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Theories of sequential decision-making have been around for decades but continue to flourish. The Simons Institute’s Fall 2022 program on Data-Driven Decision Processes provided an excellent overview of recent results in online learning and sequential decision-making.

Dear friends,

I hope all of you are enjoying the arrival of spring. 

In this episode of Polylogues, Sandy Irani sat down with theoretical computer scientist, Pixar co-founder and FOCS Proceedings cover artist Alvy Ray Smith to discuss his rich and varied career.

In his presentation at the Simons Institute, mathematician and best-selling science communicator Jordan Ellenberg (University of Wisconsin–Madison) emboldened his colleagues to practice the art of writing about science for a broad audience.

For decades, mathematicians have been inching forward on a problem about which sets contain evenly spaced patterns of three numbers. Last month, two computer scientists blew past all of those results.

Cryptographers have shown how perfect security can undermine machine learning models.

In his Theoretically Speaking public lecture this month, Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith shared his voyage from an early career as a theoretical computer scientist to pioneering the digital graphics revolution.

Greetings from Berkeley, where February is a mixture of glorious spring blossoms and surprise snow flurries.

What is the computational complexity of computational complexity? In his Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture, Eric Allender (Rutgers University) explored the core themes of the Spring 2023 research program on Meta-Complexity.

In 2021, the Simons Institute hosted a workshop titled 50 Years of Satisfiability: The Centrality of SAT in the Theory of Computing. One of the talks was by Simons Institute Founding Director Richard Karp, who gave a firsthand account of early developments in computational complexity theory.