Adam Kalai (OpenAI) explores how to evaluate machine translation systems in the absence of ground-truth reference translations, focusing on the extreme case where only acoustic outputs are available, without contextual or visual grounding. simons.berkeley.edu/news/validat...

In his talk in our workshop with @ProjectCETI on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species, Markus Freitag surveyed the rise of LLM-driven translation and its near-human performance in high-resource languages. simons.berkeley.edu/news/machine...

1/2 When the Beatles sang Octopus’s Garden, they could not have imagined real-life Coral Gardeners working with “the coral that lies beneath the waves.” Rich Williams spoke of using AI to restore coral reefs at scale at the Simons Institute's. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/rich-w...

It's not too late to catch up on the talks from the Complexity and Linear Algebra Boot Camp, happening this week. Register to attend in person, watch the live stream, or access the talk videos before they're captioned for YouTube. simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/co...

Join us for the first Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture of 2025–26! simons.berkeley.edu/events/virtu...

Check out Senior Scientist Nikhil Srivastava's latest "Theory at the Institute and Beyond" column, about the compressed oracle method. simons.berkeley.edu/news/compres...

This July, the Simons Institute co-hosted, in collaboration with @projectceti.bsky.social and Oceankind, the fourth annual workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species. Learn more: simons.berkeley.edu/news/worksho...

1/2 "For the first time we have different minds, not only ours but various LLMs that we can study. There is an urgent need to understand why they work as well as they do...Soon, it may be too late." Tomaso Poggio at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tomaso...

1/2 "Personally, I think that the problem of intelligence is not only one of the great problems in science, like the origin of life or the origin of the universe, but it's the greatest of all," said Tomaso Poggio at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tomaso...

In this episode of Polylogues, @lakshmic.bsky.social sits down with Moni Naor for a wide-ranging discussion of Naor’s path in the field, intersections of cryptography and complexity, the cryptographic technology behind CAPTCHA, and highlights of his own research. bit.ly/3Kh1zt6

The September issue of our newsletter has just dropped, with articles on decoding communication in non-human species, the compressed oracle method, and more. Check it out: mailchi.mp/berkeley/sim... Subscribe: berkeley.us7.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=...

Next week at the Simons Institute: the Algorithmic Foundations for Emerging Computing Technologies Boot Camp. Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/programs/alg...

A hearty welcome to the long-term participants in our Fall 2025 research programs on Complexity and Linear Algebra, and on Algorithmic Foundations for Emerging Computing Technologies.

1/2 "[AI] is invading all sciences. AI is really machine learning. It was pretty clear to a number of us, at least a couple of decades ago...that the problem of learning is the gateway to the problem of intelligence." Tomaso Poggio at the Simons Institute simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tomaso...

1/2 "We are claiming it's a specification for an AGI." — Manuel Blum. He and @lenoreblum.bsky.social talked of their model of consciousness, the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM), at the Simon Institute's Smale@95: A Conference in Honor of Steve Smale. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/manuel...

1/2 "This is kind of shocking." Mikhail Belkin of @ucsandiego.bsky.social on how adding the same vectors to the activations of an LLM's transformer blocks can steer its output from, say, either English to Chinese, or Python to C++, at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/mikhai...

"What is so strange about machine learning in particular and AI more recently is that there is this puzzle of dimensionality." Mikhail Belkin of @ucsandiego.bsky.social at the Simons Institute's Smale@95: A Conference in Honor of Steve Smale. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/mikhai...

1/2 "Fundamentally, modern AI is just a mathematical object. Math is transforming the world...especially with respect to modern AI." Mikhail Belkin of @ucsandiego.bsky.social at the Simons Institute on the triumph and failure of math as it relates to AI. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/mikhai...

1/2 In 1998, Fields medalist Steve Smale posed 18 math problems for the next century, including: "What are the limits of intelligence, both artificial and human?" Yuan Yao of HKUST said this question inspired him the most, at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/yuan-y...

We bid farewell this week to our merry band of cryptographers. Till next time!

Congratulations to our colleague and friend, former Simons Institute Associate Director Peter Bartlett, who will be delivering one of the plenary lectures for the 2026 International Congress of Mathematicians. www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/07/11/m...

1/2 The answer to today's energy hungry AI data centers might be memristors, said Leon Chua, quoting Geoffrey Hinton's claim about "mortal computation," where the hardware and what's learned are inseparable. Chua spoke at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/leon-c...

We're delighted to host the annual @projectceti.bsky.social workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species. The team's linguistics lead, Berkeley Professor @begus.bsky.social, was profiled in a recent @ucberkeleylibrary.bsky.social feature. www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/l...

Next week at the Simons Institute, a workshop on the intersections of graph learning and theoretical computer science. Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/gr...

1/2 Leon Chua on how Hodgkin & Huxley had mis-identified the Na and K ion channels in neurons as time-varying conductances, at the Simons Institute's Smale@95: A Conference in Honor of Steve Smale, in honor of Steve Smale's 95th birthday. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/leon-c...

1/2 “A subset of people in our community have attacked watermarking, black box evasion attacks, inference attacks, and so on.” Somesh Jha of @uwmadison.bsky.social on the weaknesses of ML Robustness research, speaking at the Simons Institute. Video (Part I): simons.berkeley.edu/talks/somesh...

