work

I spent this week plugging along, working mostly on S&P reviews and my DSO project. Fortunately, I am on track to finish the reviews just in time for the S&P R1 deadline! I still have a couple left, but they shouldn't take too long. I was very fortunate to be assigned mostly PIR papers (some of which had really cool ideas!). Those are a bit fast for me to get through. I also had my regular meetings, which are moving, but I wouldn't say there are any huge updates.

A paper I worked on with Chris Zhu and others also just got accepted to SIGMOD Record with a revision! Congrats to him and our other coauthors. It was a big effort, and he did a lot of work getting it together. The paper isn't public just yet, but I'll post it to my papers page once it's up! This week it also became official that I'm going to give the paper talk for our FOCS paper! I already have some ideas how I want that talk to go, and I'm excited that I'll get to present it in November!

non-work

Outside of work has been pretty good too! As with many Americans, I started paying attention to the world cup as the playoffs started. It's unfortunate that the US is already out, but I've still been trying to watch the games during the day. I'm very fortunate that I can put it up on my TV and work from home when I want to in the summer. I don't usually watch intensely, but it's pretty entertaining to have on the background.

I also finished catching up on Silo this week! I'm officially watching the weekly releases. Even though Season 3 didn't start out that strong, the second episode captured me a lot more. I think the picked up the pacing a good bit, which really benefits that show. I hope the writers have a concrete plan for the whole narrative arc just so that it doesn't go off the rails.

I've been continuing listening to The Mind is Flat! The book seems a bit verbose to me, but that may be because I'm already on-board with the overall message of the book. It's probably necessary to move more slowly for people who are less on board. I also just bought a physical copy of Dungeon Crawler Carl! I've been recommended it by a lot of people, so I'm excited to start it soon!

questions

• Can we build trapdoor functions or oblivious transfer from graph-based hardness assumptions like planted clique?
  • There's recent work building PKE from planted clique with an LPN-like assumption, but I'm not sure if these techniques can be pushed up to TDFs.
• What algorithms can be sped up under cryptographic assumptions?
  • I revisited this paper this week looking for some ideas for a project.
  • This seems like a very unexplored research area that could have some practical applications. It seems like a bit stronger than just "heuristic" algorithms if you can speed up an algorithm under a cryptographic assumption
• What are the most interesting things to tell non-experts about PIR?
  • On Monday, I'm going to record an interview to talk mostly about Plinko (More on this next week :-)), but I want to convince people that PIR is really cool

Thanks for reading to the end! I didn't take many pictures this week, so all I have is a picture of Timmy and me watching soccer and reviewing papers.