Stories
Curated narratives that connect the dots between papers, courses, and key concepts.
Interpolation Can Be Harmless
The classical warning about overfitting fused two claims: that a model fits noisy data exactly, and that the fitted noise must damage predictions elsewhere. A Fourier sampling toy separates them — and turns “benign overfitting” into something you can calculate.
Spectrum Jails: Engineering Trust After the Fact
Cognitive radios promised flexibility that regulators could not certify line by line. Drawing on law and economics, this work asked whether identity, liability, and future sanctions could replace trust in a radio's internal design, then followed the technical tradeoffs that appear when deterrence, rights, commitment, and reputation must operate through real observations.
Witsenhausen's Counterexample: When Actions Speak
A tiny decentralized-control problem broke the linear logic of classical LQG. Connecting it to communication and information theory turned that warning into a program of constructions, converses, approximation guarantees, and new ways to see information hidden in physical action.