As has been announced by Lance and Mihai, Avner Magen just died in a climbing accident in Alaska (there's a memorial blog set up in his name).
I didn't know Avner personally, but I've "met" him through a few of his papers. Among the many things he did were some very nice early results in the theory of metric embeddings. With Nati Linial and Michael Saks, he showed how to embed trees into Euclidean metrics with low (O(log log n)) distortion. And in a later result, he showed how to do JL-style embeddings that preserved not only distances, but also higher order volumes (improvements here)
This last result has been of particular interest in some of the work I've been doing of late - we've been interested in arc-length preserving embeddings that relate to volume preservation, and I've also had a student looking at some near neighbor problems for higher dimensional objects.
It's very sad to read such recent works and know that the person who wrote them is no more. My condolences to his family and friends.
Showing posts with label memorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label memorial. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Rajeev Motwani Memorial
I just returned from the technical workshop and memorial in honor of Rajeev Motwani. The workshop was excellently run by Ashish Goel, and designed (extremely well, I thought) as a mix of retrospective and technical content, with one speaker presenting a brief retrospective and introduction, and a technical speaker laying out a body of work.
The topics were varied: they started with Sanjeev Khanna discussing matchings in random graphs (Rajeev's thesis work), and going onto brand new results in this area: for example, an expected time O(n log n) bound for matchings in d-regular bipartite graphs. Piotr Indyk talked about locality-sensitive hashing, David Karger talked about randomized min cuts, Aneesh Sharma discussed monetization problems in social networks, and Sudipto Guha concluded with a overview of data streams.
The talks were surprisingly technical: if I closed my eyes, I could have easily imagined being in a SODA conference room. The only difference was that people were actually paying attention, as opposed to clicking away on laptops (or tweeting!). It was a large crowd: over 100 people, by my casual count.
There were many retrospectives, given by Dick Karp, Jeff Ullman, Chandra Chekuri, and Ron Conway. Chandra spoke in particular about the experience of being Rajeev's student, and as a former student myself, his words touched me the most. He talked with feeling, compassion and honesty, and drew a compelling picture of a man that we began to know all over again.
There was a beautiful memorial service in the Stanford Church, with words in English and Sanskrit, a hauntingly beautiful hymn from the Vedas sung by Rajeev's elder daughter, and testimonials from colleagues and friends old and new. Don Knuth was the organist for the entire ceremoney, and played pieces you didn't think could be played on a church organ. After the service, and a reception, there was a concert by one of Rajeev's favorite bands, Indian Ocean. They played amazing music, and I'm downloading their songs as we speak, but that's a tale for another time.
It was good to go back and meet people who I knew so well for a brief period of time, and then lost touch with. Many (if not all) of Rajeev's former students were there, and there were many others who cohabited the Gates Building along with me. All of us older, a little grayer, but still recognizable :). Spread-apart families often only get together at weddings or at funerals, and this was one of those occasions where it was great to see everyone, but as we all kept murmuring "unfortunately it had to happen like this".
If I had to describe the feeling that dominated my thinking that day, it was a sense of being robbed. Upon hearing testimonial after testimonial, anecdote after anecdote, listening to this divine rock group that Rajeev listened to and loved, I could only wonder at the many sides of this person whom I knew so little of. I wished I had known more about him: that our interactions had been more multidimensional than that of advisor and student, and that I (and my fellow students at the time) had seen more of the ebullience and vivacity that others spoke so vividly of.
By the end, a new picture began to emerge, of a 'hub', a 'connector' and a 'facilitator', someone who had the clarity to know what people really needed to succeed, and the self-effacement to stand back and make it happen, by connecting people together. He helped legions, and legions came to bid him farewell.
It therefore seems oddly fitting that his career in research started with studying random matchings, and ended with new explorations of social networks. His life, one might think, has always been about creating, analyzing and enriching connections.
The topics were varied: they started with Sanjeev Khanna discussing matchings in random graphs (Rajeev's thesis work), and going onto brand new results in this area: for example, an expected time O(n log n) bound for matchings in d-regular bipartite graphs. Piotr Indyk talked about locality-sensitive hashing, David Karger talked about randomized min cuts, Aneesh Sharma discussed monetization problems in social networks, and Sudipto Guha concluded with a overview of data streams.
The talks were surprisingly technical: if I closed my eyes, I could have easily imagined being in a SODA conference room. The only difference was that people were actually paying attention, as opposed to clicking away on laptops (or tweeting!). It was a large crowd: over 100 people, by my casual count.
