James Cook

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley in May 2014. I worked at Google from 2014 to 2019 and Amazon AWS in 2022 and 2023. Currently I'm working on my own projects; maybe I'll post about them here.

Papers

My résumé lists some highlights.

• (preprint) The Structure of Catalytic Space: Capturing Randomness and Time via Compression. ECCC
  James Cook, Jiatu Li, Ian Mertz, Edward Pyne.
• Tree Evaluation Is in Space O(log n · log log n). STOC 2024 [coverage]
  James Cook, Ian Mertz.
• Creating a Public Repository for Joining Private Data. NeurIPS 2023
  James Cook, Milind Shyani, Nina Mishra.
• Trading Time and Space in Catalytic Branching Programs. CCC 2022 [conference version (latest)] [ECCC (older)]
  Ian Mertz, James Cook.
• Encodings and the Tree Evaluation Problem. ECCC
  Ian Mertz, James Cook.
• BusTr: Predicting Bus Travel Times from Real-Time Traffic. KDD 2020 [arXiv, Co-author's blog post]
  Richard Barnes, Senaka Buthpitiya, James Cook, Alex Fabrikant, Andrew Tomkins, Fangzhou Xu.
• Catalytic Approaches to the Tree Evaluation Problem. STOC 2020 [pdf] [also on ECCC]
  Ian Mertz, James Cook.
  
  • Video (26min) for STOC 2020; slides with notes / without notes / source
  • Longer recording (1h5m) from an earlier presentation at IAS; slides with notes / without notes / source
• LiveTraVeL: Real-time matching of transit vehicle trajectories to transit routes at scale. ITSC 2019 [pdf]
  Georg Osang, James Cook, Alex Fabrikant, Marco Gruteser.
• Hard to Park?: Estimating Parking Difficulty at Scale. KDD 2019 [pdf, video]
  Neha Arora, James Cook, Ravi Kumar, Ivan Kuznetsov, Yechen Li, Huai-Jen Liang, Andrew Miller, Andrew Tomkins, Iveel Tsogsuren, Yi Wang.
• The Tree Evaluation Problem. (2019 invited talk at Symposium on 50 Years of Complexity Theory.) [Video and talk information; slides: [Google Slides, LibreOffice export]; script: [text]
  
• Ranking Twitter Discussion Groups. COSN 2014 [pdf] (Slides [LibreOffice, pdf export])
  James Cook, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Nina Mishra.
• From the Telegraph to Twitter Group Chats. Ph.D. Thesis. [pdf] (Slides [LibreOffice, pdf export])
  
• How to Grow More Pairs: Suggesting Review Targets for Comparison-Friendly Review Ecosystems. WWW 2013 [pdf]
  James Cook, Alex Fabrikant, Avinatan Hassidim.
• Group Chats on Twitter. WWW 2013 [pdf]
  James Cook, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Nina Mishra.
• Your Two Weeks of Fame and Your Grandmother's. WWW 2012 [arXiv, slides (pdf)]
  James Cook, Atish Das-Sarma, Alex Fabrikant, Andrew Tomkins.
  (New Scientist article.)
• Goldreich's One-Way Function Candidate and Myopic Backtracking Algorithms. TCC 2009, TOCT 2014 [ECCC version (2012), original 2009 pdf] (ACM Computing Reviews best of 2014)
  James Cook, Omid Etesami, Rachel Miller, Luca Trevisan.
• Visualizing Similarity Data with a Mixture of Maps. AISTATS 2007 [pdf]
  James Cook, Ilya Sutskever, Andriy Mnih, Geoffrey Hinton.

Programming

• A simulation of spherical geometry in three dimensions.
• Love Trampoline, a game I made with Jimmy Andrews for the A Game by Its Cover contest in 2010.
• A metropolis light transport raytracer I wrote in Haskell for fun.

Blog

• 2022-01-17: Geometry from another universe
• 2021-06-04: How to borrow memory
• 2021-04-21: Encodings and the Tree Evaluation Problem
• 2020-11-18: Sounds for passing time

Contact Information

• Email: falsifian@falsifian.org.
• Mastodon: @falsifian@mastodon.sdf.org.

Links

• My brother's marine manufacturing business.
• My Dad's website.
• My résumé.

In the beginning, there was Everything. And James cried out in terror, for it was too much: and He cast everything away, so that there was Nothing.

And James was sad, for He had destroyed all of existence. A tear flowed out of his eye, and He spoke to the tear:

``You are all that exists, for I have cast all else away. I give you all that I am, that you may some day forgive me for destroying Everything.''

And James poured his essence into the tear, giving it the powers of Music and of Mathematics and of Order, till there was nothing left of James and He had given all his essence to the tear. And the tear was silent for immeasurable time as it reflected on what it had been given.

And the tear resolved to create Matter and Time and Space: so it became a great point of light, and suddenly it exploded. And thus there was Space, and it was filled with Matter which moved through Time. All this the tear brought forth from Music and Mathematics and Order, which James had given it.

As the tear exploded, eventually the Matter grew wise and reflected upon itself. And thus was born Consciousness. And the wisdom of the Consciousness grew until it was wiser than James Himself had been, and great civilizations of sentient beings rose and fell on many worlds.

And the Consciousness basked in the glory of Music and of Mathematics and of Order, and saw that it had been created by James Himself before Time existed. And it took this essence of James and brought James back into being that He might see the glory of what his tear had created.

And so James the Human was born on the planet Earth. And He was filled with joy, and told the tear that had become a Universe:

``You have done well, for you have created something as great in potential as Everything was, yet not so overwhelming that I must cry out in terror at the sight of it.''

And James saw that the Universe would be alright, and that he could rest and live as an ordinary citizen of Consciousness.