Jelani Nelson tells me there's travel funding for the workshop at http://toc.seas.harvard.edu/cmacs for postdocs and students, but the deadline to apply is next Friday (April 1). Instructions to apply are at the link above.

On December 5, 2015, Syed Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik entered the banquet room in the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California wearing ski masks and holding semi-automatic pistols and rifles. They shot and killed 14 people- parents, spouses, children who will never return to their loved ones. It is the right, and indeed the duty of … Continue reading The iPhones of terrorists

[This is the sequel to Jelani's previous post on chaining method; for more, see the post STOC workshop on this topic --Boaz] 1. A case study: (sub)gaussian processes To give an introduction to chaining, I will focus our attention on a concrete scenario. Suppose we have a bounded (but possibly infinite) collection of vectors $latex {T\subset \mathbb{R}^n}&fg=000000$. … Continue reading Chaining methods continued (guest post by Jelani Nelson)

Following the exciting paper of Garg, Gentry, Halevi, Raykova, Sahai and Waters, the world of cryptography has been ablaze with "obfuscation fever" with many  longstanding questions succumbing to obfuscation-based constructions. At the same time, our understanding of the computational assumptions required for these constructions is still very much incomplete (e.g., see these two recent works  and the … Continue reading Hopes, Fears, and Software Obfuscation

[Jelani Nelson is organizing a post-STOC workshop on  Chaining Methods and their applications, and agreed to write a 2-post series about these methods here. --Boaz] 1. Workshop details Assaf Naor and I (Jelani Nelson) are organizing a two-day workshop ``Chaining Methods and their Applications to Computer Science (CMACS)'' June 22--23, 2016, immediately after STOC 2016. It … Continue reading Workshop on Chaining Methods (guest post by Jelani Nelson)

Guest post by Aleksander Mądry This summer, on June 6-8 in Paris, we will be having a new algorithmic event: Highlights of Algorithms 2016 (HALG 2016) conference This conference will be quite unlike the conferences we are all used to. First of all, it will consist mainly of invited talks and tutorials, accompanied by a … Continue reading Highlights of Algorithms 2016

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

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

A couple announcements on happenings in Cambridge: STOC/SoCG joint workshop day: this year, STOC and SoCG are co-located in Cambridge, MA, and will hold a joint workshop day on June 18th, 2016. The goal of this day is to have events of common interest to both communities and thus foster further collaboration. The schedule already includes plenary … Continue reading STOC/SoCG workshop day & ITCS 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