Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing

Party time

Rebuilding an Optimistic Vision for AI Policy Recall November 6, 2024 — the day after the U.S. election. I was driving back to my home in Washington, DC, from Ohio with colleagues. I was heartbroken not because of the rebuke to my political party...

Spring 2025 Simons Institute Law and Society Fellow Serena Booth (Brown University) was an AI policy advisor in the US Senate before joining us. Read her feature in our October newsletter, "Rebuilding an Optimistic Vision for AI Policy."

simons.berkeley.edu/news/rebuild...

2/2 One example showed a 1556x smaller carbon footprint using a better model, GPU, data center PUE and site, said UC Berkeley's David Patterson at the Simons Institute’s workshop on Algorithmic Foundations for Emerging Computing Technologies Boot Camp. simons.berkeley.edu/talks/david-...

1/2 Focusing on the 4Ms of AI—model (FLOPs), machine (GPU, mWh / 1.0e12 FLOPs), mechanization (power usage effectiveness) and maps (sites w/ clean energy)—can reduce AI’s carbon footprint, said UC Berkeley's David Patterson, at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/david-...

Congratulations to Thomas Rothvoss and Lang Liu, the inaugural winners of the Trevisan Prize at Bocconi University.

cs.unibocconi.eu/trevisan-pri...

2/2 Instead, pick the most efficient model, the latest GPU, and an efficient cloud data center in a low carbon location, said David Patterson, at the Simons Institute's workshop on Algorithmic Foundations for Emerging Computing Technologies Boot Camp. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/david-...

1/2 "Bad AI carbon footprint commandments." @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social's David Patterson's "don'ts" for reducing AI's carbon footprint: don't pick the biggest model; don't pick an older GPU; don't pick a local data center. He spoke at the Simons Institute. simons.berkeley.edu/talks/david-...

Applications are open for research fellows and senior visitors for the Fall 2026 programs on Spectral Theory Beyond Graphs, and on Pseudorandomness and High-Dimensional Expansion.

simons.berkeley.edu/research-fel...

simons.berkeley.edu/long-term-vi...

Join us for Mark Embree's Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture next Tuesday! Register to attend in person or view the livestream.

simons.berkeley.edu/events/compu...

Next week at the Simons Institute, a workshop on Linear Systems and Eigenvalue Problems. Join us!

simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/li...

From our friends at CLIMB:

Voleon Seminar with Ariel Procaccia
"Thinking Outside the Ballot Box"
Friday October 3rd, 2 p.m. PT
306 Soda Hall (HP Auditorium)

Details: climb.berkeley.edu/thinking-out...

Livestream: www.youtube.com/channel/UC9t...

2/2 "Then...apply similar techniques to analyze dolphin vocalization and behavior," said @mit.edu's Mark Hamilton at the Simons Institute workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species IV (co-hosted with Project CETI). Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/mark-h...

1/2 How can one make sense of dolphin vocalizations and behavior? First, "use machine learning to rediscover human words by just watching unlabeled videos of people talking about things," said @mit.edu's Mark Hamilton, speaking at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/mark-h...

Join us Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. PT for the first Karp Lecture of the year. Register to attend in person or view the livestream.

simons.berkeley.edu/events/virtu...

2/2 Markus Freitag, head of Google Translate Research, spoke at the Simons Institute's workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species IV (co-hosted with Project CETI). Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/markus...

1/2 While in Hawaii during the pandemic, Markus Freitag realized he should take whale language translation seriously. "I really fell in love with whales. You could just lay in the water and you could hear them singing," he said at the Simons Institute. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/markus...

Exploring algorithms and privacy in big data with clément canonne In this age of identity theft and privacy invasion, could you order a bowl of chips online, without giving away your mother’s maiden name? Gathered in a local pub in Sydney, computer scientist Clém…

Here's my latest blog alert on sublinear #algorithms and #differentialprivacy in a wide-ranging conversation with @ccanonne.github.io!

scieye.wordpress.com/2025/09/17/e...

#randomness #BigData #SciComm @simonsinstitute.bsky.social @sydney.edu.au

YouTube video by Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing Rethinking Computing with Neuro-Inspired Learning: Algorithms to Hardware

First was a whole slate of talks from the @simonsinstitute.bsky.social Algorithmic Foundations for Emerging Computing Technologies symposium:

Kaushik Roy - neuro-inspired algorithms and hardware www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvTd... (2/6)

Next week at the Simons Institute, a workshop on Managing Memory.

Hope to see you there!

simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/ma...

Register to attend, view the livestream, or access the videos before they're captioned for YouTube.

simons.berkeley.edu/events/virtu...

Virtualization and the Cost of Indirection | Richard M. Karp Distinguished Lecture Some types of virtualization, such as virtual memory, are implemented by providing a layer of indirection between what the program sees and what the system implements. This layer of indirection is typ...

Join us next Tuesday!

simons.berkeley.edu/events/virtu...

Validation by Listening In this talk from the recent workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species IV, Adam Kalai (OpenAI) explores how to evaluate machine translation systems in the absence of ground-truth referenc...

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...

Machine Translation of Human Languages in the Age of LLMs: Is This the End of the Language Barrier? In his contribution to the workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species IV, Markus Freitag (Google) surveyed the rise of LLM-driven translation and its near-human performance in high-resourc...

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...

2/2 "Combining AI with local knowledge to inform how we use the models has given us the success we’ve had." Rich Williams of Coral Gardeners at the Simons Institute's workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species IV (co-hosted with Project CETI). simons.berkeley.edu/talks/rich-w...

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...

Compressed Oracles and Coherent Workshops | Theory at the Institute and Beyond Let me start with a confession. For many years, I was afraid of quantum and crypto. Quantum scared me because I didn’t know how to think about tensor products, and crypto because I couldn’t keep track...

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...

Workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species This July, the Simons Institute co-hosted, in collaboration with Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) and Oceankind, the fourth annual workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species....

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...

2/2 "I hope we have enough time." Tomaso Poggio on the urgency of elucidating at least some of the principles of intelligence, at the Simons Institute's Smale@95: A Conference in Honor of Steve Smale. Video: simons.berkeley.edu/talks/tomaso...