The gentle ask

To ask or not to ask, that is the question

Appropriate Questions:  What are you looking for in a summer intern? (then be prepared to demonstrate how you fit those desired skills)  What has been your most interesting case/project in the past year?  What drew you to this employer/what was your path to this organization/firm?  I spoke with ______, the Michigan student who worked here two summers ago, and s/he said (fill in positive asp...

Ask the Children

A gentle introduction to

The PythonTEX package allows authors to combine computational and typesetting tasks by embedding Python code in TEX documents. This package allows access to many powerful Python modules, providing support for such things as symbolic mathematics, plotting, arbitrary precision numerical calculations, and networking. Python’s intuitive syntax, popularity, and extensibility along with TEX’s formatt...

A Gentle Introduction to the Kernel Distance

This document reviews the definition of the kernel distance, providing a gentle introduction tailored to a reader with background in theoretical computer science, but limited exposure to technology more common to machine learning, functional analysis and geometric measure theory. The key aspect of the kernel distance developed here is its interpretation as an L2 distance between probability mea...

Cryptographic Voting - A Gentle Introduction

These lecture notes survey some of the main ideas and techniques used in cryptographic voting systems. The write-up is geared towards readers with little knowledge of cryptography and it focuses on the broad principles that guide the design and analysis of cryptographic systems, especially the need for properly designed security models. We use a system proposed by Fujioka, Okamoto and Ohta as s...