Category Archives: Cornell

Heartwarming

The colloquium speaker this week was Tom Leighton, an applied math professor from MIT who founded Akamai in the late 90s. Akamai now serves something like 20% of the web’s traffic and is worth on the order of $5 billion. The neat thing was that Leighton works in the Theory group at MIT. People often say that theoretical computer science is of no use in the real world, but Akamai’s techniques (based on consistent hashing, among other things) have certainly made a difference!

Courses and Such

I’ve spent most of the week being oriented and trained, and I’m finally ready to start real work. I’m still waiting for a grad student to return from Yahoo before getting too involved in my research, but at least classes have started. My probable course schedule is

  • Analysis of Algorithms (with Dexter Kozen)
  • The Structure of Information Networks (with Jon Kleinberg)

Advanced Programming Languages looks really good as well, but I think it’s going to have to wait until next year.