The cryptography program at Simons is well under way and we're wrapping up our second week here at the wonderful Simons Institute at Berkeley. It's been a roller-coaster ride discussing the thrilling developments in the field: from fully homomorphic encryption to multilinear maps, obfuscation, differential privacy and more. The orientation/bootcamp week was an unqualified success: survey … Continue reading Cryptography Program@Simons: Historical Papers

The DIMACS Center at Rutgers University (dimacs.rutgers.edu) is seeking an Associate Director. DIMACS facilitates research, education, and outreach in discrete mathematics, computer science theory, algorithms, mathematical and statistical methods, and their applications.  The Associate Director is expected to play a leadership role in planning, developing, and running DIMACS activities and programs, including setting new directions.  A PhD in computer science, … Continue reading DIMACS looking for an associate director

Last summer I gave a mini-course on the Sum of Squares algorithm in the Swedish Summer School of Computer Science. It was a great experience - the venue was  Djurönäset  - a hotel in the beautiful Stockholm archipelgo with stunning views and great food. It was organized very smoothly by Jakob Nordström, Per Austrin, and Johan Håstad, … Continue reading 2015 Swedish Summer School in Computer Science – apply soon

See here. NSF-sponsored papers should be freely available no more than 12 months after publication in a journal. This is not perfect, but a step in the right direction. Computer scientists should insist that conference proceedings are treated the same way, and made freely available no more than 12 months after publication. Hat tip: Lance Fortnow.

There are only two FOCS/STOC chairs per year, and most would do just fine without my unsolicited advice. Nevertheless, I thought it might make sense to write down some of my thoughts after chairing FOCS 2014, and perhaps even some people that are not program chairs will find it of interest. This is based on … Continue reading Tips for future FOCS/STOC program chairs

And available at this web page. At some point I would like to add a direct link to the video for each paper from the program page, but I figured that it's best to announce this now rather than let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Update: Paul Beame notes below that the videos, as … Continue reading FOCS 2014 videos are online

[One can tell it's reviewing and letter-writing season when I escape to blogging more often..] There's been some discussion on the NIPS experiment, enough of it that even my neuro-scientist brother sent me a link to Eric Price's blog post. The gist of it is that the program chairs duplicated the reviewing process for 10% of the … Continue reading Quick comments on the NIPS experiment