work

This was a surprisingly active week at work! Early this week, I found out that my class is actually fully enrolled at 65 students!! This was way up from the estimate of 40ish that had taken it in previous years. After some sleuthing by my colleagues, it turns out that there was a huge uptick in CS major enrollments in the class, which usually primarily has Cybersecurity BS/MS students. The current theory is that these students are hoping to get a minor in Cybersecurity, which requires only 2 classes beyond the CS degree. Whatever the reason, I hope that the class still goes well next semester! It's a bit more pressure now than I was expecting, and I'm sure it'll be extra work as well.

While that was going on, my friend and collaborator Pino has been visiting NYC! He very kindly came across the river to meet me in my Stevens office, and we spent most of the day talking about PIR. He says he'll stop by again next week, and hopefully we can come up with good solutions to the remaining problems that we have.

Other than those two things, I mostly tried to focus on Eurocrypt reviews. I still have about 5 more to do, and I hope I can get them all down before Thanksgiving week, so that I have a better chance to relax.

non-work

Despite the cold week, I still managed to do all my daily runs. On top of that, I was listening to The Stone Sky on my way back and forth to work more often. I expect to actually finish it today, when I do my run! The details of the magic system haven't panned out as I optimistically hoped. I'm the type of fantasy reader that loves to dig into the lore and world-building, so I felt a little let down on that front. The story is still amazing though, and I expect I'll recommend it to other people, assuming the very end holds up.

I also beat the base game of Hades 2! The gameplay in that game is so fun, but I'm not sure the story entirely makes sense to me. It feels like the game developers were really trying to force the story in to the rougelike genre in a way that they didn't have to in the original Hades. I'm still going to continue to grind the game, though and get the final ending, because it's just so well-made.

questions

• What are the best realistic datasets to sets PIR on?

  • Many papers just focus on the size of the database and element length, but what are the applications that matter most?

• How should incentives in academia be restructured to improve the peer-review process?

• What is the best way to help an undergraduate interested in pursuing cryptography research?

Thanks for reading to the end! Here’s a picture of Timmy all curled up on the couch: