This term I am teaching cryptography at Harvard. There had been several advances in crypto since I last taught this course at Princeton, and so I will do several things differently. The slow but steady progress towards constructing quantum computers has caused the NSA to announce that users should transition away from RSA, Diffie-Hellman and … Continue reading Teaching cryptography
Author: Boaz Barak
Graduating bits recap
The graduating bits event at ITCS was held last Friday. You can see the list of all presenters and their slides on the webpage. I enjoyed it and learned quite a bit, even if I was rather strict towards the poor presenters with the timer... Here is a summary of some of the talks based … Continue reading Graduating bits recap
Register for graduating bits
If you are a student or a postdoc looking for a new position, please come to ITCS 2016 (January 14-16 in Cambridge MA) and give a short presentation on your work during the graduating bits event (Friday, Jan 15 6:30pm). If you are interested, please send me your information and presentation (see here for precise details how to … Continue reading Register for graduating bits
Graduating bits at ITCS
ITCS 2016 will be held in Cambridge January 14-16. As in previous years, we will have a "graduating bits" session where students graduating this year can present a (very) short talk on their work. This year I am in charge of the graduating bits event, which means that details on how to sign up for it will only appear … Continue reading Graduating bits at ITCS
Postdoc application deadline coming up
The deadline to apply for the Rabin postdocs, as well as other postdoc positions, is coming up on December 1st, see my previous post. Don't forget to apply!!
The mother of all inequalities
Theoretical computer scientists love inequalities. After all, a great many of our papers involve showing either an upper bound or a lower bound on some quantity. So I thought I'd share some cool stuff I've learned this Friday in our reading group's talk by Zeev Dvir. This is based on my partial and vague recollection … Continue reading The mother of all inequalities
Theoretical CS Opportunities at Harvard
[I don't have much to add to Luca, Scott, and Lipton/Regan on the exciting announcement by Babai of a quasipolynomial time graph isomorphism algorithm. I can't wait to hear the details! --Boaz] Aided by some very generous gifts, Computer Science is on a growth streak at Harvard, and in particular there are some new opportunities in Theoretical Computer … Continue reading Theoretical CS Opportunities at Harvard
Advice for the budding theorist
As a Ph.D student, I searched for advice on succeeding in grad school, and often thought that eventually I would repay the favor when I became a professor. I never got around to doing that, but now decided to give it a shot. So, here goes: Tip #1: Don’t get advice from the Internet. Grad … Continue reading Advice for the budding theorist
A different type of pseudo
(see also this post and these lecture notes) There is a longstanding feud in statistics between "frequentists" and "Bayesians". One way to understand these two camps is to consider the following statements: The probability that my paternal great great grandfather had blue eyes is 5% The probability that the $latex 10^{10^{10}}$-th digit of $latex \pi$ is … Continue reading A different type of pseudo
Is computational hardness the rule or the exception?
As a cryptographer, I am used to the viewpoint that computational problems are presumed hard unless proven otherwise. We cryptographers constantly come up with new hardness assumptions, and generally use the heuristic that if a problem doesn't have an obvious algorithm then it must be hard. We've had some interesting failures (see here for a recent example), but this heuristic seems … Continue reading Is computational hardness the rule or the exception?
Windows On Theory 