Research Life-Stories: Bobby Kleinberg

Our project continues with Bobby Kleinberg. ------------------------------------------------------------ As an undergraduate I majored in mathematics and took only one computer science course. In fact quite a few of the mathematicians who influenced me were openly dismissive of computer science. Of course, throughout this period my brother Jon would continually talk to me about TCS — a … Continue reading Research Life-Stories: Bobby Kleinberg

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 – 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