initial post
Note: This post was imported and originally posted on leaflet on 2025-05-28
I found out about this on Bluesky the other day, but I decided it would be useful to actually post things every once in a while. Partially, I want to have a way to keep myself accountable (hopefully) every week. My goal is just to write about what I've been thinking about and maybe also share some interesting things I see.
Work
The main things I've focused on this week have been finishing up some work that I need to do to fund the end of my postdoc at UChicago. The main focus is to review some recent proposals of OPRFs — primarily TCR+22, Basso24, and AG24. So far, I've enjoyed reading about and reviewing the different definitions and assumptions they're based on. It's interesting how different the presentations can be (and how confusing lattices are 😵💫).
My other work has been moving forward but slowly. There are about 3-4 research projects that I wish I could fully focus on each, but I find myself working on one and getting distracted by the others, unfortunately. I'm optimistic that I'll have some interesting submissions coming up — just in time to flex my new job at Stevens 🙂.
I also last week went down a rabbit hole of trying to understand Gil Kalai's objections to quantum computing, which started when I watched this YouTube video debate. It didn't seem detailed or fleshed out enough to formally understand what was going on. I think the next steps for me would be to understand the thresholding argument that show good-enough quantum error-correction can give quantum computing generally.
Non-work
Outside of work, things have been fun recently. Last weekend, my partner and I got a lot done at our new place, like cleaning, logistics, etc. But, we also had our share of fun! We tried our grill for the first time and played a board game over the food. Then, we went shopping on Memorial Day and participated in quite a few sales, and honestly the stores were really not very crowed, especially considering it was Memorial Day in NYC.
This coming weekend, we're having a small (and late) party to celebrate our new place. I get to try out the grill again and hopefully not burn as much of the food 😬. It should be fun though!
Cool things I learned about this week
A blog post going through An interesting interpretation of Diffie-Hellman through category theory
A glossary of zero-knowledge terms (already helpful for my reading about different OPRF constructions!)
A blog post illustrating some dangers of satire, now that the entire internet is read constantly
An Atlantic article highlighting parts of the extreme privacy movement (see also the very useful book)
A Supreme Court case tracker from NY times that summarizes the cases, decisions, and impacts
(Research ?) questions
I feel like it'd be fun to write down some questions as they come. I don't have time to dig into every one, but maybe there's an obvious answer to many — and if not, a research question!
Are there non-interactive zero-knowledge proof systems which do not rely on the random oracle model and Fiat-Shamir transform? What assumptions are they build from?
What are the limits of LPN in all of its variations? I've been recently surprised by the power of "sub-exponential" LPN, which enables the construction of some pretty crazy primitives. It makes me wonder if the attacks can be improved...
Can PIR with client-side preprocessing be improved further? A paper at Eurocrypt 2025 had an impressive asymptotic improvement, but there is a large dependence on the security parameter and I don't think the scheme is practical. It'd be interesting to try to bridge this theory with practice.
As a bonus for reading to the end, here's a photo I took last weekend that I find funny:
