work

The amount of work this week was pretty average, but I had a lot of fun doing it! I finally had my first group meeting of the semester on Monday, and I'm excited to talk to my students about LLM watermarking this week (weather permitting). I also look forward for the meetings they lead themselves and hope for some really interesting discussion. My class also covered fun stuff like quantum key distribution, teleportation, and superdense coding. Those were really enjoyable lecture to give. This week, teleportation actually came up in my own research project too, so I was able to send my collaborators my lecture notes to read :-).

Other than that, it was a lot of regular meetings. My main research this week was trying to get some papers prepared for a STOC submission and starting some new projects, now that Eurocrypt has passed. I still have some more regular work, and I am pushing to get more grant applications submitted this year. Beyond that more exciting stuff, I also went to some new School of Computer events, like our seminar and town hall. It's a pretty exciting (and scary and uncertain) time to work in CS research.

non-work

Outside of work, I was mostly reading and watching TV. I'm still reading both Prelude to Foundation and the second Dungeon Crawler Carl, both of which are good (in different ways). I'm only about halfway through both, though, so I'll reserve my full review until I finish them up. I've also been watching Dark Matter, because I guess I'm just in a sci-fi mood a lot. It's...okay. I really liked it for a while, but recently the "magic system" has just really annoyed it. I'm okay brushing aside that moving realities has nothing to with putting something in superposition, but then even if you just treat the box as "magic" which allows you to go between worlds, there are just more questions/inconsistencies raised. I'm personally a much bigger fan of hard magic systems, but even soft magic is fine with me, if the story is compelling. So really, maybe the fact that I'm bothered by the "science" is more a manifestation with frustration with the plot.

Unfortunately, because of the storm, I don't really have plans this weekend. Hopefully, the weather will remain not too cold and next weekend, I can do something more fun!

questions

• What is the proportion of hybrid versus fully post-quantum crypto that's being deployed in practice?
  • This came up when discussing the motivation for some pre-quantum research I've been working on.
• Have there been any surveys of theoretical CS or cryptography, which look at what researcher are interested in?
  • I feel like both incremental result in hot areas get published over larger results in less hot areas.
  • I wonder if this is something we have good methods of measuring over time.
• Is generated a lean proof for a new result now seen as a negative?
  • There was a time that I was excited to go back through old results and formalize them in lean with GenAI.
  • I also think it'd be interesting to require a lean verification along with any theory paper.
  • I suspect this would be taken as the author not understanding the result, and it seems that theoreticians are pivoting just from new results anyway. It seems much more about interpretation or communication of the results.
  • That being said, if you do have the understanding, it seems like just a strict benefit to have a lean proof artifact.

Thanks for reading to the end! Here are some (very delicious) homemade dumplings my postdoc Ojaswi was kind enough to give me and Timmy ready to be shipped away.