work

We just finished week 7 of 14 at Stevens, which means we're halfway through the semester! Teaching a brand new class has been much more difficult than teaching crypto last year, but it's let me experiment with some new ideas that I'm planning to fold into the crypto class next semester. What really excites me about being halfway through though is that my quantum class gets to move on from entanglement and quantum information and into quantum computing and algorithms! This is the half of the course that I'm personally quite interested in, and I'm hoping that I can cover the material well enough that my students understand it.

Other than giving and grading a midterm, I've been filling my time working on my STOC paper. We've had to clean it up quite a bit and reframe some parts, but I still am happy with the results in it. I also have been preparing my FOCS talk! It turns out that I'm the second presenter of the first section on the first day, which will be nice to get it out of the way and enjoy FOCS/TCC. Right now, the toughest part has been getting it down to an 18 minute slot, which would be like 15 minutes of speaking. I have some slides already, but I suspect I'm going to have to cut/compress parts of the talk.

non-work

I have been enjoying the fall and nice runs in 40-60 degree (F) weather! And, despite staying busy, I've found time to get away from work to relax. I'm still reading Forward the Foundation and Dungeon Crawler Carl 3 slowly. I don't know when I'll finish either, but I'm enjoying them for the most part. However, the Foundation story is much different than the TV show. I'm curious at this point if the two narratives even sync up later or not. Either way, it's cool to read such a classic narrative.

I also started playing Order of the Sinking Star since I've been back! It's made by the same director as The Witness and Braid, which I liked a lot. The incredible diversity of the mechanics keeps the game fresh, and I'm really looking forward to when they start to overlap or collide. My friends and I also finally beat Palworld last night. I don't think any of us really followed the plot at all, but we still had a good time. I'm not sure what we'll play next, but I think Enshrouded is a candidate.

questions

• What are the best constructions of Fair Blind Signatures?
  • I recently found out about these, and I think they have some applications for my work.
  • I also feel like Blind Signatures with metadata is a better name, but I guess I'm bound by the historical practices.
• How interesting would an information-theoretic version of my one-round ORAM lower bound be?
  • This is the only open problem I've had marginal success using GenAI to solve so far.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here is Timmy hiding around a corner and caught watching Talarico.