There were many retrospectives, given by Dick Karp, Jeff Ullman, Chandra Chekuri, and Ron Conway. Chandra spoke in particular about the experience of being Rajeev's student, and as a former student myself, his words touched me the most. He talked with feeling, compassion and honesty, and drew a compelling picture of a man that we began to know all over again.
There was a beautiful memorial service in the Stanford Church, with words in English and Sanskrit, a hauntingly beautiful hymn from the Vedas sung by Rajeev's elder daughter, and testimonials from colleagues and friends old and new. Don Knuth was the organist for the entire ceremoney, and played pieces you didn't think could be played on a church organ. After the service, and a reception, there was a concert by one of Rajeev's favorite bands, Indian Ocean. They played amazing music, and I'm downloading their songs as we speak, but that's a tale for another time.
It was good to go back and meet people who I knew so well for a brief period of time, and then lost touch with. Many (if not all) of Rajeev's former students were there, and there were many others who cohabited the Gates Building along with me. All of us older, a little grayer, but still recognizable :). Spread-apart families often only get together at weddings or at funerals, and this was one of those occasions where it was great to see everyone, but as we all kept murmuring "unfortunately it had to happen like this".
If I had to describe the feeling that dominated my thinking that day, it was a sense of being robbed. Upon hearing testimonial after testimonial, anecdote after anecdote, listening to this divine rock group that Rajeev listened to and loved, I could only wonder at the many sides of this person whom I knew so little of. I wished I had known more about him: that our interactions had been more multidimensional than that of advisor and student, and that I (and my fellow students at the time) had seen more of the ebullience and vivacity that others spoke so vividly of.
By the end, a new picture began to emerge, of a 'hub', a 'connector' and a 'facilitator', someone who had the clarity to know what people really needed to succeed, and the self-effacement to stand back and make it happen, by connecting people together. He helped legions, and legions came to bid him farewell.
It therefore seems oddly fitting that his career in research started with studying random matchings, and ended with new explorations of social networks. His life, one might think, has always been about creating, analyzing and enriching connections.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Memorial Workshop for Rajeev Motwani: Update
I had mentioned a memorial workshop for Rajeev Motwani to be held at Stanford Friday Sep 25. Registration is now open for the workshop and the memorial service to follow.
Registration is free, but mandatory. So if you plan on attending either the workshop or the service or both, make sure you register.
Registration is free, but mandatory. So if you plan on attending either the workshop or the service or both, make sure you register.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Memorial Workshop for Rajeev Motwani
Plans have been in the offing for a memorial workshop for Rajeev Motwani, and now the details are available. Below is the announcement (sent by Ashish Goel):
Dear friends,I'll update this post with the registration URL when it becomes available.
As you might know, our dear friend and colleague, Rajeev Motwani, passed away in a tragic accident on June 5, 2009. We are holding a technical workshop titled
Randomized Algorithms: Theory and Applications
at Stanford University on Sep 25th, 2009, from 10am - 2:30pm to honor Rajeev's research in the area of algorithms and their applications. If you did not know Rajeev's research, please see http://www.stanford.edu/~ashishg/cgi-bin/RememberingRajeev/ for a brief introduction.
The workshop will take place at the Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall. Workshop attendees are also invited to a memorial celebration starting at 4:00pm at the Stanford Memorial church, followed by a performance by one of Rajeev Motwani's favorite bands, Indian Ocean. The registration URL, web-page information, parking directions, and talk titles will follow in a later email.
Registration will be free, but mandatory. Please feel free to bring this to the attention of any colleagues/students who you think might wish to attend, and send me an email if you have any questions.
Workshop program:
10 - 10:45 am
Welcome remarks
Retrospective by Richard Karp, UC Berkeley
Technical talk by Sanjeev Khanna, University of Pennsylvania
10:45 - 11:30 am
Retrospective by Jeff Ullman, Stanford University
Technical talk by Piotr Indyk, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
11:30 am - 12:15 pm
Retrospective by Chandra Chekuri, University of Urbana-Champaign
Technical talk by David Karger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
12:15 - 1:30 pm
Lunch for registered attendees
1:30 - 2:30 pm
Retrospective by Ron Conway, Venture Capitalist
Technical talk by Sudipto Guha, University of Pennsylvania
Technical talk by Aleksandra Korolova, Stanford University
The Scientific committee for the workshop consisted of:
Moses Charikar
Ashish Goel
Richard Karp
Prabhakar Raghavan
Tim Roughgarden
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