Travel to the Bay Area

Typically when I travel to the Bay Area, I feel like a horse with blinders, my sights focused on meetings and what needs to be accomplished. Last week, I looked around more than usual and had some interesting conversations:

• Moshe Babaioff: Structure of subdominant strategies and their usefulness.
  
• Aranyak Mehta: That is so paperware!
• Ashish Goel: What will be an open architecture for auction platforms? (like OpenFlow is for IP routing).
  
• Lars Backstrom: Say people vote only when their votes matter. Dynamics in small committees.
• Sivakumar: What is the rate of growth of information consumption?
• Ravi Kumar: PTAS for Jacard median. Interesting stuff. Ravi has been giving plenary talks, we need to see the slides, we need to see the slides....
• Jasson Schrock: new YouTube skins.
• Kunal Talwar: Is budget-limited auction design a foundational research problem of interest?

And many others. In some cases, I am still continuing the conversations in my head. :)