I’m TAing Discrete Math for Professor Nick Gravin this semester (2025 Spring). We’ve introduced extra problems—a set of challenging bonus questions that provides extra credits, meant for students who find the regular coursework too easy. The goal is to provide meaningful enrichment, but we’ve encountered a mechanism design problem: How do we structure rules and incentives so that students put in genuine effort, avoid academic dishonesty where they copy from each other to get scores, and maintain fairness in the grading process?...

Professor Shang-Hua Teng from USC is visiting our institute (ITCS@SUFE) today. A distinguished mathematician and theoretical computer scientist, Professor Teng shared valuable career insights during an open panel discussion. Later, he delivered a talk on his recent work, Regularization and Optimal Multiclass Learning, co-authored with Julian Asilis, Siddartha Devic, Shaddin Dughmi, and Vatsal Sharan, and presented at the Thirty-Seventh Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2024. Professor Teng and my advisor met at Tsinghua almost 20 years ago and remain close collaborators and friends since then....

At the end of my USC PhD open day visit, I went to Frank Lévy’s concert “An Hour With Rachmaninoff” at Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford. Professor Lévy commented on Rachmaninoff’s nostalgia. Rachmaninoff’s deep nostalgia was largely due to his forced exile from Russia after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Before the revolution, Rachmaninoff was already a major composer, pianist, and conductor in Russia. He had a beautiful estate called Ivanovka, where he composed much of his early music, surrounded by the rolling Russian countryside that he loved....

I was on a flight back to Shanghai when I read an article about Rose (from BlackPink) and her new song, “APT,” featuring Bruno Mars. I was smitten after a single listen. The sound was mesmerizing. After first hearing the song, I found myself humming the chorus wherever I went. I was hardly the only one. Presumably, a considerable number of readers are still captive to that spell. You know the chorus I’m talking about: a-pa-teu, a-pa-teu, a-pa-teu, a-pa-teu…...

I used to be really into modern art—especially the 1960s—when I was in high school. Teenagers tend to distance themselves from their own culture or from whatever’s popular, I guess so they can feel “iconic.” Honestly, I was just being avant-garde for the sake of avant-garde: hanging up a Marilyn Monroe print in my bedroom, thinking it was cool that none of my friends got it (not that I fully did, either, as I later realized)....

March 15th is World Consumer Rights Day—to raise global awareness about consumer rights and needs, and to demand respect and protection for all consumers. In China, the day is marked by a two-hour prime-time show on state-run China Central Television (CCTV), where brands are publicly criticized for issues like poor-quality products, robocalls, and illegal collection of personal information. Reporters often would spend months or even years under disguise in those problematic industries to finally unveil the truth on this day....

“Chopiniana,” also known as “Les Sylphides,” is a ballet choreographed by Mikhail Fokine, set to music by Frédéric Chopin, and premiered in 1907 as a “romantic reverie”. It’s a ballet blanc—where all ballerinas wear white dresses or tutus. Mariinsky Theatre premiered the ballet in 1907. The music is very beautiful. And the choreography has magic. Fokine’s Chopiniana is an homage to the Romantic era with its white ballet, fleeting arabesques, airy dances of ethereal sylphides and perpetual longing for perfection....

This is the second reading note of paper “Strategic Experimentation with Exponential Bandits”, following the previous post that describes the single-agent basic model: a continuous two-armed bandit: one risky (R) arm + one safe (S) arm. Model: When There Are More Than One Agents Players each have replica two-armed bandits. They share the same prior belief (over whether the Risky arm is good or bad), the same discount rate, and information is public....

This is the reading notes of “Strategic Experimentation with Exponential Bandits” by Godfrey Keller, Sven Rady and Martin Cripps, published in Econometrica, 2025. I think it is a really cool theoretical economic paper, because the math is solid, elegant and inspiring. For more details, please refer to the original paper. The following are notes for the models and and results for reference, if one wants to quicly grasp the intuition....

Brahmn’s music speaks love. And the story goes: [The story] has been pieced together from personal letters between Clara, Brahms, and friends. Robert Schumann was Brahms’ mentor. Brahms got close to Schumann’s wife Clara as Robert was drifting off into madness (likely related to syphilis). Clara and Brahms wrote letters to one another as if lovers, but after Schumann’s death, Brahms left Clara to move on with his career, although they still kept in touch, and were affectionate whenever the met....