I'm happy to invite (in the name of the Stanford theory group) applications for the inaugural Motwani Postdoctoral Fellowship in Theoretical Computer Science, made possible by a gift from the Motwani-Jadeja foundation. Please see application instructions . Please apply by Jan 6, 2017 for full consideration.

Economists generally agree that free trade agreements between countries such as the U.S. and Mexico or China that have complimentary strengths result in a net benefit to both sides. But this doesn't mean that every individual citizen benefits. There are definitely winners and losers, and as we have seen in this election, the losers are … Continue reading Free trade and CS

As also posted by Michael Mitzenmacher, we have several postdoc positions at Harvard,  please apply by December 1st. In particular in 2017-2018, Harvard's center for mathematical sciences and applications will be hosting a special year on combinatorics and complexity,  organized by  Noga Alon, me, Jacob Fox, Madhu Sudan, Salil Vadhan, and Leslie Valiant. I am quite … Continue reading Some announcements

Now that the important event of the STOC deadline has passed, we can talk about trivial matters such as the future of the free world (but of course, like a broken record, I will come back to talking about sum of squares by the end of the post). A priori predicting the result of the … Continue reading Post-deadline diversion: Election predictions

As mentioned before on this blog,   STOC 2017 will be part of an expanded “Theory Fest” (http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2017/) which is being planned by a small committee (Sanjeev Arora, Paul Beame, Avrim Blum, and Ryan Williams, as well as SIGACT chair Michael Mitzenmacher and STOC’17 PC chair Valerie King).   One component of Theory Fest would be a series of … Continue reading Theory Fest short presentations – call for suggestions

The success of TOC is due to the intrinsic intellectual merit of our field but also due to many fruitful connections: connections between subfields of TOC (see Avi Wigderson’s depth through breadth), connection with Mathematics, connections with other fields in Science and Humanities via the computational lens, and connections with industry. All of these powerful … Continue reading TOCA-Revolution Begins: Nov 4

I hope to see many readers of this blog in person tomorrow for the workshop in honor of Avi Wigderson 60th birthday (Wed-Sat), which will feature a collection of great speakers talking on a variety of areas in theoretical computer science and mathematics. But, if you can't make it in person, the talks will be streamed … Continue reading Live from Princeton, NJ: Avi60

As I mentioned before, this term Pablo Parrilo, David Steurer, Pravesh Kothari, and I are teaching two sister seminars at Harvard/MIT and Princeton on the Sum of Squares algorithm. See the website http://sumofsquares.org  for details, lecture notes, as well as links to lecture videos and how to sign up to follow the course on Piazza. But, if … Continue reading An optimal weather variant of the sum of squares algorithm

This fall I will be teaching a graduate seminar on the Sum of Squares algorithm. Actually, it will be two "sister seminars". In the Cambridge/Boston area, I (with possibly some guest lectures by Pablo Parrilo) will be teaching the course on Fridays 10am-1pm, alternating between Harvard and MIT. In Princeton, David Steurer and Pravesh Kothari … Continue reading Proofs, beliefs and algorithms through the lens of Sum of Squares

Following the proud tradition of previous STOC/FOCS conferences, FOCS'16 will also have a (half) day of workshop/tutorials on Saturday, October 8th, right before the conference starts. You are invited to submit your proposal of workshop or tutorial by August 31st; see details here. In short: you just need to propose an exciting theme and arrange the speakers. We will … Continue reading Call for proposals for FOCS’16 workshop/tutorial (half-)day