Letter from the Director, February 2022

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley, where spring is already upon us. A shout out to those who went to school here at some time or another — the magnolias are in full bloom, and that has not changed one bit. 

This semester, we received the great news that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation was awarding the Simons Institute with $250,000 in support of our Spring 2022 research program on Causality. This interdisciplinary program aims to integrate advances and techniques from theoretical computer science into methods for causal inference and discovery, and has interesting ties with the Sloan Foundation’s interests in empirical economics. You can read more about the award here

The Institute is currently inviting applications for science communicator in residence positions for the coming academic year. We welcome recommendations of excellent candidates, and appreciate your help in getting out the word to your networks.

In this issue of the newsletter, Simons Institute Senior Scientist Prasad Raghavendra is back with the latest installment in his recurring column, Theory at the Institute and Beyond, this time with news of research developments on error-correcting codes.

I hope to see you soon.

Best wishes,
Shafi

Shafi Goldwasser
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

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