Letter from the Director, Summer 2025
Dear friends,
Greetings from Berkeley, where we are in the final weeks of an exciting summer at the Simons Institute. Our Summer Cluster on Quantum Computing wound down a few weeks back after a period of intense activities. In addition to a weeklong workshop (July 7 to 11), the cluster included a number of one-day thematic workshops — on Quantum Decoding for Optimization (June 2), on The Compressed Oracle Method in Quantum Complexity and Cryptography (June 9), and on Quantum Gibbs Sampling (June 18). These one-day workshops catch experts up on recent technical developments and foster accelerated collaborations that further explore the promise of these developments. This has been an innovative forum that has been very effective and has already led to some breakthroughs.
Our summer program on Cryptography has been continually abuzz with activity. In addition to exciting workshops on obfuscation, proofs, and secure computation, there have been fascinating reading groups spanning foundations, proofs, interface with ML, low-complexity cryptography, and communication complexity. It has been highly gratifying and invigorating to catch a glimpse of the second floor around teatime with energetic collaborations that leave no whiteboard unused!
We’re delighted to share two feature articles this month from recent science communicators in residence. Alex Bellos writes about the development of error-correcting codes, the topic of a Spring 2024 research program at the Simons Institute. And Anil Ananthaswamy explores metacognition — the ability of large and small language models to know that they know.
In the latest installment of our Polylogues web series, former Science Communicator in Residence Christoph Drösser interviews Steven Piantadosi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley who co-organized our Spring 2025 workshop on LLMs, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Neuroscience. The two discuss how LLMs are influencing our understanding of some of the foundational questions in linguistic theory.
Also in our SimonsTV corner this month, we have highlights from this summer’s Cryptography program and Quantum Computing cluster: talks by Ron Rothblum on SP1 Hypercube and the Jagged Polynomial Commitment Scheme, and Robbie King on Sum-of-Squares Spectral Amplification.
And finally, we’re pleased to highlight some recent press — a blog piece by Summer 2025 Science Communicator in Residence Lakshmi Chandrasekaran inspired by Seyoon Ragavan’s recent Quantum Colloquium on The Jacobi Factoring Circuit: Classically Hard Factoring in Sublinear Quantum Space and Depth, and an article by our friends at the Challenge Institute for Quantum Computation (CIQC) about young quantum scientists whose careers took flight at CIQC and the Simons Institute.
Wishing you an enjoyable close to the summer,
Venkat
Venkatesan Guruswami
Interim Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing