About a month ago, in our theory seminar, we had a talk by Paul Ohm. Paul is a Professor of Law at the University of Colorado and has done important work in the interface between Computer Science and the Law (which was also the title of his talk). There is much to report about this … Continue reading Occupy Database – Privacy is a Social Choice

In my last post I promised a simple proof that there are no deterministic extractors for SV sources. The proof is due to Salil Vadhan, Avi Wigderson and myself and its technique has been used to obtain impossibility results on doing cryptography with SV sources. We show that even more restricted classes of sources are not amenable to deterministic … Continue reading No Deterministic Extraction from Santha-Vazirani Sources – A Simple Proof

Last week Ryan O'Donnell mentioned, as part of his Simons Symposium report, that Per Austrin (with Kai-Min Chung, Mohammad Mahmoody, Rafael Pass, and Karn Seth) have a new, Fourier-based, proof of an "old" result due to Miklos Santha and Umesh Vazirani. This is a great opportunity to tell you a bit about deterministic extraction. I will also discuss (in my … Continue reading Correlations and Bias in Deterministic Extraction

Our first guest blog (which is more of an announcement) comes from Cynthia Dwork. You can email Cynthia if you want to learn more … ---------------- An inter-disciplinary group of researchers based at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley, invites applications for two-year postdoctoral fellowships under the Sloan foundation-sponsored project “Towards Practicing … Continue reading New Interdisciplinary Center on Privacy with Postdoc Positions