In grad school I collaborated with Chris Adami on some papers about black holes. We suggested that some of the mysteries surrounding black holes may evaporate if you correctly include the effects of stimulated emission. Chris is presenting some of these results now at the APS meeting, and on his new blog. (paper)

Can we measure the effect of one person’s words on another person? I want to describe the main idea behind my recent paper, Information-Theoretic Measures of Influence Based on Content Dynamics, which I’m presenting at WSDM 2013. Ostensibly, information theory is a dry, academic subject about how to send 0’s and 1’s through a noisy channel (like […]

New preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.4475. The title is changing to: “Information-Theoretic Measures of Influence Based on Content Dynamics”. I’ll give a detailed, readable summary in a week or two. I’ll be presenting about this at WIN workshop, so please come! For now, imagine the following problem. There are hundreds of people in a large room talking to each […]

Sadly, I was not born with a sensical one-word last name, leading to various problems throughout life. For googling purposes, the all-too-common misspellings: GV Steeg Greg Steeg Greg VerSteeg

Next month on April 9 I’ll give a talk for UC Irvine’s AI/ML seminar. The next week I’ll fly to Lyon, France for WWW (the World Wide Web conference). I’ll be giving a talk at a workshop before WWW called “Making sense of micro posts”. Then I’ll present my and Aram Galstyan‘s paper “Information Transfer in […]

I’m teaching a graduate course this term at USC with Aram Galstyan called “Physics and Computation”. Basically, it shows how we can use statistical physics to understand problems in computer science. Hopefully I’ll post some details about the class later.  For now, here’s the main text we’re using: Information, computation, and physics. In a classic […]

UAI 2011 has ended, and it went really well. I was happy with my talk and surprised at how many people at UAI were interested in quantum stuff! There were many interesting presentations but I want to mention one in particular because it’s on my mind and it has a nice connection to my talk. […]

I’m happy to unveil a new paper, “A sequence of relaxations constraining hidden variable models”. Depending on your interests, I’m including two different overviews. One comes from the social networks perspective and the other from the quantum physics perspective. Fundamentally, they are both about detecting hidden variables. I’ll be giving a plenary talk about this […]

My ISI web page got moved to a new framework, so it could get integrated with our group web page more easily. After several hours of work, the result is marginally better looking than my old web page.