Mathematics
Tales from the Crypt(ography) Lab with Dr. Kristin Lauter
Episode 19, April 11, 2018 – Dr. Lauter tells us why she feels lucky to do math for a living, explains the singular beauty of elliptic curves and the singular difficulty of supersingular isogeny graphs,…
Second homomorphic encryption standardization workshop delivers the goods
What an exciting two days at the Second Homomorphic Encryption Standardization Workshop at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More than 70 participants from 10 countries gathered together for two intense days of panels, discussions and planning…
Recharging Bandits
We introduce a general model of bandit problems in which the expected payout of an arm is an increasing concave function of the time since it was last played. We first develop approximation algorithms for…
Approximating General Norms by Euclidean Beyond the John’s Ellipsoid
John’s theorem proved in 1948 states that any centrally-symmetric convex body in R^d can be sandwiched by two ellipsoids up to a factor of sqrt{d}. In particular, it implies that any d-dimensional normed space embeds…
Inherent Trade-Offs in Algorithmic Fairness
Recent discussion in the public sphere about classification by algorithms has involved tension between competing notions of what it means for such a classification to be fair to different groups. We consider several of the…
On Characterizing the Capacity of Neural Networks using Algebraic Topology
The learnability of different neural architectures can be characterized directly by computable measures of data complexity. In this talk, we reframe the problem of architecture selection as understanding how data determines the most expressive and…
