Letter from the Director, April 2026

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley, where last week we had a doubleheader of workshops associated with our quantum and machine learning pods. The latter workshop, Theoretical Foundations: From the Early Days of Neural Networks to the Modern Deep Learning Era, celebrated the 60th birthday of our colleague Peter Bartlett, who served as the Simons Institute’s second associate director. And last month, we welcomed participants to the Institute for a workshop on Trust in Decentralized Systems, the second thematic workshop in our ongoing research program on Federated and Collaborative Learning.

The Simons Institute is currently inviting proposals from organizing teams that would like to convene a research program or cluster at the Institute in Fall 2027 or later. This year for the first time, we’re encouraging teams to consider whether an experimental convening format might best serve their topic — for example, a short program during a regular academic semester. Energetic programs addressing some of the deepest and most pressing challenges related to the theory of computing form the core of our mission to advance the frontiers of the field. So please think of exciting ideas for such thematic programs, put together an organizing team that brings together multiple perspectives on those topics, and send us your (pre)-proposals. We are eager to hear your ideas! And feel free to reach out to get the discussion rolling, even if you haven’t yet decided to submit a proposal.

In other news, we’re proud to share that our short documentary film, Until the Sun Engulfs the Earth: Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity, is being featured this month in the April 2026 issue of Labocine, an online magazine and streaming platform that is home to the Science New Wave. This film, which was released in 2022 as Episode 2 of Theory Shorts, asks how we know that a problem is impossible to solve. It arose out of our Fall 2018 research program on Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity, and features Paul Beame, Faith Ellen, Jelani Nelson, Manuel Sabin, and Madhu Sudan.

And of great personal interest to me, our friend Arvind Raghunathan of Roc360 has established a center for theoretical computer science at my alma mater, IIT Madras. It’s wonderful to see theory getting this kind of recognition, and to be building ties with a truly global community of institutions advancing research in the field. Also, please join me in congratulating Matei Zaharia on his receipt of the 2025 ACM Prize in Computing!

In our SimonsTV corner this month, we’re showcasing talks from the most recent workshops in the Federated and Collaborative Learning program: Brendan McMahan’s Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture on Responsibly Improving AI with Privacy-Sensitive Data, and Giulia Fanti’s talk on Synthetic Data as an Enabler for Learning from Decentralized Private Data, from the workshop on Trust in Decentralized Systems.

Theoretical computer science and its intersections with technology and society have been the talk of the town in the last month. Check out a selection of recent coverage in the In the Press section of this issue of the newsletter. 

I hope to see you in Berkeley soon!

Best wishes,
Venkat

Venkatesan Guruswami
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing