News

The Simons Institute’s 2022 short documentary, Until the Sun Engulfs the Earth: Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity, is being featured this month in Labocine’s April 2026 issue, mathēmatiká. The documentary asks how we know that a problem is impossible to solve.

Today, data sharing is the cornerstone of many modern applications. A common concern in such data-sharing pipelines is privacy: organizations are responsible for protecting the privacy of their data, whether it represents user data or enterprise trade secrets. In her talk from the recent workshop on Trust in Decentralized Systems, Giulia Fanti (Carnegie Mellon) discussed emerging challenges related to learning from private, federated data.

Brendan McMahan (Google) presents a framework of principles that helps bring precision to discussions of privacy and AI, and examines the theory and practice required to apply them in real scenarios.

Greetings from Berkeley, where last week we had a doubleheader of workshops associated with our quantum and machine learning pods.

Matei Zaharia, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley, has been awarded the ACM Prize in Computing for his visionary development of distributed data systems and computing infrastructure. In the prize announcement, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) noted Zaharia’s development of open-source systems helped enable large-scale machine learning (ML), analytics and AI at a global scale. 

We recently received the good news that our colleague John Wright, a UC Berkeley theorist who is actively involved with the Simons Institute’s Quantum Pod, has been awarded a 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship. Simons Institute Director Venkatesan Guruswami sat down with him to discuss his research and his reflections on the field.

In a distinguished lecture given as part of the Simons Institute’s recent workshop on Theory of Computing and Healthcare, Holden Thorp (editor in chief, Science) explored how public disagreements in the autism world belie a growing convergence of the views that autism is a biological condition subject to intervention, and a social difference that requires only acceptance.

In an event comprising short talks and dialogue, Simons Institute Law and Society fellows Rui-Jie Yew and Greg Demirchyan explored key challenges of alignment in AI governance.

In this talk from the Federated and Collaborative Learning Boot Camp, Daniel Ramage (Google) provided an overview of pioneering work at Google on federated learning, and discussed important open problems in the space.

Greetings from Berkeley, where spring break is just around the corner, though we have been enjoying spring-like weather already.