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.

[...]

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 [...]

Simons Symposium: Thursday

Our first speaker on Thursday was Tali Kaufman, who talked about ongoing work with Irit Dinur exploring the connection between locally testable codes and expanders.

[...]

Simons Symposium: Wednesday

This morning we had three speakers.

[...]

Simons Symposium: Tuesday

This morning’s talks began with Daniel Kane, who told us about some exciting new decomposition/regularity theorems for low-degree polynomials of random $\pm 1$ bits. The motivation for his work is that although the known regularity lemmas and the known invariance principles are separately optimal, their combination is not. Knowing this, one can shoot for more [...]

Simons Symposium: Monday

Today was the first day of the 2012 Simons Symposium on Analysis of Boolean Functions. We had five speakers today.

[...]

Open problem collection (Simons Symposium)

Next week the Simons Foundation is hosting a symposium on Analysis of Boolean Functions in the Virgin Islands; Elchanan Mossel, Krzysztof Oleszkiewicz and I are organizing it.

We are currently collecting problems for the Open Problems session on Monday. I am posting a few “classics” below; please feel free to mention your favourite open problems [...]

Simons Symposium: Sunday

Participants for the Simons Symposium on Analysis of Boolean Functions arrived at Caneel Bay on Sunday.

The symposium begins tomorrow.