Letter from the Director, October 2021

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley, where we’ve been “enjoying” some much-needed rain!

This October, the Simons Institute held its seventh annual Industry Day. The goal of the day was to foster exchange and collaboration between the Institute’s industry partners and graduate students, postdoctoral research fellows, and senior researchers at the Institute and on the broader Berkeley campus. We were delighted to learn about research developments in our partner network, and to welcome PayPal as our newest industry partner. 

As a few of you may have already realized, 2021–22 marks the Simons Institute’s 10th anniversary year! We will be celebrating the occasion with a research symposium and gala in late May, and will be offering a variety of ways for you to engage with the Institute throughout the year. 

To kick off the celebrations, we’re happy to share with you the first installment of a three-part Polylogues miniseries on the Foundations of Computing. In this episode, former Simons Institute Journalist in Residence Siobhan Roberts sits down with Don Knuth for a conversation on his career, the history of computer science, and the nature of algorithms.

Also in our SimonsTV corner this month, we share a Theoretically Speaking panel discussion on Deep Nets and the Primate Visual System featuring James DiCarlo (MIT), Grace Lindsay (University College London), Jitendra Malik (UC Berkeley), and Santosh Vempala (Georgia Tech), and moderated by Science Communicator in Residence Anil Ananthaswamy. 

As always, we invite you to connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. 

Here’s to happy reunions,
Shafi

Shafi Goldwasser
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing