work

I had my last class of the semester this week!! It was just a relatively brief review session, so I'm happy that a lot of my students actually showed up. I'll give them the final in a bit less than two weeks. I think I have a better sense of how to give exams at Stevens too, so it should hopefully go smoothly. It's a big relief to not have any more class prep to do for this class. Ever since spring break, every week has taken a good bit of effort to get the materials together. Fortunately, I'll have a good baseline for the next time I teach the course; however, there are still plenty of improvements and changes that I'd like to make in the future.

On top of the class this week, a few collaborators and I had a submission to CCS. The writing was very rushed up to the end, and honestly, there is a lot of revision that I want to do before we upload it publicly. The core concept is more applied than I'm used to, but I think there are some interesting empirical results that we show. Hopefully, I'll have more updates in the coming weeks.

I had a few other significant meetings for some new projects too! But all that is in the early stages, so it'll be a bit before there are big updates.

non-work

I finally finished the Severance book! It was a good read, but it was a bit out of the mainstream that I usually prefer. The narrative was heavily character driven. Not much happened in the actual plot, a ton of the book was flashback, and there wasn't a fleshed-out science around the epidemic that occurred. Still though, the main character was compelling enough to keep me interested through the whole book! It's been a couple of days, and I'm not sure what my next pick read is, but I'll have to pick something soon.

I was also having a lot of fun playing Slay the Spire 2 this week. But then my cat decided to step on a power strip in the middle of a run. You would think this would just corrupt the run itself, but somehow it destroyed all of my progress in the whole game! All my ascensions were reset, I lost car unlocks, and I lost all the lore that I had... It's very annoying, but I recently decided to push through and just rebuild from the ground up. :-)

Oh yeah, last weekend, I also got to play Vantage with my friend, thrift shop a bit, and buy some new and only vinyl. It was really fun, and I'm glad he was willing to come over the river to NJ from NYC.

questions

• Are extractability assumptions as weird as I think they are?
  • I've been reading papers where they sometimes assume something like: if an adversary can distinguish two inputs or produce a "correct" input, then there is some algorithm to extract a secret from an adversary from its coins.
  • Some of these are shown under standard assumptions. But, some seem like they're just assumed.
• Is there a systematic survey and comparison of complexity and cryptography in different quantum random oracle models?
  • For example, I want to know about quantum algorithms with classical access to a classical function, quantum access to a classical function, a random unitary, and function which outputs Haar random states for each input.
  • How do these relate to each other? What can be used to build which cryptography?

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's a picture of my cat in a grocery bag.