Greetings from Berkeley! We are gearing up for a busy wrap-up of the spring semester, with five back-to-back workshop weeks at the Simons Institute...
In this month’s newsletter, we’re highlighting a 2015 talk by Chris Umans on some of the then state-of-the-art approaches to bound the matrix...
Ten years ago, researchers proved that adding full memory can theoretically aid computation. They’re just now beginning to understand the implications...
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.
We are delighted to announce that PayPal has joined our community of industry partners. PayPal highlights the importance of theoretical computing in financial services through the work of its new blockchain technology research group, complemented by its AI research team.
At the Simons Institute, we are experiencing one of the most exciting and jam-packed semesters since the Institute opened. In addition to vibrant programs on Computational Complexity of Statistical Inference and Geometric Methods in Optimization and Sampling, we are hosting ongoing research pods in Quantum Computing and Machine Learning. And the building is lively with three new cohorts of postdocs — one associated with each pod, and a group of Simons-Berkeley postdoctoral researchers funded by a new grant from the Simons Foundation. All told, the population of postdoctoral-level scholars at the Institute over the course of the year is up 69% from the level in 2019–20.
Despite the constraints imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, this was a year of tremendous growth for the Simons Institute. Thanks to generous grants from the Simons Foundation, National Science Foundation (NSF), and Department of Energy (DOE), we have added three new cohorts of postdocs to the Institute community.
There is some good news from the front lines on circuit complexity, one of the most challenging arenas within theoretical computer science. An algebraic circuit consists of gates, each of which carries out either addition or multiplication over some field, say real numbers. The depth of the circuit is the length of the longest path from the output to one of its inputs. Naturally, an algebraic circuit computes a polynomial over its inputs.
A profile of Ingrid Daubechies by former Simons Institute Journalist in Residence Siobhan Roberts.