LifeHacker is a website dedicated to tricks, especially technology related, to make people more efficient or productive. The signal to noise ratio in that website is not particularly high, but I think it is a good idea to share tricks that can save time and effort. In particular, are there tools or tricks that made a difference in your … Continue reading Theory Life-Hacks

Aleksander Madry asks me to announce that registration for the Highlights of Algorithms conference he posted about is open. The registration link is http://highlightsofalgorithms.org/registration/. (Early registration is due April 30.) Also, the preliminary program is available at http://highlightsofalgorithms.org/program/. The program is packed with 28 invited talks and with even a larger number of short contributions. Those interested in attending … Continue reading Highlights of Algorithms registration

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