Letter from the Director, March 2026

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley, where spring break is just around the corner, though we have been enjoying spring-like weather already.

Applications for programmatic research fellowships in our Spring 2027 research program on Symmetry in Efficient Computation with Local Constraints are now open. We hope the early-career researchers among you with interests intersecting with the program will consider applying, and we invite the rest of you to share the announcement with your networks. Applications are due April 1.

We recently received the good news that our colleague John Wright, a UC Berkeley quantum computing theorist actively involved with the Simons Institute’s Quantum Pod, has been awarded a 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship. I sat down with him to discuss his research and his reflections on the field, and am delighted to share that conversation with you here.

Each year, in addition to our research programs, clusters, pods, and programmatic workshops, the Simons Institute hosts a small number of free-standing workshops. Last month in this vein, we held a workshop on Theory of Computing and Healthcare, which bridged innovative concepts from theoretical computer science and the pressing, real-world challenges of modern healthcare. One of the highlights was a distinguished lecture by Holden Thorp (Science) addressing social and biological approaches to understanding autism.

This past weekend, I interviewed Dan Spielman (Yale) and Nikhil Srivastava (Simons Institute), two of the organizers of First Proof, an ongoing experiment to measure the capacity of AI to do research-level math. First Proof announced its forthcoming benchmark and second batch of problems on Pi Day. I’m delighted to share that conversation with you here, in the latest installment of our Polylogues web series. 

Simons Institute research programs begin with a boot camp designed to bring a diverse group of researchers from different disciplines onto the same page and develop a common language, explore the program’s central themes, and build a framework for productive collaboration during the semester. The boot camp videos also serve as a highly effective entry point to undergraduates and graduate students interested in entering a field. The Federated and Collaborative Learning Boot Camp consisted of talks, panels, and tutorials, and featured a strong presence from industry research labs as well as academic researchers. We’re pleased to share Daniel Ramage’s talk from that workshop, Toward Provably Private Federated Learning.

Also in our SimonsTV corner this month, we have a set of talks on Alignment Problems in AI Governance by our two Law and Society fellows this semester, Rui-Jie Yew and Greg Demirchyan. The Simons Institute’s Law and Society Fellowships enhance Institute programs that address technologies with societal impacts and implications for ethics, law, and policy, by supporting a researcher focused on addressing the broader societal implications of the themes addressed within these programs. This semester, we have two Law and Society fellows at once, and we’re delighted to introduce you to their work.

Thanks as always for being part of our global community. I hope to see you in Berkeley soon.

Best wishes,
Venkat

Venkatesan Guruswami
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing