Former NSF theory program director Peter Brass guest posts on the state of the foundation.

Constructing indistinguishability obfuscation schemes in a hardness rich world Rachel Lin’s talk, “Expedition to Obfustopia,” at the Simons Institute examined indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) in cryptography. She highlighted the challenges in constructi…

In my latest blog, I discuss the challenges of building a powerful #cryptographic technique that aims to “obfuscate” the internal implementation details of programs- lnkd.in/gT3smPZh
Thanks Seyoon Ragavan and Rahul llango for the nice chat about their works @simonsinstitute.bsky.social!
#TCS

Workshop Session A:  Breaking and Making Quantum Speedups Organized by Siddhartha Jain, Seyoon Ragavan, Alexander Schmidhuber and Noah Shutty Workshop Session B:  Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search: Bridging Theoretical Foundations and Industrial Frontiers Organized by Piotr Indyk, Rajesh Jayaram, and Ravi Krishnaswamy Workshop Session C: Morning: Space: Connecting Classical and Catalytic Approaches Organized by Ian Mertz and Ted Pyne Afternoon: The Localization Method for High-dimensional Inequalities Organized by Santosh S. Vempala

The workshops for #FOCS2025 have been announced! They will take place on the first day of the conference, December 14 (Sunday), over 3 parallel sessions.

Title slide: Factoring with a Quantum Computer: The State of the Art Seyoon Ragavan (MIT) Based on joint works with Gregory D. Kahanamoku-Meyer, Vinod Vaikuntanath, and Katherine Van Kirk

Excellent talk yesterday at UTS by Seyoon Ragavan, on #quantum algorithms for factoring: focusing on Regev's recent improvement, and subsequent improvements by Seyoon and his coauthors.

Wonderful article by @lakshmic.bsky.social about work on the Jacobi factoring circuit with Seyoon, Greg and Katherine!

How would you respond if your lab got destroyed by a missile?

"I wish that a day will come very, very soon in which Iranian scientists and Israeli scientists will collaborate and work together and perform scientific research for the future of mankind."
apnews.com/article/isra...

Excellent hires. Wow!