Avi Wigderson has won the Turing award. I just can’t find the words on how happy this makes me, so won’t even try to write a post, beyond what I wrote on Twitter. Many have posted on Avi’s contributions, see Quanta, New Scientist, Scott’s blog, Lance’s blog, but to me, perhaps this tweet of Michal Feldman resonated the most. One of the first lessons I learned from Avi is one that I still remember. This was at the IAS, I think when I was visiting there in 2001. We were talking about a technical question, and I mentioned that an upcoming visitor is an expert on that topic, and so it might be goo ..read more

STOC/TheoryFest 2024 is in Vancouver, British Columbia this year, during the week of June 24-28. The registration website is now open at http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2024/registration.html In addition to the STOC 2024 paper talks, the program features keynote talks by Michal Feldman, Jakub Pachocki, and Tim Roughgarden, and workshops on Algorithmic Problems in Modern LLMs, Extremal Combinatorics, Length-Constrained Expanders, Online Resource Allocation, and a special workshop on TCS Mentoring, Diversity, and Outreach ..read more

One of the lessons we have seen in language modeling is the power of scale. The original GPT paper of Radford et al. noted that at some point during training, the model “acquired” the ability to do sentiment analysis of a sentence X by predicting whether it is more likely to be followed by “very negative” or “very positive.”  As they trained the model, at some point, the zero-shot performance “jumped” significantly.  Of course, as Radford et al. noted, their approach required “an expensive pre-training step—1 month on 8 GPUs.” Figure 1: Figure adapted from OpenAI GPT blog post (2018 ..read more

I wrote this letter earlier today to the Harvard Corporation. I did not intend to make it public but was asked by some people to do so. I figured there is no harm in that. Many people that I respect are deeply disappointed at Harvard in particular and U.S. Universities at large, and are calling for the resignation of our president. I hope this letter explains why I do not share this view. See also my previous tweet. This is not because I think Harvard has no issues with anti-semitism, nor because I think it is a bastion of freedom of speech. I have been critical of Harvard’s administration bef ..read more

[I was hoping for this piece to be posted as an op-ed in the Crimson, since I really want to reach students that are well-intentioned but may not realize they are harmful. However, it was rejected and so I am posting this here] The events of October 7th, 2023, hit many Israeli-Americans personally. My immediate family was thankfully spared, but I have several friends who were not so lucky. At Harvard, where I  teach, one student lost four members of her family; three generations: grandmother, father, and two kids were murdered. The Idan family were the next-door neighbors of another stude ..read more

[Guest post by Shafi Goldwasser, See also PDF version of document] On the morning of Saturday, October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack near the Israel/Gaza border. In villages and towns near the border they went from door-to-door annihilating whole families. They killed children in front of their parents and siblings. They abused women. In a music concert in the desert, they massacred hundreds of young people and wounded thousands of others. And they took captive children, infants, elderly in wheelchairs, women and men, to be used as human shields, and worse. The attacks on civilians were pl ..read more

This is a copy of the open letter that has been signed by well over 100 faculty at the time I am posting this. The full letter and list of signatories can be found on https://bit.ly/harvard-against-terrorism We are faculty at Harvard who are deeply concerned about the events in the Middle East, as well as the safety of our students here on campus. On October 7th, Hamas launched a premeditated attack on the Israeli population. Hundreds of terrorists infiltrated Israeli towns and houses. Children were killed in front of their parents; entire families were executed. Grandmothers, mothers, and the ..read more

Dear President Gay, Recent days have been harrowing for both me and every other Israeli or Jewish person on the Harvard campus. On October 7th, Hamas launched a premeditated attack on the Israeli population. Hundreds of terrorists infiltrated Israeli towns and houses. Children were killed in front of their parents; entire families were executed. Grandmothers, mothers, and their babies were kidnapped. All in all, more than 700 Israelis were killed in a single day and the death toll is continuing to grow. There have also been deaths on the Palestinian side, including hundreds of terrorists and ..read more

[Cross posted on lesswrong; see here for my prior writings]  [it appears almost certain that in the immediate future, it would be] possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Letter from Albert Einstein (prepared by Leo Szilard) to F.D. Roosevelt, August 1939 Do you know, Josef Vassarionovich, what main argument has been advanced against uranium? “It would be too good if the problem could be solved. Nature seldom proves favorable to man.”   L ..read more

[Unrelated announcement: Yael Kalai, Ran Raz, Salil Vadhan, Nisheeth Vishnoi and I recently completed our survey of Avi Wigderson’s work for the volume on Abel prize winners. Given the breadth and depth of Avi’s work, our survey could only cover a small sample of it, but we still hope it can. be a useful resource for students or researchers in computational complexity.] Tim Nguyen has a wonderful podcast called the “Cartesian Cafe“, where he interviews for an extended time people on a technical topic. Some people he interviewed include Scott Aaronson, John Baez, Tai-Danae Bradley, Sean Carroll ..read more