Letter from the Director, October 2018

Dear friends,

In 2018, the Simons Institute hosted its inaugural "Summer Clusters". This new format is designed to offer a platform for focused research on fast-moving or emerging topics, for a smaller number of participants than attend our semester-long programs. Our first two clusters — on Algorithmic Fairness, and on Challenges in Quantum Computation — are featured in this issue of the newsletter.

I sat down with Fairness organizers Cynthia Dwork (Harvard University) and Guy Rothblum (Weizmann Institute of Science), and Quantum organizer Umesh Vazirani (UC Berkeley) to discuss the research that took place in their clusters. You can watch the interview here.

Our Summer 2018 Journalist in Residence, Dana Mackenzie, has written a feature article on the research in the Quantum cluster. Omer Reingold has contributed an insider’s perspective on the work in the Fairness cluster.

This summer, we also began posting online the final program reports prepared program organizers at the one-year anniversary of each program. Each report includes a comprehensive bibliography of publications that emerged from the program. Explore the growing library of program reports on our online archive.

This fall, we are running programs on Foundations of Data Science, and on Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity. We'll share news from these programs in our next issue of the newsletter.

I hope to see all of you in Berkeley soon!

Best regards,
Shafi

Shafi Goldwasser
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

Related Articles

• Video Feature: Algorithmic Fairness and Quantum Computation
• Summer Cluster on Challenges in Quantum Computation
• Summer Cluster on Algorithmic Fairness