work

It's calming to revisit the week in hindsight after I've fully calmed down and recovered from everything going on. My biggest two concerns at work this week were a presentation for DSO and being reintroduced to my new office. Having just come back on Monday, I had till Tuesday night to refine and practice my presentation for DSO, which I eventually gave at 10pm ET (10am SGT). All things considered, it went well! I'm still waiting on some comments to wrap up the paperwork, but I was told that most of the audience got something out of the talk which I'm happy about :-).

Adding to the presentation, I came to my new office for the first time on Tuesday morning to find my boxes missing from the move and no where to plug in my computer! I scrambled a bit to just have my daily meetings on my laptop, but fortunately our Operations Manager is a godsend. She worked very hard to track down my boxes and get my office in working order. There are still a few kinks to work out over time, but it'll work for me for the next few weeks at least.

Needless today, this (plus traveling) led to a big build-up of stress. And I basically spend all of Wednesday entirely sore seemingly just from being tense.The body is pretty crazy that way. Fortunately, Wednesday through Friday were much more chill, and I was able to get a lot of work done on my upcoming submission, unpack my office, and do a little bit of prep for my new class (though not as much as I should've!).

non-work

I made sure to put off work while I was with my family last weekend. I was definitely a bit tired and tense from the upcoming work, but I tried my hardest to just put it out of my mind and enjoy being around them. I had a lot of fun getting breakfast, BBQ, and playing with my nephew! It was the first time I'd been back since my mom passed away in March, so a lot had changed. Despite a little air of grief though, the wedding and love I have for my family made it a fun time though.

Once I was back, I basically spend Monday and Tuesday night working for my deadline. But, the rest of the week gave me free time without cutting into my productivity. I was able to spend the a lot of time just talking with my friends, and I'm grateful they were able to take the time with me. We're looking for new games to play together though, so I'm open to suggestions :-).

questions

• Why haven't people tried to construct concretely efficient attribute-based encryption from plain LWE from more restricted policy classes?
  • This seems like a natural target to try and get something concretely instantiable
• What is the simplest way to describe to someone the differences between PIR and ORAM?
  • Specifically, when which one is the right tool for the job or concretely efficient enough for practice
  • This is a question I've thought a bit about, but I can't do much more than gesture at the implementations that have been used. I don't think I have a personal grasp of what the precise targets are for concrete schemes
  • For example, at what point would signal have considered using PIR instead of ORAM for their contact discovery?

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's is a picture from last weekend and this weekend!