work

Other than having Monday off, this week felt pretty normal. It seemed like it was a little bit busier day-to-day than future weeks will be, but that's to be expected because some meetings moved from Monday and Eurocrypt is coming up. There were also a few administrative meetings about the new School of Computing and a Conversation with the President. In general, despite being in crazy times, I think Stevens is actually pretty well positioned to get through the next few years. I of course have some concerns, but the administration and community seems to be adapting pretty intelligently in general.

For me though, I'm just focusing on teaching, publishing, and funding my research. I have either two or three submissions I'm planning to go to Eurocrypt. (We'll have to see if I can get the third finished in time :-).) More on that later, if my coauthors and I decide to post our papers publicly. I also just heard back that a proposal I submitted has been accepted! That's really exciting news, but there's still a little bit of paperwork to go through before it's official. So, it's an exciting and busy time, but unfortunately no big new just yet.

My coauthors and I also finally posted our revised version of our PIR lower bound! This corrects some erroneous parts of the previous version and streamlines some of the writing. We got held up with a series of vacations we were each on, one after another.

non-work

Outside of work, my friends and I have honestly just been playing a lot of Palworld. I didn't expect to enjoy just chilling in that game so much, but honestly it's pretty relaxing. Kind of like a more chill and social version of Factorio with more incentive to explore. However, Factorio is unparalleled in the automation genre if that's what you're looking for.

I also managed to check out Bullshit Jobs again, so I should finish that soon! There's still a lot that resonates with me, but the presentation of the case is very one-sided. I probably would agree with the author on most of the problems, but it remains to be seen if I'd agree on the solutions. This week I started the second Dungeon Crawler Carl book too! The first was such a fun read, and the second is off to another great start. The writing is just so funny and light, while someone also carrying an interesting subplot and intrigue around the world-building.

questions

• Are there any known lower bounds for garbled RAM?
  • For example, is it known that the garbled program much be some constant factor larger than the original program?
  • What about for garbled circuits?
• Are there examples of cryptographic database encodings which are useful asymptotically?
  • This is really broad and under-specified, but our paper requires "oracle-free encodings" for many of it's results. This doesn't seem very restrictive for PIR, but maybe there are other settings where this matters.
• How can CS Theorists improve their science communication?
  • This has been on my mind, because I think it's harder and harder to justify why theory is interesting to study, now that everyone is focused on empirical/AI work.
  • Theoretical physics has done really well in this field, but I don't know what we can or can't take from them.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of a thank you note I got from my friend!