Congrats to Irit Dveer Dinur of the Institute for Advanced Study & Weizmann Insitute, #NASmember Subhash Khot of New York University, Guy Kindler of @hebrewuniversity.bsky.social, Dor Minzer of @mit.edu, and Muli Safra of Tel Aviv University, winners of the 2026 Michael and Sheila Held Prize! (1/2)

I’m giving a talk at Stanford Theory Lunch this Thursday on recent work arxiv.org/abs/2511.16094 (joint work with awesome coauthors @mdinitz.bsky.social and Jeremy Fineman). Come by if you are around!

Postdoc positions available at the DSAI Institute at Johns Hopkins: ai.jhu.edu/careers/post... . If you're interested in either differential privacy or algorithms with predictions, please get in touch!

Wikipedia should have a bot that, when the time comes, automatically changes "[subject] is" to "[subject] was" etc. This bot should be known as the killer app.

Lately, I have been obsessed with developing theoretically based optimization algorithms that actually attain the best practical performance. Alas, the classic model of minimax optimal methods is overly conservative; it overfits to tune its worst-case. We found a path forward 1/

this is a pretty accurate summary of my research area

For any of my @princeton.edu friends and followers: there's a new policy out that seems like it would hurt the eating clubs, including my beloved Quad. Please consider registering your opposition! www.dontharvardourprinceton.com

And if you're faculty: I beg you, for the sake of everyone else in the world, strongly consider creating your own public webpages for your course instead of having everything locked up in Canvas.

First day of class for the semester. Told my 2.5-year-old that "Daddy is going to be a teacher today, just like your teachers!". Response: "Daddy you're so silly". Apparently I lack the gravitas of a daycare teacher.

Incredibly well deserved!!

Synthetic Data is all the rage in LLM training, but why does it work? In arxiv.org/abs/2502.08924 we show how to analyze this question through the lens of boosting. Unlike boosting, however, our assumptions on the data and the learning method are inverted.

A proof is a logical argument written to convince a skeptical audience. A corollary is that the best way to read a proof is to roleplay as a skeptical audience.

Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume? Networking researcher: UDP

Just saw a new result on the arxiv: polylog approximation for directed steiner tree! arxiv.org/abs/2412.10744 . Amazing breakthrough in a fundamental approximation algorithms problem. Congrats Bundit!

A statistic I've seen repeated in the discussion of health insurance is that UHC used an "AI with a 90% error rate" to deny claims. Recently I saw it repeated twice here: dailynous.com/2024/12/15/c... in which a moral philosopher struggles to figure out if murdering health insurance CEOs is moral.

Prompt: Draw a picture of an American family at Thanksgiving dinner.

Just had a new paper hit the arxiv (will appear at NeurIPS '24), joint with Sungjin Im, Thomas Lavastida, Ben Moseley, Aidin Niaparast, and @vsergei.bsky.social: arxiv.org/abs/2411.16030 . I think it's super cool, so a quick thread!

The Washington Post reports that Michael Anton and Sebastian Gorka had a falling out over who should receive credit for writing Trump's speeches. This is incorrect. In this thread, I will tell you the real reason why Anton dislikes Gorka. 🧵

Almost got through a semester with no academic integrity violations 😢