Letter from the Director, November 2024

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley, where we have a busy week ahead, including our flagship Industry Day on Thursday, November 7.

We’re pleased to announce three exciting new initiatives. First, we are issuing a call for proposals for two new workshop series: Breakthroughs Workshops and Goldwasser Exploratory Workshops. There will be up to two workshops in each of these series per year, and we hope some of you will propose the inaugural lectures, to be held in 2025–26. 

Next, in partnership with Jane Street, we’re launching Circles, the Simons Institute – Jane Street Small Group Collaborations. The program will support groups of three to six researchers for four weeklong visits to the Simons Institute and Jane Street, spread over two years, to collaborate on an ambitious research project. We are currently accepting applications, and hope some of you will consider applying. 

Last but not least, we are teaming up with Canadian research consortium IVADO to enhance and expand the Spring 2025 research program, Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers, Part 2 (LLM2). This partnership will support the addition of a third thematic workshop within the LLM2 program, organized by Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal), Siva Reddy (McGill University), and other collaborators. The partnership will also enable long-term program participation by eight to 10 researchers and students from Canadian universities.

In our SimonsTV corner this month, we’re pleased to highlight a talk by Nicholas Carlini (Google DeepMind) on Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models, from our recent workshop on Alignment, Trust, Watermarking, and Copyright Issues in LLMs. Carlini presents research showing two distinct attacks that lead ChatGPT to divulge large amounts of its training data. 

I’m delighted to share that Simons Institute Senior Advisor Bin Yu has a book out with Rebecca Barter: Veridical Data Science: The Practice of Responsible Data Analysis and Decision Making. The print version is available for purchase, and there’s a free online version as well. 

Hope to see you in Berkeley soon.

Best wishes,
Venkat

Venkatesan Guruswami
Interim Director, Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing