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% \address{Department of CSE\\
% University at Buffalo\\
% 226 Bell Hall\\  kornfeld@google.com
% Buffalo,  NY  14260--2000}

\signature{Dr. Kenneth W.\ Regan}

\begin{letter}{Professor Chunming Qiao\\
Chair, Department of CSE\\
University at Buffalo\\ 
338A Davis Hall\\
Amherst, NY 14260-2500
}
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\opening{\vspace{-1ex}\leftline{Dear Chunming:}}

%\email{regan@buffalo.edu}
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I am writing at last formally to request a one-term sabbatical leave for Spring 2020, my first since Spring 2009.  I apologize for the extreme tardiness of this request; I know the February 15 deadline applies to both one-term and full-year requests.  Ever since my sudden trip to India last February I have been in breakneck mode, through finally completing the long-overdue upgrade to my statistical chess model last week.  That was two months later than the target time of meetings I attended in Italy in late June with officials of the World Chess Federation including its new head, Arkady Dvorkovich (recently the Deputy PM of Russia).  It has been hard for me to determine a plan until this work was settled, plus I have received some information pertaining to a plan only in the past few days.

\medskip
Here are what I wish to do and the benefits this would also bring to the Department and University:

\begin{enumerate}
\item
\emph{Collaborative work on quantum computing.}  Preparation during this calendar year has included my visit to India hosted by Prof.\ Amlan Chakrabarti, who is also Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Technology at the University of Calcutta, and also a major paper with my student Chaowen Guan (who is defending his thesis next week) buiilding on techniques originally developed with Chakrabarti to improve the running times of some fundamental problems.  The paper did not earn a high enough score for FOCS and we are looking to re-submit it.  News this week is that Chakrabarti has approval for a short sabbatical to spend March 2020 in the US and wishes to visit Buffalo.  Hosting him would also create synergy with Ram Sridhar, who also met Chakrabarti last year, and others involved both with quantum computing and with machine learning at UB.  Sabbatical leave would allow optimizing my participation and also allow a possible return visit to Kolkata later in the spring.  This all follows the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (non-binding) last February involving not only UB and Calcutta but also several other US institutions: he mentioned Princeton (where he did a postdoc with professor Niraj Jha), the University of Utah, and Arkansas State in his latest message to me.

\medskip
Guan has also recently earned a postdoctoral position at Penn State in Professor Sean Hallgren's quantum computing group.  I know other faculty there, plus having hosted our Distinguished Speaker Patrick McDaniel from there.  A sabbatical would promote the opportunity to visit there and expand these contacts.

\item
\emph{Collaborative work with Richard Lipton on subjects including quantum.}  Lipton is my co-author on several papers and on the textbook \emph{Quantum Algorithms Via Linear Algebra} with MIT Press.  He originated the prominent weblog \emph{G\"odel's Lost Letter and P=NP} (GLL) which I partner.  We often use the blog for early drafts of research ideas.  We have several that we wish to follow through, but the above exigencies have superseded them for some time.  He is staying in Manhattan through May of next spring before spending parts of the summer at the Toyota Technical Institute in Chicago.  I would be able to travel to work with him for extended periods (staying with family in northeast New Jersey); I would also wish to host him in Buffalo.

\item
\emph{Production of research using my settled chess model.}  My previous model, although successfully deployed and used for papers presented at AAAI and IEEE CIG and ICAART and other recognized international conferences, is incomplete with regard to one prediction factor that influences chess moves.  A facile analogy is how the Standard Model of particle physics ignores gravity but in most applications that doesn't matter.  On scales of over a hundred chess positions the missed  factor ``evens out.''  However, my student Tamal Biswas in his thesis work found general ways to isolate subsets of positions in which the missed factor has strong effect, and recently others have pointed out related factors whose modeling would increase the sensitivity of cheating tests.  Modeling it, however, has been fraught since 2015---as I have expounded in articles on the GLL blog that can be found by their titles: ``Depth of Staisficing,'' ``Unskewing the Election,'' ``Stopped Watches and Data Analytics,'' and ``Sliding-Scale Problems'' among others.  Now I can attest that the new model is complete with regard to implementing all general factors influencing chess play that I know.  In the meantime, the incompleteness has been a bottleneck in the production of research based on the model beyond its narrow application for statistical judgment of allegations of cheating with computers during human games.  I have qualified past results by saying they measure the large-scale accuracy of the players but not the difficulty of individual positions and the challenge they generate.  I even wrote an apologetic personal note last March to Dr. Frank Niro, Editor of the new \emph{Journal of Chess Research}, saying I did not feel I could submit definitive work in these areas until the extended model is ready.  

\medskip
Sabbatical leave in the spring would be timely in enabling me to do so.  It would also facilitate travel to next year's spring meeting of the FIDE Fair Play Commission---there is a distinct likelihood of this taking place during the annual chess festival in Reykjavik, Iceland, which is April 17--24 next year.  My work in this capacity has brought substantial visibility to UB and the Department in the past, most recently in a story covered by major media last month where my statistical reports prompted the increased surveillance and catching of a grandmaster cheating with a computer program on his smartphone during games.  I intend this also as a springboard for engagement with the data-science community at large about the design and vetting of models when there is a premium on being absolutely sure in what one infers and on explainability.  A 99\% correctness rate is great in many areas but far from enough in the anti-cheating work.  
\end{enumerate}

In addition, I would be able to pick up things I dropped amid the swirl since spring, such as contacts with people from IBM in New York State coming out of the workshop held here last March; I did not have time to attend a follow-up quantum workshop in Utica in July though that also reflected family events occurring (suddenly) then and the aforementioned chess-cheating story which broke the same week.

I would not expect to receive any additional income during my sabbatical leave for activities specific to it.  There remains the possibility of a contract with the World Chess Federation involving use of my (new) materials and personal services, which has been on-hold since 2016.  I will return to the University for at least one full year after my sabbatical leave, and I will submit a written report of my professional activities and accomplishments while on sabbatical leave, no later than the end of the first semester after my return. I understand that I may be required to repay all sabbatical salary if I do not return for the minimum period and/or file an activity report in a timely fashion. Further, I understand that I must obtain written approval in order for my sabbatical report to be submitted late.  I apologize also that my present lateness has impacted Department plans, although they are set up to allow for my leave in Spring.






\closing{Yours sincerely}

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