Congrats to Dr. Argyris Mouzakis @argymouz.bsky.social! He successfully defended his PhD thesis today. He's the first PhD graduate of The Salon. He continues on to a postdoc at @utaustin.bsky.social IFML, hence the cowboy hat. (As you can see, they did not eat the 🍓🧀🎂)

Honoured that our 2016 paper, Robust Estimators in High Dimensions without the Computational Intractability, w/ Ilias Diakonikolas, @daneelssoul.bsky.social, @jerryzli.bsky.social, Ankur Moitra, Alistair Stewart, was awarded the Gödel Prize This is the highest award for papers in theoretical CS 1/7

Sad but proud to send a batch of students on their next journey! @argymouz.bsky.social: postdoc UT Austin IFML Shubhankar Mohapatra: senior scientist A*STAR @viverson03.bsky.social, Matthew Y. R. Yang, Chris Trevisan: PhD at MIT EECS @xingtu-liu.com: PhD at UCLA Stats & DS 1/n

I am honoured (and still a bit stunned) to receive the 2026 Presburger Award from @eatcs.bsky.social. This recognizes 1 or 2 young scientists for outstanding contributions in theoretical CS This honour is shared w my collaborators, students, institutions, & research community 1/7

Congrats to my undergraduate mentee Valentio Iverson (@viverson03.bsky.social) for winning this award in recognition of “remarkable contributions to basic mathematical research." One of his works is this one at COLT 2025 with me and @argymouz.bsky.social: arxiv.org/abs/2503.01766

🧵New paper on arXiv: Optimal Differentially Private Sampling of Unbounded Gaussians. With @uwcheritoncs.bsky.social undergrad Valentio Iverson and PhD student Argyris Mouzakis (@argymouz.bsky.social). The first O(d) algorithm for privately sampling arbitrary Gaussians! arxiv.org/abs/2503.01766 1/n

After a long but very thoughtful review and revision process, this paper was finally accepted to the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA)! Congrats to junior authors @matt19234.bsky.social @argymouz.bsky.social @vkerdos.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2301.13334