Letter from the Director, December 2024

Dear friends,

Greetings from the land of the Ohlone. As the year draws to a close, I am grateful for all of you who make up our brilliant, innovative, open-minded, and collaborative community, and for my wonderful colleagues at the Simons Institute who have made Calvin Lab a global home for our field. 

The Simons Institute invites applications for postdoctoral-level research fellowships in our Summer and Fall 2025 research programs: Cryptography 10 Years Later: Obfuscation, Proof Systems, and Secure Computation (Summer 2025); Complexity and Linear Algebra (Fall 2025); and Algorithmic Foundations for Emerging Computing Technologies (Fall 2025). Please forward the announcement to strong candidates in your circles.

Also, our Scientific Advisory Board will be reviewing program proposals (and pre-proposals) in January. Groups with interesting ideas for proposals are encouraged to apply. Learn more about how to submit a proposal, and feel free to get in touch with our associate director, Sampath Kannan, at simonsassociatedirector@berkeley.edu. 

In this issue of the newsletter, we are featuring an article by Science Communicator in Residence Anil Ananthaswamy about training LLMs. And in our SimonsTV corner, we are showcasing the talks by Noam Brown (Open AI) and Sasha Rush (Cornell Tech) that Anil writes about. 

Season’s greetings from all of us at the Simons Institute!

Yours,
Venkat

Venkatesan Guruswami
Interim Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing