## Simons Symposium wrapup

For some reason I composed — but forgot to post — the final wrapup post from the Simons Symposium. Even though it’s long since happened, I post it now anyway for posterity…

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## Simons Symposium 2014 — Day 4

[Editor's note -- just a reminder that these daily updates are almost entirely thanks to Li-Yang Tan.]

The first speaker of the day was Sergey Bobkov, who spoke about concentration on the cube and its relationship with various isoperimetric problems, including highlights of his own work.

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## Simons Symposium 2014 — Day 3

The first speaker of the day was Subhash Khot, who discussed his recent work with Madhur Tulsiani and Pratik Worah giving a complete characterization of the approximation resistance of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) under Subhash’s Unique Games Conjecture (UGC).

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## Simons Symposium 2014 — Day 2

The second day began with Tom Sanders speaking about the Bourgain-Green sumset problem in additive combinatorics, including some of his own work on the problem.

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## Simons Symposium 2014 — Day 1

Li-Yang here.

Avi Wigderson kicked off this year’s symposium with a talk describing recent joint work with Dimitri Gavinsky, Or Meir, and Omri Weinstein attacking one of the central open problems in computational complexity: does ${\mathsf P} = \mathsf{NC}^1$, or in words, can every sequential computation be efficiently parallelized?

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## Simons Symposium 2014 — Discrete Analysis: Beyond the Boolean Cube

I’m pleased to announce that this week we’ll be reporting on the 2014 Simons Symposium — Discrete Analysis: Beyond the Boolean Cube. This is the second of three biannual symposia on Analysis of Boolean Functions, sponsored by the Simons Foundation. You may remember our reports on the 2012 edition which took place in Caneel Bay, [...]

## Special journal issue, Simons videos, hiatus return

Some announcements: First, the book serialization will start back up again on Monday; stay tuned. Second, 22 videos from the Simons Symposium are now available. Third, there will be a special issue of Theory of Computing devoted to analysis of Boolean functions (see below announcement); please submit your good papers!

The journal Theory [...]

## Simons Symposium: final open problems

As mentioned, we had one more open problems session on Thursday.

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## Simons Symposium: Friday

Today was our last day. The first speaker was Jelani Nelson, who talked about applications of “FT (Fourier transform)-mollification” in CS Theory. The basic idea behind this technique (which I think dates back to Berry’s proof of the Berry–Esseen Theorem) is to smooth out functions $g : {\mathbb R} \to {\mathbb R}$ by convolving them [...]