Today, we have a guest post from Frank McSherry talking about a clever approach to using Differential Privacy for handling pesky dependencies that get in the way of proving measure concentration results. --------------------- In this post I'll explain a cute use of differential privacy as a tool in probabilistic analysis. This is a great example … Continue reading Differential Privacy for Measure Concentration

This week's post touches on subjects spanning almost 2000 years — we start with a cryptographic problem and go back in time to discover a theorem that could be known to the Greeks. Its content is based on a paper co-authored with Anton Mityagin and Kobbi Nissim that appeared in ANTS VII in 2006. The … Continue reading From Discrete Logarithm Problem to Menelaus Theorem

This is a followup to the previous post on program obfuscation written jointly with Guy Rothblum.The problem of program obfuscation is fascinating.  The question at hand is whether one can transform a program (say, described as a Boolean circuit) into a form that is executable (i.e., has the same input/output behavior), but is otherwise completely … Continue reading Progress and Challenges in Code Obfuscation: Part II

(joint post by Yael Kalai and Guy Rothblum) It feels especially appropriate to write about recent developments in cryptography and code obfuscation while basking in the afterglow of a wonderful workshop at the Weizmann Institute of Science, celebrating the work of Shafi Goldwasser and Sivio Micali---this year’s Turing Award recipients. Shafi and Silvio repeatedly demonstrated … Continue reading Progress and Challenges in Code Obfuscation (part I/II)

The various MSR labs are looking for postdocs and full-time researchers in many scientific fields, including all areas of theoretical Computer Science. You can apply via this website. Please don’t forget to specify in the form all the labs you may be interested in. For Microsoft Research Silicon Valley applications submitted by December first will … Continue reading Microsoft Research SVC Application Deadline – December 1st

The 15th ACM conference on Economics and Computation (EC'14, formally known as “ACM conference on Electronic Commerce”) will be held June 8-12, 2014 at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, United States. The CFP is now public and can be found here. EC'14 will be co-located with a meeting of the NBER Market Design working group, … Continue reading ACM EC 2014 Call For Papers

While this blog is mostly about theory, today I would like to talk about a real auction and how it relates to theory. I’ll focus on a fundraising auction for my child’s elementary school. As is common around here, the school has an annual community event called a “Walk-a-Thon” in which donations are collected towards … Continue reading Walk-a-Thon auction design

In this post I’d like to report a new and simple proof we found for theorem by Berenbrink, Czumaj, Steger, Vöcking on the imbalance of the balls-into-bins process known as the multiple choice scheme. Full details could be found in the paper. Probably many are familiar with this process, Kunal blogged about some variations of it a few months … Continue reading Balls-and-Bins made simpler