Shafi Goldwasser (MIT and Weizmann) and Silvio Micali (MIT) were announced as the 2012 Turing Award winners. I am so excited! On a personal note, my first research paper was a follow-up on their work (joint with Oded Goldreich on pseudorandom functions) and they kept on inspiring my research ever since (and I’m hardly alone … Continue reading 2012 Turing to Goldwasser and Micali
Challenges in Outsourcing Computation
As applications move to cloud computing platforms, ensuring data confidentiality and integrity becomes a serious concern. Users want to ensure that even if untrustworthy systems handle their confidential data, their data cannot be disclosed. In addition, users want to ensure that computations done by the (untrusted) systems are correct.The latter problem is known as the … Continue reading Challenges in Outsourcing Computation
Research-Life Stories – Oded Goldreich (2nd post)
Oded Goldreich makes a second contribution to the Research-Life Stories Project (see the first one here): ----- How I started enjoying the process of writing technical papers (1983-4) When I was a graduate student at the Technion (1980-3), I really hated the process of writing technical papers. In retrospect, I realize that this was rooted in … Continue reading Research-Life Stories – Oded Goldreich (2nd post)
Research-Life Stories – Oded Goldreich
Our next entry on the Research-Life Stories Project is by Oded Goldreich (a second installment by Oded will be posted in a few days). ------ This collection of my research-life stories was triggered by a request of Omer Reingold to contribute to a collection of research-life stories that he intends to maintain on Windows on … Continue reading Research-Life Stories – Oded Goldreich
Research-Life Stories – Yuri Gurevich
Yuri Gurevich shares an anecdote about beginnings which he refers to as "Research-Life Prehistory" ------------ Mathematics is the last refuge of platonism. In what sense, mathematical objects – from real numbers to Banach spaces – exist? Where are they to be found, detected by experimental means? Mathematical platonism comes very naturally to working mathematicians. When you … Continue reading Research-Life Stories – Yuri Gurevich
Research-Life Stories – Omer Reingold
As promised, I am writing the first post in our research-life stories project. I will start today with a few stories about my first steps in research. Nothing special in them, but I hope they will become more interesting in the context of other’s stories (which I hope will follow). So, tell us, how was your beginning? … Continue reading Research-Life Stories – Omer Reingold
FOCS 2013 – CFP
The FOCS 2013 main site is up, and the CFP is coppied below too. --- CALL FOR PAPERS 54th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2013) Berkeley, California, October 27-29, 2013. The 54th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2013), sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations … Continue reading FOCS 2013 – CFP
From Discrepancy to Privacy, and back Part 2: Approximating Hereditary Discrepancy
In a previous blog post, we saw how ideas from differential privacy can be used to prove a lower bound on the hereditary discrepancy for the Erdös Discrepancy problem. This lower bound happened to be nearly tight. It turns out that this tightness is no accident. The connection between hereditary discrepancy and privacy is in … Continue reading From Discrepancy to Privacy, and back Part 2: Approximating Hereditary Discrepancy
ICALP deadline approaching
Quick Reminder: the deadline for ICALP is Feb 15th. Time to rev up your latex engines. The call for papers is here.
Alt Equals
I recently discovered that some colleagues are unaware of the math typesetting capabilities in PowerPoint, and so as a responsible Microsoft employee I thought it my duty to inform the public of these potentially time-saving and slides-beautifying features. This is also for my own benefit, as I seem to always forget where to find the … Continue reading Alt Equals
Windows On Theory 