Hope everyone has a great FOCS! In the previous post we mentioned the two workshops on different aspects of the Fourier transforms occurring today. I also wanted to mention the Tutorial on obfuscation today with talks by  Amit Sahai, Allison Lewko and Dan Boneh. The new constructions of obfuscation and their applications form one of the most exciting and … Continue reading FOCS 2014 is starting

[Guest post by Anna Gilbert, who is co-organizing with Piotr Indyk and Dina Katabi a FOCS 2014 workshop on The  Sparse Fourier Transform: Theory and Applications, this Saturday 9am-3:30pm]  After reading Boaz's post on Updates from the ICM and in particular his discussion of interactions between the TCS and applied math communities, I thought I'd contribute a … Continue reading Applied mathematicians vs Theoretical Computer Scientists

Not unrelated to our last post, the upcoming FOCS will have a panel-led discussion on "How might FOCS and STOC evolve?" (organized by David Shmoys) on Saturday 10/18 at 6pm. If you are interested in the future of FOCS and STOC, and haven't yet registered or made your travel plans, I urge you to do so … Continue reading Evolving FOCS – mobile edition

[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