Letter from the Director, October 2024

Dear friends,

Greetings from Berkeley! I’m delighted to be writing my first update to you as interim director since Shafi stepped down in August after six-and-a-half years of visionary service.

The search for our next director opened this week. I encourage you to share the announcement with your network — and perhaps our next director is reading this newsletter already!

Our Fall 2024 research programs on Modern Paradigms in Generalization and Large Language Models and Transformers are now in full swing. In this issue of the newsletter, we share a couple of our favorite talks from these programs’ recent boot camps: John Duchi’s presentation on Robust Optimization and Generalization and Aditi Raghunathan’s talk, Challenges in Making LLMs Safe and Robust.

Also in this month’s newsletter, senior scientist Nikhil Srivastava shares the latest installment of his column, Theory at the Institute and Beyond. This time, he turns his attention to developments in quantum Gibbs samplers, a new proof of Friedman’s theorem on expansion of random graphs, and advances on low-error and parameterized PCPs. 

And finally, we’re pleased to share with you the newest video in our Polylogues web series: an interview with former Simons Institute Scientific Advisory Board member and program organizer Irit Dinur — famous for her research on PCPs and locally testable codes, hardness of approximation, and, recently, high-dimensional expanders.

I hope to see you in Berkeley soon!

Best wishes,

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