I am trans and gay.

A gay friend of mine remarks that when being bisexual/lesbian/gay, coming out is really never over, and one needs to come out again and again, to each new person. And really, he says, there is rarely a good time to bring it up.

“How come you didn’t know I am lesbian/gay?”, I heard from several friends, in shock, worried I might have wrongly assumed they are heterosexual.

How many LGBTQIA people are in our communities? I know some LGBTQIA people in the community, but how many more are there, and how can I find them?

This simple question leads to something which would become more important to me than I expected initially.

In the rump session, I give a coming-out talk, combined with an announcement for an LGBTQIA cryptographers meeting during the rump session break ( https://eurocrypt.2018.rump.cr.yp.to/4f756d069387ee90de62454a828a3b9b.pdf).

Giving this talk in itself was very nice. I enjoyed sharing my happiness with the community, see my happiness reflected in other people’s eyes. I enjoyed the many positive comments I received during the hours and days that followed, and the recognition of daring to be visible.

During the break, I am excited and nervous. How many people will come to the meeting? And who? More than 10 people come, most of which I knew without knowing they are LGBTQIA. We walk into the room, one by one, each with light in our eyes. We came out to each other, all of us, in that moment. It’s intimate, moving, exciting. Coming out remains deeply personal. It can be daunting, even in a warm, progressive environment such as our research community and even to an LGBTQIA subgroup.

After the rump session, we go to the gay-lesbian bar Shpagat in Tel-Aviv, in happy excitement. We are the last customers that night. The next day, during the breaks, we often find ourselves with a majority of LGBTQIA people in a conversation, we sit next to each other during talks. Something important happened.

In light of our increased visibility (to each other and to the community at large), there were more opportunities for coming outs the next days (or so was my impression, although I am only conscious of 2 explicit cases…). It was very liberating for me to share many of the following conference moments with LGBTQIA cryptographers who would add additional views to a heterosexual, cissexual perspective, and who would help me explain the sensitive issue of coming out to other caring members of our research community.

The research community is my permanent country of residence, my frame of reference, the source of almost all my long-term friendships – and enfin, in this country, there live quite a few LGBTQIA people, and the research community encourages us and shares our happiness.

We are going to organize more LGBTQIA meetings alongside cryptography-related conferences. I hope, there will be more such meetings inside and outside of CS. And we look forward to see the number of LGBTQIA researchers (that we are aware of) grow.

If you are an LGBTQIA researcher who wants to get in touch with us more discretely than at a public meeting (to talk to one of us, e.g., in the beginning of your PhD etc.), you can send an eMail to queercrypt@gmail.com. You can also use that eMail address to join our mailing list (for event announcements) and/or our WhatsApp group (include your phone number if you want to join the WhatsApp group). While the group centers around cryptography-related events, the group is not limited to researchers in cryptography.

Lies, Damns Lies, and Herbert London

I am grading the final projects of my class, I am trying the clear the backlog of publishing all the class notes, I am way behind on my STOC reviews, and in two days I am taking off for a complicated two-week trips involving planes, trains and a rented automobile, as well as an ambitious plan of doing no work whatsoever from December 20 to December 31.

So, today I was browsing Facebook, and when I saw a post containing an incredibly blatant arithmetic mistake (which none of the several comments seemed to notice) I spent the rest of the morning looking up where it came from.

The goal of the post was to make the wrong claim that people have been paying more than enough money into social security (through payroll taxes) to support the current level of benefits. Indeed, since the beginning, social security has been paying individuals more than they put in, and now that population and salaries have stop growing, social security is also paying out retired people more than it gets from working people, so that the “trust fund” (whether one believes it is a real thing or an accounting fiction) will run out in the 2030s unless some change is made.

This is a complicated matter, but the post included a sentence to the extent that $4,500 a year, with an interest of 1% per year “compounded monthly”, would add up to $1,3 million after 40 years. This is not even in the right order of magnitude (it adds up to about $220k) and it should be obvious without making the calculation. Who would write such a thing, and why?

