Letter from the Director, April 2019

Dear friends,

Greetings from the Simons Institute, where we are midway through our twelfth semester of research programs. In Spring 2019, we are hosting semester-long programs on Geometry of Polynomials and on Data Privacy: Foundations and Applications. You can read more about these programs in Luca Trevisan's column, This Semester at the Simons Institute.

You may recall that the Simons Institute is now hosting research activities year-round. In Summer 2019, we will run a program on Foundations of Deep Learning, and two shorter clusters — on Fairness, and on Error-Correcting Codes and High-Dimensional Expansion.

In our From the Inside series, we share articles on our Fall 2018 programs — Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity and Foundations of Data Science.

We also take a deeper look at some of the work that emerged from our Spring 2018 programs, with a Research Vignette by Xinbo Geng, Swati Gupta, Tong Huang, and Le Xie, on an energy-related strand within the program on Real-Time Decision Making; and a panel discussion on the Predictive Brain, featuring Brain and Computation program organizers Christos Papadimitriou and Bruno Olshausen, and guests Michael Pollan and Celeste Kidd, moderated by Fall 2018 Journalist in Residence Anil Ananthaswamy.

This spring, we launched a campaign to honor our Founding Director, Dick Karp. We will be launching a distinguished lecture series in his honor this fall, and are welcoming contributions to the Richard M. Karp Fund through June 2019. 

I hope you enjoy this issue of the newsletter, and look forward to seeing you in Berkeley.

Best wishes,
Shafi

Shafi Goldwasser
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

Related Articles

• Video Feature: The Predictive Brain
• This Semester at the Simons Institute, Spring 2019
• From the Inside: Foundations of Data Science
• From the Inside: Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity
• Research Vignette: Real-Time Decision Making in Energy (RTDM-E)