Jiahui Liu

Congratulations to our colleague John Wright, who has received a 2026 Sloan Fellowship!

chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/seven-u...

A slide, with title" The (AI)lephant in the room", and a single sentence on the slide: "What is the point of learning, designing, and analysing algorithms anymore?"

Preparing for my first lecture (Algorithm Design), I added a slide this year. Can't really not address it.

Something worrying me: many seem to change their research direction out of FOMO, reacting to (the obvious) recent trend: "If I don't do this, someone else will do it!"

One of the key perks we have in academia is the freedom to set our own agenda.* If someone else can—and WILL—do it, why would you?

Aparna, on the stage, in front of a slide recalling the no-cloning theorem and why, as a result, there may be hope for quantum OTP (although they are impossible classically)

Talk at #TQC2025 by Aparna Gupte (MIT): "can we have quantum One-Time Programs, i.e., programs that can be evaluated only once?"

No. But, good news, yes!
arxiv.org/abs/2411.01876

We are launching an 𝐮𝐧𝐨𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 and experimental online parallel event for the conference ITCS25, aimed at everyone who cannot attend the conference in person for whatever reasons. (1/2)
sites.google.com/view/itcs202...
#ITCS25 #ITCS2025 #OnlineParallels

The question is whether there is a mechanism to stop this vicious cycle....The entire academia is under some crazy capitalist incentive mode nowadays that pushes people to publish for the sake of publish. sigh.

I definitely agree. I'm against mass producing papers. But I also think there's a vicious cycle here. Some people find review procedures to be unreliable, but if they write enough papers, then some will get in by this randomness. So they mass produce papers, which results in poorer review quality.

Yes precisely

Time Magazine cover, headlined, "When the Music Died: John Lennon." Image of John Lennon.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do;
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too.
Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace.
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one.
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one.

John Lennon, 10/9/40-12/8/80

Peer reviews of the quantum cryptography community have been making me very depressed and nihilistic recently.....

Wrote this just to vent....
gardenofforkingpath.blogspot.com/2024/12/some...

Our result is "win-win" in the following sense: we either have a classical oracle separation of QMA and QCMA, or we will have a quantum advantage in distinguishing pseudorandom distributions on permutations, which is closely related to the Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture.

QMA vs. QCMA and Pseudorandomness We study a longstanding question of Aaronson and Kuperberg on whether there exists a classical oracle separating $\mathsf{QMA}$ from $\mathsf{QCMA}$. Settling this question in either direction would y...

A new work with @henryyuen.bsky.social
and Saachi Mutreja. We show a classical oracle separation of QMA and QCMA, the long-standing problem on the power of quantum proofs over classical proofs, based on a quantum pseudorandomness conjecture.

arxiv.org/abs/2411.14416