My first stop was a July 2012 post on snopes, which commented on a very similar viral email. Snopes points out various mistakes (including the rate of social security payroll taxes), but the calculation in the snopes email, while based on wrong assumptions, has correct arithmetic: it says that $4,500 a year, with a 5% interest, become about $890k after 49 years.

So how did the viral email with the wrong assumptions and correct arithmetic morph into the Facebook post with the same wrong assumptions but also the wrong arithmetic?

I don’t know, but here is an August 2012 post on, you can’t make this stuff up, Accuracy in Media, which wikipedia describes as a “media watchdog.”

The post is attributed to Herbert London, who has PhD from Columbia, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relation and used to be the president of a conservative think-tank. Currently, he has an affiliation with King’s College in New York. London’s post has the sentence I saw in the Facebook post:

(…) an employer’s contribution of $375 per month at a modest one percent rate compounded over a 40 year work experience the total would be $1.3 million.

The rest of the post is almost identical to the July 2012 message reported by Snopes.

Where did Dr. London get his numbers? Maybe he compounded this hypothetical saving as 1% per month? No, because that would give more than $4 million. One does get about $1.3 million if one saves $375 a month for thirty years with a return of 1% per month, though.

Perhaps a more interesting question is why this “fake math” is coming back after five years. In 2012, Paul Ryan put forward a plan to “privatize” Social Security, and such a plan is now being revived. The only way to sell such a plan is to convince people that if they saved in a private account the amount of payroll taxes that “goes into” Social Security, they would get better benefits. This may be factually wrong, but that’s hardly the point.

Against a 61% Tax Increase on Berkeley Students

Currently, when graduate students work as teaching assistants, the university waives their tuition and pays them a stipend. Under current tax law, students pay income tax “only” on their stipend. A provision in the tax bill currently under consideration would count the waived tuition as income, on which the student would have to pay taxes as well.

A calculation by a Berkeley physics graduate student (source) finds that a student who work as TA for both semesters and the summer, is payed at “step 1” of the UC Berkeley salary scale, and is a California resident, currently pays ​$2,229 in federal income tax, which would become ​$3,641​ under the proposed tax plan, a 61% increase. The situation for EECS students is a bit different: they are paid at a higher scale, which puts them in a higher bracket, and they are often on a F1 visa, which means that they pay the much-higher non-resident tuition, so they would be a lot worse off (on the other hand, they usually TA at most one semester per year). The same calculation for MIT students shows a 240% tax increase. A different calculation (sorry, no link available) shows a 144% increase for a Berkeley EECS student on a F! visa.

This is one of the tax increases that go to fund the abolition of the estate tax for estates worth more than $10.9 million, a reduction in corporate tax rates, a reduction in high-income tax rates, and other benefits for multi-millionaires.

There is also a vox explainer, and articles in inside higher ed and the chronicle of higher education with more information.

If you are a US Citizen, and if you think that graduate students should not pay for the estate tax of eight-figure estates, you should let you representative know. Usually calling, and asking to speak with the staffer responsible for tax policy, is much better than emailing or sending a physical mail. You can find the phone numbers of your representatives here.

If you have any pull in ACM, this is the kind of matter on which they might want to make a factual statement about the consequences for US computer science education, as they did at the time of the travel ban.

ما همه ایرانی

Many people are angry and heartbroken at the consequences (on themselves, their loved ones, their friends and coworkers) of the executive order that has banned refugees, as well as legal immigrants and green card holders, from certain countries from entering the US for the next few months. A common question is, what can we do? A few possibilities:

