[Note: As I commented on Omer's touching post, I too was shocked by the sudden closure of the amazingly successful MSR Silicon Valley lab. I hope that this blog, whose contents had very little to do with MSR itself and everything to do with the great group of people that was there, would continue to … Continue reading Sum of Squares: Upper bounds, lower bounds, and open questions

Dozens of comments following Omer’s post, which confirmed the closure of the lab, would make you believe that it was a magical place where amazing things happened. And indeed, it was. But it was also more than just a place – the lab was a community with its own values, identity, voice and will. In … Continue reading Riding the Wheel of Samsara

Today, I choose to remember the five amazing years I spent in MSR-SV Labs (which are unfortunately closing). In a place with no boarders between research areas, I was free to follow my intellectual curiosity with colleagues I wouldn’t normally have the great fortune of working with. My non-theory colleagues have left me a much … Continue reading Farewell Microsoft-Research Silicon Valley Lab

My hearty congratulations to MacArthur Fellowship for handing down the right decision and naming Craig Gentry its fellow, better known as a genius. What a truly deserving winner! As the readers of this blog know full well, Craig has done seminal work in cryptography - time and time again. In his prize-winning Ph.D. work in … Continue reading Congratulations to MacArthur Fellowship

The FOCS program is now online here.Congratulations to Yin Tat Lee and Aaron Sidford for winning the best paper and the best student paper awards for their paper "Solving Linear Programs in O˜(√rank) Iterations and Faster Algorithms for Maximum Flow". They made an important advance in the theory of interior point methods by showing that you can actually … Continue reading FOCS 2014 program is online

[Boaz's note: videos of all ICM 2014 talks, including Mark's talk discussed below, as well as the talks of  Candes and Bhargava I mentioned before are available online here. In particular, if you still don't know how one constructs a fully homomorphic encryption scheme then you should (a) be ashamed of yourself and (b) watch Craig Gentry's … Continue reading ICM 2014: Mark Braverman on interactive information theory

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley invites applications for Research Fellowships for the research program on Cryptography that will take place in Summer, 2015. These Fellowships are open to outstanding junior scientists (at most 6 years from PhD by 1 May, 2015). Further details and application instructions can be found … Continue reading Simons-Ber​keley Research Fellowship​s in Cryptograp​hy for Summer 2015

This week I'm at the International Congress of Mathematicians  (ICM) 2014 in Seoul, and thought I would post a quick update from a TCS perspective. See Tim Gowers's blog for a much more comprehensive account. There are several other TCS folks here, and I hope some would also post their impressions and recommendations as well. For TCS the … Continue reading Updates from ICM 2014

I am delighted by the news that Subhash Khot was awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize. I am reminded of a time (many years ago) when Robert Krauthgamer and I were arguing about one of Subhash’s papers if it is more of a Complexity Theory paper or more of an Algorithms paper. While this was a … Continue reading Congratulations to Subhash Khot for Nevanlinna Prize