Letter from the Director, September 2026

Venkat Guruswami, photographed from the shoulders up against a gray background. He's wearing glasses and a dark shirt.

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley, where our fall research programs on Spectral Theory Beyond Graphs, and on Pseudorandomness & High-Dimensional Expansion are in full swing. The Simons Institute has been hopping this past month, with workshops during four of the last five weeks: our ICM Satellite Conference on Spectral Theory, High-Dimensional Expansion, and Pseudorandomness; a joint boot camp for our two fall programs; a reunion of the Fall 2025 program on Algorithmic Foundations for Emerging Computing Technologies; and the first thematic workshops of each of the programs. In addition, there is a large number of working groups on various topics that meet weekly, and teatime continues to actively foster impromptu discussions, on matters both technical and nontechnical.

We’re sharing a collection of outstanding talks and tutorials from these gatherings in our SimonsTV corner this month: Jorge Garza-Vargas on Strong Convergence, William Hoza on Derandomizing Space-Bounded Computation, Mitali Bafna on High-Dimensional Expansion, and Eugenia Sapir on Random Hyperbolic Surfaces.

Developments in AI are at the forefront of all of our minds, and addressing them will be a central concern for the Simons Institute as we look ahead. Three weeks ago, we convened a working group on AI and TCS, focused on producing near-term suggested actions for how our research community can adapt to developments in AI. The group published its report yesterday, with recommendations related to AI use disclosure, conference submission evaluation, the role of AI in graduate education, and more. 

And next week, we will be holding a workshop on Trustworthy AI: From Hallucinations to Reliable Autonomy. AI interpretability, reliability, safety, and alignment are key topics of discussion right now, and we hope to have more to say about them in the weeks and months to come. We’re also sharing some press clippings on this and other TCS-related topics in this issue of the newsletter.

At this time of year, we warmly invite applications for Simons Institute Research Fellowships, Science Communicator in Residence visits, and Circles, the Simons Institute – Jane Street Small Group Collaborations. Please consider applying, or sharing information about these opportunities with your network.

I hope you are well, and that we meet in Berkeley soon.

Best wishes,
Venkat

Venkatesan Guruswami
Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

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