Clément Canonne

@ccanonne.github.io

7171 Followers 694 Following

Senior Lecturer #USydCompSci at the University of Sydney. Postdocs IBM Research and Stanford; PhD at Columbia. Converts ☕ into puns: sometimes theorems. He/him.

A slide introducing the complexity classes: NP, coNP Non-Deterministic Polynomial (and its dual) [no dice] RP, coRP Randomized Polynomial (and its dual) BPP Bounded-Error Probabilistic Polynomial ZPP Zero-Error Probabilistic Polynomial
A poster with the headline from the monthly edition of Le Monde Diplomatique: "Tout le monde déteste l'IA" (Everyone hates AI)
My head, with antlers (from a trophy behind, on the wall)
In French, an exercise sheet. The first sentence: "One of the exercises below is truly infeasible. Find it, then solve the others."
A mural in Paris, with two people playing chess and the text "Vouloir apprendre eat plus imtéressant que penser savoir"
Two stops called Croissant and Chocolaterie
A sulphur-crested cockatoo, on the grass
Table summarizing the results, from Kenny's paper
A Burger King ad (in France) saying "le foot, c'est forcément avec une bonne pizza" and showing people sharing small... Burgers
A cup of coffee with a text, where the two "e" of "feels good" look like epsilons
p.68: beginning of the section on Minimum Spanning Tree in Expected Linear Time
Description of the key ideas behind the KKT algorithm: sparsify the graph G by finding a "good" forest F of the graph, which can be used to identify (and remove) a lot of "heavy" edges from G. Once G has been sparsified this way, finding an MST in what remains is much faster.
The ringtail possum, on the balcony railing
A ringtail possum, on a balcony
Three galahs, eating on the grass
AI is a Meteor. Don’t be a Dinosaur. May 30, 2026 ~ Boaz Barak
Lower Estimates for L_1-Distortion of Transportation Cost Spaces Chris Gartland; Mikhail Ostrovskii Separating QMA from QCMA with a classical oracle John Bostanci; Jonas Haferkamp; Chinmay Nirkhe; Mark Zhandry Boolean function monotonicity testing requires (almost) n^1/2 queries Mark Chen, Xi Chen, Hao Cui, William Pires, Jonah Stockwell NP-membership for the boundary-boundary art-gallery problem Jack Stade MIPco=coRE Junqiao (Randy) Lin
Why verify? Types of forecasts and verification What makes a forecast good? Forecast quality vs. value What is "truth"? Validity of verification results Pooling vs. stratifying results
Future Fellowships (FT27) Application Submissions: 23 September to 6 November 2026 Assessment Period: 9 November 2026 to 28 May 2027 Announcement: 26 October to 9 November 2027
Obi-Wan Kenobi meme: "Written by humans. Now that's a sentence I haven't heard in a very long time"
"We denote by XYZ the", where XYZ is a succession of subscripts spelling out "aaarg" and ending (for the last subscript) with a "face screaming" emoji.
From the CSTheory question about a paper cited extensively, yet nowhere to be found: "Did the Rabin/Yao paper ever get to be at least a personal communication/draft/sketch in someone else's paper, or is this one of those indications of the "golden era" where giants roamed the earth and didn't always touch ground when stepping from breakthrough to breakthrough?"
An Australian 50c coin, with a kangaroo and an emu on the "Tails" side
The following seven STOC TheoryFest 2026 workshops will take place during the morning sessions from Monday through Friday: Machine Learning for Algorithms Organizers: Nina Balcan, Avrim Blum, Piotr Indyk, Ali Vakilian Dates: June 22-24 The Random Purification Channel in Quantum Tomography Organizers: Angelos Pelecanos, Jack Spilecki, Ewin Tang, John Wright Dates: June 22-24 The Role of Theory in Trustworthy and Interpretable AI Organizers: Noah Golowich, Allen Liu, Abhishek Shetty Dates: June 22-24 Algorithmic Frontiers of Graph and Hypergraph Problems via Global Queries Organizers: Deeparnab Chakrabarty and Sagnik Mukhopadhyay Dates: June 22-24 Understanding Large Language Models via a TCS Lens Organizers: Anay Mehrotra, Amin Saberi, Grigoris Velegkas Dates: June 25-26 Building New Algorithmic Foundations for Cryptography Organizers: Aayush Jain, Amit Sahai Dates: June 25-26 Testing in the Modern World Organizer: Anindya De Dates: June 25-26 The following STOC TheoryFest 2026 workshop will be held all day Saturday: Can AI do Theory? Organizer: Pritish Kamath, Pravesh Kothari, Mariana Raykova, Abhradeep Thakurta, Nikhil Vyas Date: June 27
