The Wisdom of Crowds & A Long Forgotten Research Paper
I have been reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki.
It mentions a research paper co-authored by William Sethares on how independent uncoordinated “agents” solve decision problems. My very first published paper, when I was a graduate student at Princeton, titled “Convex Cost Functions in Blind Equaliation” was co-authored with Sethares (published sometime in 1991 or 1992, I forget now). Here is the funny thing: I have never met him, and I don’t believe I have even spoken to him once!
This is the power of social networking: my advisor at Princeton, Sergio Verdu, worked with Rod Kennedy of Australian National University on this problem, who in turn was working with Sethares. That was when I got involved with it. We got some “results” as they say, published it together. Later on, I ended up switching my PhD topic to something else.
When I saw the mention of Sethares in that book (the research reported in the book is not connected to what we published in 91), it triggered recollection of that long-forgotten research paper, and the fact that I don’t even know him!