October 12, 2023 To President Claudine Gay and the Harvard University leadership We attach an open letter for your consideration written on October 8, 2023 and signed by more than 350 faculty members at Harvard. The drafters of the letter (listed below) welcome President Gay’s statement unequivocally condemning Hamas’s terrorism and distancing the university from … Continue reading Open letter to the Harvard community

[Update 10/11: I have not received a response to this letter, but On the night of October 9th, Harvard's leadership released a statement, and president Gay added her own statement on October 10th; you can read both here. These partially address what I raised in the letter, but still fall short of condemning, rather than … Continue reading Letter to Harvard President Claudine Gay

[Unrelated announcement: Yael Kalai, Ran Raz, Salil Vadhan, Nisheeth Vishnoi and I recently completed our survey of Avi Wigderson's work for the volume on Abel prize winners. Given the breadth and depth of Avi's work, our survey could only cover a small sample of it, but we still hope it can. be a useful resource … Continue reading Cartesian Cafe podcast interviews me on cryptography

TCS for All (previously TCS Women) Spotlight Workshop at STOC 2023/Theory Fest: Travel grants and call for speaker nominations You are cordially invited to our TCS for All Spotlight Workshop! The workshop will be held on Thursday, June 22nd, 2023 (2-4pm), in Orlando, Florida, USA, as part of the 54th Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) and TheoryFest! The workshop … Continue reading TCS for all travel grants and speaker nominations (guest post by Elena Grigorescu)

Luca Trevisan recently interviewed me for the Bulletin of the EATCS (see link for the full issue, including an interview with Alexandra Silva, and technical columns by Naama Ben-David, Ryan Williams, and Yuri Gurevich). With Luca's permission, I am cross-posting it here. (I added some hyperlinks to relevant documents.) Q. Boaz, thanks for taking the … Continue reading Interview about this blog in the Bulletin of the EATCS

In my previous post I discussed how large language models can be thoughts of as the hero of the movie "memento" - their long-term memory is intact but they have limited context, which can be an issue in retrieving not just facts that happened after the training, but also the relevant facts that did appear … Continue reading Chatting with Claude

Related to my last post on the FOCS 2023 conjectures track, the chairs now put together an FAQ about it. ACM SIGACT is soliciting nominations for several prizes: Knuth Prize by February 15, Distinguished service award by March 1, and Gödel prize by March 31. NSF is looking for a Program Director for the Algorithmic … Continue reading Theory announcements: Prizes, CFP, and more

Update 1/27: Amit, Shubhangi, and Thomas put together an FAQ about this. This year, FOCS 2023 will include something new: a Conjectures Track, separate from the Main Track. Submissions to the Main Track will be evaluated along similar lines as STOC/FOCS papers typically are, aiming to accept papers that obtain the very best results across … Continue reading New in FOCS 2023: A conjectures track