In brackets, the letter T with a bar over it, then the symbol for "much smaller than" followed by the number 1
A picture of myself, which a halo of fluffy, unmanageable long hair
A picture of an elephant on the whiteboard, where the head and trunk are an eta
The ILP formulation of s-t MinCut
Two pelicans and another water bird, on a pipe, sleeping
The beginning of an official letter by the Australian government, stating that my application for Australian citizenship had been approved.
The output of Wolfram Alpha on the query series e^(L (e^t-1)), {t,0,4} giving the Taylor expansion of e^(L (e^t-1)) at t=0 to fourth order.
Taylor expansion at 0, up to order 4, or the MGF of X
The easy derivation of the MGF of a Poisson random variable.
The reason and derivation why the above is true, modulo a few missing details (i.e., missing the justification that one can swap expectation and derivative)
Definition of the MGF of X as the function which maps a real t to the expectation of exp(t X).
The expectation of the fourth power of X, when X is a Poisson random variable, written as an infinite sum to compute.
A dishwashing tablet bag, Finish Powerball Quantum
The MathQuEST logo, a green polyhedron
The crab in Spongebob Squarepants, doing a summoning ceremony. The caption states "Chebyshev, Chebyshev, Chebyshev")
Part of a slide which states: Last lecture with me for now (I'll be back in Week 13): Clément ↝ André and a picture of Magikarp and Gyarados below
Marathon statistics, screenshot from the official app. Total time: 3:50:39.
Two cartoon characters, a computer scientist and a physicist, arguing whether the universe is discrete or continuous
The basic idea of hash tables is that “the universe is a big place, but it’s mostly empty."
Stinkhorn fungi
Kiri Dalena (born 1975, The Philippines), putting the words of Bertolt Brecht in lighting/neon form. This is the poster accompanying and explaining the art piece.
A red neon sign, reading "In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times."
A bib for the Canberra Marathon, on April 12, 2026
Futurama poster: Bender, Fry, and Leela's heads are outlined, smiling, with the caption in all caps: YOU'RE NOT PAID TO THINK A MINDLESS WORKER IS A HAPPY WORKER SHUT UP AND DO YOUR JOB!
The waterfront, view of the skyline with hues of orange and pink in the sky.
Kenny in front of his title slide, The Quantumly Fast and Classically Furious
Petition EN7775 - Make part-time PhD students' stipends tax exempt
A picture of Sydney's skyline and harbour bridge, in the sunrise, from the north bank of the river, with orange tints in the sky
Photo of three Stinkhorn fungi
Increase the attractiveness of PhD programs for Australian students by lifting the stipend rates in fields aligned with the National Innovation Pillars and making part-time research scholarships tax free.
Recommendation 3 Allow universities to achieve research specialisation by reforming registration requirements to reduce the condition for research breadth and enable each to build scale in areas of their competitive and comparative advantage.
Draw U1,...,Un independently and uniformly in [0,1], and compute the argmax of log(ai-log log(1/Ui). Call that Z. Then Z is distributed proportionally to the weights a1,..,an
Also maximum load when throwing 50 balls, one after the other, in 50 bins, but now at each step two bins are selected at random (in yellow), and the ball goes into the least full of the two.
Visualization of the maximum load over time, when 50 balls are thrown uniformly at random into 50 bins, one at a time.
Also maximum load when throwing 100 balls, one after the other, in 100 bins, but now at each step two bins are selected at random, and the ball goes into the least full of the two.
Visualization of the maximum load over time, when 100 balls are thrown uniformly at random into 100 bins, one at a time.