work

Busy week this week! The main thing was obviously the push to submit to Eurocrypt. I was hoping to submit three papers. Unfortunately, I had to drop one because another became more of a time sink than I was expecting. It might be ok though, because I ended up with two papers submitted on PIR! They're both interesting to me, but I also know that Eurocrypt got a record number of submissions this year. Best of luck to me and my coauthors, and I hope that the reviewers find our papers as interesting as we did!

After the deadline, I felt pretty exhausted from the push. But on Friday, I wrapped up a lot of grading and course prep that I had put off earlier in the week. My course requires the students to propose and do a semester long project, and the proposals they sent are really cool! I hope what they come up with is just as interesting.

I also looked ahead to the STOC call for papers, because I'm planning to submit one or two papers to it. It's generating a lot of buzz in my circles! Now the submission is required to be publicly uploaded and requires the authors to upload a video explaining the ideas in the paper. It's cool to see conferences adapting and increasing friction to fight against the waves of papers that GenAI can help produce. I have a lot of concern about the equity of this solution, especially for non-native English speakers or those who are just worse at presenting. There were already high barriers for many, and this only raises them. I hope we can continue to adapt in ways that meet the needs of the whole community.

non-work

Well I was pretty busy this week, so there wasn't much outside of work. I still played some Palworld with my friends and some Slay the Spire 2 with my partner last week. But nothing super eventful.

I also started the Prelude to Foundation! I like the Apple TV show but never read Asimov myself. I'm still only very early into the book, but I like it so far. I understand some of the changes that the TV show made already, but I'm also a little confused on the timeline. I'll see if it connects better, assuming I read the rest of the books, but it really does feel like stories written in a way that wasn't really meant to fit together into a larger narrative.

questions

• What are alternatives to STOC's call for papers?
  • Are there good ways to add submission friction and make sure authors understand their own paper, without creating more equity issues?
• What is it reasonable to expect from an undergraduate getting paid as a research assistant?
  • I know they are busy with other classes, but does it make sense to ask for a specific deliverable?
• Do people actually care about the secret-key PIR model?
  • Is it more reasonable to run in linear time than to be able to read/write to the database (i.e., ORAM)?

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of Timmy napping this week.