Next week at the Simons Institute, the final workshop in the Summer 2025 Cryptography program: Secure Computation. simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/se...

This is what cryptography looks like.

Fun facts: the Pizza theorem 🍕 states that if Alice and Bob cut a pizza in 4k slices (for k≥2) and take alternating slices, they'll get the same amount even if the cutting wasn't centered. It was proven by Upton in 1968. Before that, nobody knew how to cut pizza. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_t...

1/2 "To prove the existence of secure encryption, all we require is proving that P != NP. If P = NP, then we can break all of these primitives [fundamental algorithms used in cryptography]." — Rafael Pass of @cornelltech.bsky.social at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/rafael...

1/2 Cryptanalysis has a rigor that machine learning lacks. “There would never be a paper accepted in crypto where the attack was ‘run the attack 5 times and it works [once].’ This is true of the world of ML." @anthropicai.bsky.social's Nicholas Carlini said at the Simons Institute...

1/2 "We need help!" @anthropicai.bsky.social's Nicholas Carlini called for cryptanalysis experts to join efforts to make ML safe, at the Simons Institute's workshop on Cryptography 10 Years Later: Obfuscation, Proof Systems, and Secure Computation Boot Camp Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/nichol...

1/2 UCLA's Amit Sahai passed on advice from The Lion King's Pumba on how two words — "Hakuna Matata", or rather, "Indistinguishability Obfuscation" (compiling programs into unintelligible ones while preserving functionality) — solve many problems in cryptography and more.

What's obfuscation in computing? UCLA's Amit Sahai jokingly began his tutorial with a "gruesomely human" analogy, at the Simons Institute's workshop on Cryptography 10 Years Later: Obfuscation, Proof Systems, and Secure Computation Boot Camp. Video here: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/amit-s...

Next week at the Simons Institute, a workshop on Proofs. Join us! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/pr...

Quantum Summer Cluster Workshop #SimonsQuantum

Harnessing factorization – beyond its use to crack #encryption - to evaluate the power of a #quantumcomputer. My latest blog: scieye.wordpress.com/2025/06/07/b... Many thanks to Seyoon Ragavan for chatting with me about the topic & his work!

1/2 Today's classical public-key cryptography is vulnerable to adversarial quantum attacks — @nttresearch.bsky.social's Mark Zhandry at the Simons Institute's workshop on Cryptography 10 Years Later: Obfuscation, Proof Systems, and Secure Computation Boot Camp. simons.berkeley.edu/talks/mark-z...

Catch up on the talks from this week's ongoing Quantum Summer Cluster Workshop. Register to watch the livestream and get early access to the talk recordings. simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/qu... #SimonsQuantum

Have we achieved AGI? No, said UC Berkeley's Stuart Russell at the Simons Institute's workshop on Theoretical Aspects of Trustworthy AI. LLMs are likely a piece of the AGI jigsaw puzzle, but we don't know their shape or where they fit in the overall puzzle. simons.berkeley.edu/talks/stuart...

"We need more (connections with) theory" — UC Berkeley's Sanjit Seshia, arguing for pushing theory into the design of AI systems and verification tools, to enable trustworthy AI, at the Simons Institute's workshop on Theoretical Aspects of Trustworthy AI. www.youtube.com/live/Xkbgym0...

And this wraps up the Sublinear Algorithms reunion at the Simons Institute! Great people, captivating talks, lots of discussions, and (as usual) fantastic support from the @simonsinstitute.bsky.social 's staff/team. [Below, a (partial) group photo, taken during a (very successful) lunch expedition]

Day 2: starting with a talk on "Vizing's Theorem in near-linear time" by Soheil Behnezhad! @simonsinstitute.bsky.social

We're delighted to share that Bridgewater Associates will be supporting postdocs in our ML Pod, and that we've received an Amazon Research Award for this summer’s Cryptography program. The Cryptography program is also supported by the UC Noyce Initiative and Stellar.

At the @simonsinstitute.bsky.social at Berkeley for the week, attending the Sublinear Algorithms reunion: simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/su... Looking forward to the talks, the discussions, and being spooked by the campus' squirrels.

Ronitt Rubinfeld, starting the reunion by thanking the @simonsinstitute.bsky.social!

The Simons Institute invites proposals for Science Communicator in Residence visits of 1–3 weeks during the Fall 2025 semester. Applications are due August 1, 2025. simons.berkeley.edu/participate/...

Ahead of the Sublinear Algorithms reunion next week at the @simonsinstitute.bsky.social, scribe notes for last year's "hidden gems" and open problems (curated by Nathan Harms and Santhoshini Velusamy) have been uploaded to the reunion's webpage: Check them out: simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/su...

"CIQC and the Simons Institute have created an ecosystem where mathematicians, chemists, physicists, and computer scientists don’t just coexist, they collaborate deeply." ciqc.berkeley.edu/news/ciqcs-i... #SimonsQuantum

I’m excited to attend the upcoming #obfuscation workshop at the @simonsinstitute.bsky.social as the Science Communicator in Residence! simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/ob... Look forward to meeting the experts & learning about advances in obfuscation #quantumcryptography & #theoreticalcomputerscience