[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

The graduating bits event at ITCS was held last Friday. You can see the list of all presenters and their slides on the webpage. I enjoyed it and learned quite a bit, even if I was rather strict towards the poor presenters with the timer... Here is a summary of some of the talks based … Continue reading Graduating bits recap

A couple announcements on happenings in Cambridge: STOC/SoCG joint workshop day: this year, STOC and SoCG are co-located in Cambridge, MA, and will hold a joint workshop day on June 18th, 2016. The goal of this day is to have events of common interest to both communities and thus foster further collaboration. The schedule already includes plenary … Continue reading STOC/SoCG workshop day & ITCS graduating bits

If you are a student or a postdoc looking for a new position, please come to ITCS 2016 (January 14-16 in Cambridge MA) and give a short presentation on your work during the graduating bits event (Friday, Jan 15 6:30pm). If you are interested, please send me your information and presentation (see here for precise details how to … Continue reading Register for graduating bits

ITCS 2016 will be held in Cambridge January 14-16. As in previous years,  we will have a "graduating bits" session where students graduating this year can present a (very) short talk on their work. This year I am in charge of the graduating bits event, which means that details on how to sign up for it will only appear … Continue reading Graduating bits at ITCS

The deadline to apply for the Rabin postdocs, as well as other postdoc positions, is coming up on December 1st, see my previous post. Don't forget to apply!!  

Theoretical computer scientists love inequalities. After all, a great many of our papers involve showing either an upper bound or a lower bound on some quantity. So I thought I'd share some cool stuff I've learned this Friday in our reading group's talk by Zeev Dvir. This is based on my partial and vague recollection … Continue reading The mother of all inequalities