You are heading to Paris for the first time. You finally get there and it is time for dinner, you need to pick a restaurant. Of course you would like to avoid  Tourists-Traps. Traditionally, people were relying on rule of thumb, and if they were lucky and knew someone that has some useful information, they … Continue reading Community brain

Hastad's Switching Lemma is one of the gems of computational complexity. The switching lemma analyzes the effect of random restrictions on $latex AC^0$ circuits, which are constant depth circuits with AND, OR and NOT gates of unbounded fanin. It says that such restrictions tends to simplify  $latex AC^0$ circuits in surprising ways. An immediate consequence of the switching lemma is strong … Continue reading The Switching Lemma

Tim Gowers reports on a new set of open access math journals. There will be a Forum of Mathematics:Pi that is supposed to be a generalist math journal, and Forum of Mathematics:Sigma that would have "clusters" for different areas. It will be paid for by Cambridge University Press for the first three years, and will then … Continue reading Interesting new development in Math publishing

In memory of Mihai Pătraşcu. Continuing the spirit of the previous post, in this post I will describe a specific technique for proving lower bounds for (static) data structures, when the space is (near) linear. This technique was introduced in the paper by Mihai and Mikkel Thorup, called "HIGHER lower Bounds for Near-Neighbor and  F … Continue reading Higher Lower Bounds: Just Ask for More!

In memory of Mihai  Pătraşcu Written by Rasmus Pagh, Rina Panigrahy, Kunal Talwar and Udi Wieder Reductions are arguably at the heart of complexity theory. They show that one problem is at least as hard as another. Finding reductions often requires creativity and considerable technical skill; some reductions seem as if they were pulled from thin air. The most difficult … Continue reading The Art of Reductions

Tim Roughgarden sent me the following email. I found this idea so refreshing that I thought I should share more widely. Well done PC! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PC meetings are typically all work and no play.  But the FOCS '12 PC, in an act of rebellion, has decided to spend a day disucssing their own results, before … Continue reading “Just a Spoonful of Sugar …”

Is it “safe” to release aggregate statistics from a database of sensitive information on individuals? Evidence suggests that even seemingly innocuous statistical releases can fatally compromise an individual’s privacy, especially in the presence of auxiliary information about the individual (see this paper by Homer et al. for a recent example). How might we then get … Continue reading Privacy-Preserving Data Analysis and Computational Learning: A Match made in Heaven

Part II. For Part I see here. Having largely reproduced the main results of the Lenstra et al. paper, the next research question became identifying the root cause or causes of this vulnerability. There was no shortage of explanations put forward shortly after the paper was released, and we were able to critically examine some of … Continue reading Factoring RSA Moduli. Part II.