work

This week was productive! I had a lot of meetings on many projects, all of which seemed to make some forward progress. It feels good that I've been able to keep moving despite not being in New Jersey. I think I've found a pretty good flow to keep for this next week and a half. Reflecting back on it, I'm actually impressed by all my collaborators for helping on our projects. I feel like I've been super swamped, and while I've made some progress, I definitely credit my collaborators for talking through a variety of ideas with me. I'm especially glad that I was able to restart a couple projects that went dormant during the semester.

All of this is also despite me going to visit UCSD on Monday, too. It was very kind of Nadia to let me sit in on her group's weekly meeting. I also had a really great lunch with Miro who told me a lot about his experience at UCSD and what he's doing. Very cool to officially visit the campus and meet a group that does really cool research.

We also unfortunately had a paper reject from CCS, but I think it's for the best. I don't think the paper was totally finished when we submitted it. I'm hoping we can shore it up and resubmit to USENIX/S&P soon.

non-work

Since last weekend, my partner and I have a relatively relaxed week. I had the chance to play some games with my friends last weekend after our adventures. That was a welcome respite from constantly moving. And this week, we've kind of continued with calm activities. We tried a new Thai place, but otherwise, it's been mostly walking around and watching TV. We've been watching Twin Peaks for the first time! It really comes from a different era of TV, but I've enjoyed it now. But later today, we'll be a bit more active and visit Torrey Pines to hike and hand out at the beach. It should be fun!

I've continued reading The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, and I'm almost done with it. It's a little cathartic. It feels a bit like the author just complains about each of the presidents from the last 40 years in turn. However, the way he writes about it is extremely informative. I'm a little skeptical that maybe the writing is a bit too slanted toward a populist message, but the points made are definitely compelling.

questions

• Have people looked at concurrency in PIR with client-side preprocessing?
  • My postdoc notices some nuances in some given definitions
  • It seems like to satisfy certain strong forms of security with updates, one needs to add a lot of concurrency logic to the PIR protocol
  • This is probably not that technically interesting, but definitely something current implementations leave out of their specification
• Is LWE tightly equivalent to polynomially many samples from LWE?
  • This doesn't really make sense to me, but some of my collaborators said it is.
  • Intuitively, I would think that if they're generated from different secrets, then there should be a loss in the number of vectors that are given.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here's are some pictures from this week.