Appreciation and memories of Jim Simons (1938–2024), from the Simons Institute community. Featuring contributions from Avi Wigderson, Dick Karp, Shafi...
Simons Institute Senior Scientist Venkatesan Guruswami, along with Bingkai Lin, Yican Sun, and Berkeley theory graduate students Xuandi Ren and Kewen...
We are heartbroken by the loss of Luca Trevisan, who served as senior scientist at the Institute from 2014 to 2019.
Radcliffe fellows with divergent backgrounds came together with the goal of deciphering the clicks of sperm whales.
The l'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Festival will take place December 7, 2021. Join us there!
It is natural to believe that an accurate model for a certain phenomenon can always be found, given enough data. How much data is "enough"? Somewhat tautologically: the data must contain enough information to identify the right model. This intuition can be made precise using statistics and information theory.
This week, an article showing that sleeping longer than 6.5 hours a night may be bad for your health popped up on my Google feed. It made me realize yet again why theory and mathematics are so satisfying — at least the soundness of theorems doesn’t change every decade.
“More and more, I’m starting to wonder whether P equals NP,” Toniann Pitassi, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto and a former PhD student of Stephen Cook’s, says. Her approach in circling around the problem is to study both scaled-up and scaled-down analogues, harder and easier models. “Sometimes generalizing the question makes it clearer,” she says. But overall, she hasn’t achieved clarity: “Most people think P doesn’t equal NP. And I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like it’s become less and less clear that that’s the truth.” (Published with permission from MIT Technology Review.)
A computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and a consultant to the Algorand Foundation, Tal Rabin conducts research on cryptography. In this episode of Polylogues, Simons Institute Journalist in Residence Siobhan Roberts sits down with Rabin to discuss her career and key developments in cryptographic research.
Erik and Martin Demaine, a father-and-son team of “algorithmic typographers,” have confected an entire suite of mathematically inspired typefaces.
The primate visual cortex is one of the best-studied parts of the primate brain. Insights gained from studies of biological vision led to great advances in AI, particularly in the development of convolutional neural networks for image recognition. Now, such artificial neural networks are repaying their debt to neuroscience. Computational models built using deep neural networks are beginning to illuminate the workings of the primate visual system.
Greetings from Berkeley, where we’ve been “enjoying” some much-needed rain! This October, the Simons Institute held its seventh annual Industry Day. The goal of the day was to foster exchange and collaboration between the Institute’s industry partners and graduate students, postdoctoral research fellows, and senior researchers at the Institute and on the broader Berkeley campus.