Letter from the Director, February 2026

Venkat Guruswami, photographed from the shoulders up against a gray background. He's wearing glasses and a dark shirt.

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley, where our program on Federated and Collaborative Learning is in full swing. In January, we hosted our winter Scientific Advisory Board meeting, preceded by a Theory Day with talks by some of our board members. We also had two groups of Circles participants here for a week of collaboration. And this was in addition to a workshop, a boot camp, a program reunion, and a Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture. In short, we’ve had a busy and exciting start to the semester. 

I’m delighted to share with you the latest installment of my colleague Nikhil Srivastava’s column, Theory at the Institute and Beyond. This month, he explores innovative approaches to workshop design, and unveils a community experiment to see how well AI can do research math.

The semester kicked off with a workshop on Bridging Prediction and Intervention Problems in Social Systems. This workshop challenged the prediction-centric paradigm on which machine learning models are often assessed. It brought together an interdisciplinary community to explore alternative frameworks that integrate statistical modeling and tools, policy intervention design, and evaluation methodologies. By shifting toward an intervention-based perspective, the organizing team aimed to foster new methods and theories that bridge machine learning and real-world deployment in social systems. In this month’s newsletter, we’re highlighting Frauke Kreuter’s talk from the workshop, Beyond Prediction Performance: How Modeling Decisions Shape Fairness Outcomes in Statistical Profiling.

Also in our SimonsTV corner this month, we have Katrina Ligett’s recent Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture, Let’s Stop Leaving Money on the Table, in which she suggests reformulating theoretical questions in machine learning in new ways that can help close the gaps between theory and practice. This talk was one of the highlights of last week’s Federated and Collaborative Learning Boot Camp, and we’ll be sharing another of our favorites with you next month.

I hope to see you at Calvin Lab soon!

Best wishes,
Venkat

Venkatesan Guruswami
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

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