Letter from the Director, March 2022

Dear friends, 

Greetings from spring in Berkeley. In the last couple of weeks, some of us have taken off our masks in Calvin Lab for the first time, and are enjoying a sense of renewal overall. Blooms are all around — please see some below.

In this month’s newsletter, Sean Meyn and Gergely Neu discuss Q-functions in a research vignette from our Fall 2020 research program on Theory of Reinforcement Learning. 

In our SimonsTV corner, we share Dina Katabi’s fabulous Theoretically Speaking talk from this month, Monitoring People and Their Vital Signs Using Radio Signals and Machine Learning. And in our 10th-anniversary flashback series, we revisit a musical offering from Women in Theory 2020, pandemic edition.

Hope to see you at our 10th Anniversary Symposium in May!

Best wishes,
Shafi

Shafi Goldwasser
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing