Letter from the Director, September 2022

Dear friends,

Warm greetings from Berkeley, where it oscillates from cold and foggy SF nights to beautiful sunny weather! The Simons Institute's second decade is off to an exciting start, with research programs on Data-Driven Decision Processes and Graph Limits and Processes on Networks: From Epidemics to Misinformation running alongside our ongoing research pods on quantum computing and machine learning. 

I’m happy to share with you some of our favorite talks from the last month, selected by the Institute's leadership team. First, we have a sequence of short talks given by our outstanding new cohort of research fellows. Second, we share Nicole Immorlica’s eye-opening presentation in our Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lectures series about the mathematics of how our tendency to gravitate toward those most like ourselves leads to inequality and economic inefficiency. And finally, we share Anupam Gupta’s excellent two-part tutorial on Competitive Analysis of Online Algorithms from our Data-Driven Decision Processes Boot Camp.

This month on our Calvin Café blog, Prahladh Harsha wrote about some exciting new developments in research on locally testable codes. We’re showcasing his post in this issue of the newsletter.

I hope to see you soon!

Best wishes,
Shafi

Shafi Goldwasser
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing