Letter from the Director, February 2025

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley, where we are nearly halfway through the second semester of our yearlong research program on large language models. In early February, the program hosted a highly interdisciplinary workshop with talks covering a host of topics, including one by program organizer Sasha Rush on the then-just-released DeepSeek, which we’re featuring in our SimonsTV corner this month. In broader theory news, the 2025 STOC conference announced its list of accepted papers in early February; based on both the record number 200-plus papers and the significant leaps made across the spectrum of theoretical computer science, I’m delighted and proud that the field is alive and kicking! 

In this issue of the newsletter, we feature the latest installment of Simons Institute Senior Scientist Nikhil Srivastava’s column, Theory at the Institute and Beyond. In it, Nikhil explores two recent results that have revolutionized our understanding of the sparse yet highly connected graphs known as expanders. 

As you may recall, this year the Simons Institute launched its third research pod — on Resilience in Brain, Natural, and Algorithmic Systems, co-led by Simons Institute Director Emerita Shafi Goldwasser (EECS) and Daniela Kaufer (Neuroscience). The fledgling pod held its inaugural public event this past month, in collaboration with the Berkeley Neuro-AI Resilience Center — a lecture on Resilience in Action by Daniel Jackson (MIT). We’re delighted to share that talk with you here.

Also in our SimonsTV corner this month, we have a new episode of our Polylogues web series. Science Communicator in Residence Anil Ananthaswamy sits down with Andrew Gordon Wilson (NYU Courant Institute) to discuss Wilson’s research connecting transformers, Kolmogorov complexity, the no free lunch theorem, and universal learners. 

As a reminder, we are currently accepting proposals on a rolling basis for Breakthroughs Workshops and Goldwasser Exploratory Workshops. And through April 1, you can also submit a proposal for Circles, the Simons Institute – Jane Street Small Group Collaborations. And we are always on the lookout for exciting topics for our thematic semester programs; while the next round of proposals (for programs in Summer 2027 or later) won’t be formally reviewed by the Scientific Advisory Board until this summer, we encourage anyone interested to contact us with your ideas, even if they’re in early formative stages. 

Hope to see you in Berkeley soon.

Best wishes,
Venkat

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