The Swiss Winter School on Theoretical Computer Science (Jan 26 -- 31 2025, https://theory.epfl.ch/WinterSchool2025/) is the third installment in a series of annual winter schools jointly organized by EPFL and ETH Zurich.The goal of the school is to educate outstanding international PhD students about exciting recent developments in theoretical computer science.The winter school will be held in … Continue reading Swiss winter school on Theoretical CS
Events in honor of Luca Trevisan
The following events will take place to honor our dear colleague and friend Luca Trevisan, that our community lost this June. RANDOM-APPROX 2024 will include a session in memory of Luca Trevisan consisting of a few short talks highlighting Luca's contributions to pseudorandomness and hardness of approximation, organized by Noga Ron-Zewi and Dieter van Melkebeek. … Continue reading Events in honor of Luca Trevisan
LucaFest (guest post by Anindya De, Pravesh Kothari, and Madhur Tulsiani)
We would have liked to organize Luca’s 60th birthday conference, but as you all know, we tragically lost him to a battle with cancer. However, we would like to take the occasion of Luca’s birthday today to celebrate his legacy and his impact on all of us, through a collection of talk videos available here: … Continue reading LucaFest (guest post by Anindya De, Pravesh Kothari, and Madhur Tulsiani)
FOCS test of time award: call for nominations
Luca Trevisan (1971-2024)
The theoretical computer science community and science at large suffered a great tragedy today. Luca Trevisan has been one of my intellectual and personal heroes since I joined the field. His work on pseudorandomness, complexity, cryptography and algorithms has been a strong influence on my work. Whenever I wanted to understand a new topic, often … Continue reading Luca Trevisan (1971-2024)
Fulkerson centennial workshops
Ray Fulkerson was born on August 14, 1924, and so would have turned 100 this August. There will be two events to celebrate this, in Waterloo (July 17-19) and Cornell. (September 20-21), see below. Fulkerson 100: A Workshop in Celebration of Ray Fulkerson's 100th birthday July 17-19, 2024, Waterloo, CANADA https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~fulkerso/index.html The School of Operations Research … Continue reading Fulkerson centennial workshops
Avi wins the Turing, TCS for all
Avi Wigderson has won the Turing award. I just can't find the words on how happy this makes me, so won't even try to write a post, beyond what I wrote on Twitter. Many have posted on Avi's contributions, see Quanta, New Scientist, Scott's blog, Lance's blog, but to me, perhaps this tweet of Michal … Continue reading Avi wins the Turing, TCS for all
STOC/Theory fest 2024
STOC/TheoryFest 2024 is in Vancouver, British Columbia this year, during the week of June 24-28. The registration website is now open at http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2024/registration.html In addition to the STOC 2024 paper talks, the program features keynote talks by Michal Feldman, Jakub Pachocki, and Tim Roughgarden, and workshops on Algorithmic Problems in Modern LLMs, Extremal Combinatorics, Length-Constrained Expanders, Online … Continue reading STOC/Theory fest 2024
Emergent abilities and grokking: Fundamental, Mirage, or both?
One of the lessons we have seen in language modeling is the power of scale. The original GPT paper of Radford et al. noted that at some point during training, the model “acquired” the ability to do sentiment analysis of a sentence X by predicting whether it is more likely to be followed by “very … Continue reading Emergent abilities and grokking: Fundamental, Mirage, or both?
Letter to the Harvard Corporation re Harvard president
I wrote this letter earlier today to the Harvard Corporation. I did not intend to make it public but was asked by some people to do so. I figured there is no harm in that. Many people that I respect are deeply disappointed at Harvard in particular and U.S. Universities at large, and are calling … Continue reading Letter to the Harvard Corporation re Harvard president
Windows On Theory 