• Donate to the ACLU. They have a long history of fighting for civil rights and, on Saturday, they immediately sprung into action and where able to get a stay on the ban, whose implications are still not clear.
  As you are contemplating donations, consider also supporting Planned Parenthood and the Southern Poverty Law Center. This is unrelated to the current refugees/immigrant crisis, but it is relevant to what will probably be future crises instigated by the current administration. (The SPLC does a great work in tracking and documenting hate groups.)
• Sign this petition, which has received significant media coverage
• Do what you can to make sure our professional societies produce a response. Both the outgoing and the incoming presidents of the AMS have signed the above petition, and I understand that the appropriate committee of the AMS  is considering making a statement. I don’t know if the ACM is planning a similar action, and if you have access to the ACM leadership, please lean on them to do so.
  (Edited to add: ACM put out a statement Monday morning, and so this the AMS.)
• Call your representatives in congress, especially if you live in a state with Republican senators or in a district with a Republican representative. Don’t email: call and ask to speak with the staffer who is responsible for immigration matters.
• Reach out to colleagues, students and staff who are affected by the executive order. If you have channels to do so, pressure campus leadership to cover their legal expenses, which could be substantial.

If you have other ideas, please share them in the comments.

We need to occupy unsafe spaces

Today an atmosphere of grief pervaded Berkeley, and a series of emails came from higher and higher up the chain of command, culminating with one from Janet Napolitano, reaffirming the University of California’s commitment to its principles of inclusivity, diversity, and all things that are good. Here is an email from the Vice-Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion:

Dear Cal Students, Staff, and Faculty,

We know that the results of yesterday’s election have sparked fear and concern among many in our community; in particular our immigrant and undocumented communities, Muslim, African American, Chicanx/Latinx, LGBTQ+, Asian and Pacific Islander communities, survivors of sexual assault, people with disabilities, women, and many others. We are reaching out to you with a message of support. UC Berkeley leadership remains steadfast in our values and committed to the safety and well-being of all of our students, faculty, and staff. We condemn bigotry and hatred in all forms, and hold steadfast in our commitment to equity, access, and a campus that is safe, inclusive, and welcoming to all.

Various communities have organized the following community spaces and resources:

• A community space for undocumented students tonight at 6:30pm in Chavez Room 105.
• CLSD and CLPR are hosting space at the Shorb House, 2547 Channing Way from 12pm-5pm for students to come by. Faculty and staff will be there in community with our students for support.
• MCC is holding a safe space for POC/Black students from 8pm-10pm this evening.
• QTAP is hosting a QTOPC dinner in Anthony Hall at 6pm.
• The Gender Equity Resource Center is open today, until 5pm, for those who wish for a quiet space for contemplation and community. GenEq is also hosting the following healing spaces:
  • Women’s Healing Space – Today, November 9th, 1pm-2:30pm
  • LGBTQ+ Healing Space – Today, November 9th, 2:30pm-4pm

Now, without discounting the value of having a good place to quietly sob with like-minded people, this strikes me as the message you would send after the Charleston shooting, or the Orlando shooting. This was not the act of one disturbed person. Sixty million Americans went to the trouble of going all the way to the polling place to vote for Trump, or of filling up their absentee ballot, and then mailing it in. That’s one in four adult Americans, a diverse coalition of white people: educated white people and less educated white people, male white people and female white people, religious white people and secular white people, and, one should note, even a few people who are not white. White people who thought it’s their constitutional right to discriminate against gay people, white people who think it’s ok to grab women by their pussy, and that you can get away with it if you are a star, white people who think muslims should not come to the US.

Our students will meet these people everywhere. They will be their neighbors, their coworkers, their bosses, and maybe their in-laws. When our students graduate, there will be no safe space.

And if there were, that is not where they should go. Because those sixty million people will not change their minds by talking among themselves.

But the oppressed cannot be left alone to speak out for themselves.

A feature of rape prevention programs is bystander intervention training: telling people how to recognize a situation in which someone is at risk of assault, and intervene.

We need white people to speak out against racism, christians to speak out for the religion freedom of non-christians, men to speak out against misogyny, straight people to speak out for LGBT people, Republicans to speak out against Trump.

And we need them to do this where it is not safe to do so, because otherwise all we have is angry people talking to the like-minded on the internet.

Edited to add a useful link

America is better than this

I stared into the abyss, and the abyss stared back into me and said “what the hell is wrong with you people up there?”