Letter from the Director, June 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 we’ve welcomed a band of quantum computing theorists for a summer cluster focused on NISQ (noisy intermediate-scale quantum) computers and complexity-based evidence of quantum advantage. The cluster is happening under the auspices of the Simons Institute’s Quantum Research Pod and is generously funded by the National Science Foundation. 

Since I last wrote to you, we held an exciting workshop on AI governance, which convened a group of policymakers, science policy advocates, and researchers from academia and industry to discuss the landscape of AI regulation. Organized by our Law and Society Fellows, in collaboration with the CITRIS Tech Policy initiative, the workshop was presented as part of our Algorithms, Society, and the Law initiative. We’re showcasing California State Senator Jerry McNerney’s talk from the workshop in this issue of the newsletter. 

A couple of weeks ago, we also had a fantastic workshop on The Role of TCS in Modern Machine Learning, which doubled as a birthday celebration of our former Scientific Advisory Board Chair Avrim Blum. There were too many wonderful talks to count, but we’re highlighting two nice ones in our SimonsTV corner this month: Robert Schapire’s talk on Astral Space: Convex Analysis at Infinity and Santosh Vempala’s Red Points and Blue Points.

And last week we had a reunion workshop that included three exciting and timely panels on the ramifications of AI on education and research. And this week we have a workshop that's a follow-up to the AI, Psychology, and Neuroscience 2024 Summer Cluster. All in all, a very busy start to the summer at the Simons Institute.

Later this summer, we’ll be hosting a satellite conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) 2026. ICM is the world’s most important international conference for mathematics, and meets just once every four years, like the Olympics. This year’s meeting is being held in Philadelphia from July 23 through 30. The conference had previously only been held in the US twice since its establishment in 1897: 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and 1986 in Berkeley. The host country often puts on a number of satellite events, and we are doing just that! Our conference focuses on Spectral Theory, High-Dimensional Expansion, and Pseudorandomness, and will be held in Berkeley at the Simons Institute from August 24 through 28. 

Last but not least, a number of our friends and colleagues have earned acclaim in recent weeks. Read all about their accomplishments here.

I hope to cross paths with many of you this summer, here at Berkeley or at some other theory event!

Best wishes,
Venkat

Venkatesan Guruswami
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

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