adapting to the ramp up
work
Most of my days this week were basically swamped. Monday, I flew back from San Diego, Tuesday/Thursday, I had back-to-back meetings almost all day, and Friday, I went to NY Cryptoday at Columbia. Even on Wednesday, I had to a few scattered meetings. That basically made getting all my work done pretty stressful. I ended up pushing off a lot of research work I would've liked to do to work on slides for the upcoming presentations I have. Now I have the shorter and higher stakes talk draft to practice and get the time down and a pretty good outline for the longer talk on Monday. I'm planning to keep working on the slides this weekend to get it done. But all things considered, I think I managed to get a good bit done.
Spread among the meetings, I managed to get some research done too. I also got my teaching assignments and started thinking how to revamp the cybersecurity curriculum at Stevens. All of it was pretty marginal, although one project I just started with Jaspal is really interesting and fun to think about.
non-work
Like I mentioned last week, I spend the previous weekend in San Diego with my partner. It was really fun! We went to the beach, did some touristy bus rides, and sat by the pool. I was really lucky to miss pretty much of the entire Nor’easter storm in Hoboken and just soak up the sun instead. It was pretty difficult to jump back into work after the trip, but I still got some things done, and worth missing the storm and seeing my partner. Once I was back, I tried to set aside the evenings to relax and get my life back on pace. It helped a lot to avoid me spiraling into work and keep balance in my life. I also managed to start Hades II runs and to get to the final act of Sliksong!
question
What variations of PIR are most interesting in practice?
I recently learned about t-private and t-robust information theoretic PIR, but these seem relatively unstudied in the literature
I wonder if any of these would be useful in practice (or their computational versions)
What primitives to fully anonymous secret sharing schemes imply?
I was really interested in the problems that Allison Bishop highlighted at the NY Cryptoday
Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of the Hotel del Coronado I saw last weekend:
