iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 10/03/2026

not pictured: adversarially robust streaming via differential privacy. Now that I can correctly conjure up the right name each time, I hope that work can progress smoothly

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 10/03/2026

Step one in understanding adversarially robust streaming: being able to remember which one of these papers is which.

Four papers, titled:
- A Framework for Adversarial Streaming Via Differential Privacy and Difference Estimators
- A Framework for Adversarially Robust Streaming Algorithms
- Adversarially Robust Streaming via Dense--Sparse Trade-offs
- Adversarially Robust Dense-Sparse Tradeoffs via Heavy-Hitters

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 18/02/2026

Amazing! Yesterday I would have said that computing any graph statistics with node-level LDP would be practically impossible

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 12/02/2026

The current state of professional translation is that you get sent a badly machine translated piece of technical writing, your agency says "you just have to proof this, so we won't pay full translation rates" and then you have to translate the whole thing again anyway

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 09/02/2026

Super cool expository paper on block designs and local differential privacy, showing a similar result to mine from last year but for a broader class of protocols ("pure" LDP functions and (r,λ)-designs) arxiv.org/abs/2602.02744

arxiv.org

An introduction to local differential privacy protocols using block designs

The design of protocols for local differential privacy (or LDP) has been a topic of considerable research interest in recent years. LDP protocols utilise the randomised encoding of outcomes of an expe...

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 14/11/2025

taking some artistic liberty in not using a log plot here

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 14/11/2025

I really need to switch to a newer Obsidian Zotero connector, but I've got such heavy scripting debt in this ancient abandonware plugin that I cant fathom how long it'll take me to port everything over

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Reposted by Abigail

Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 10/11/2025

Accepted at #ITCS2026: congratulations to Abigail and Vikrant! itcs-conf.org @abigailgentle.com

itcs-conf.org

ITCS 2026 Call for Papers

ITCS 2026 CFP

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 04/11/2025

Just caught myself writing D(P\|Q) on paper

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 13/10/2025

genuinely great learning-by-teaching opportunity

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 13/10/2025

I'm running a mock-conference for students using OpenReview, and have developed an appreciation for how nuanced that software is. But also an appreciation for conference chairs because of how much of a headache that software is

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Reposted by Abigail

Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 03/09/2025

My petition to the 🇦🇺 Australian government: make part-time PhD students' stipends tax exempt! 📋 Read and sign here: www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/... ⏰ Deadline: October 1

aph.gov.au

e-petitions

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 11/08/2025

I am a little sad they didn't attach their groundbreaking new information theory work for me to read

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 11/08/2025

with great power (arXiv endorsement ability) comes great responsibility (quack emails)

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 08/08/2025

Thank you differential privacy bot :)

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 08/08/2025

These objects have been used for private learning (and statistics in general) both implicitly and explicitly for some time. But this resolved my personal curiosity as to whether other optimal constructions could exist.

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 08/08/2025

Workshop paper up on arXiv! Bringing together a collection of necessary conditions on optimal LDP frequency estimation algorithms, and showing they restrict us to a specific class of combinatorial objects. arxiv.org/abs/2508.05110

arxiv.org

Necessity of Block Designs for Optimal Locally Private Distribution Estimation

Local differential privacy represents the gold standard for preserving the privacy of data before it leaves the device, and distribution estimation under this model has been well studied. Recently, pr...

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 07/08/2025

submitted a paper to arXiv, which has already passed peer review, but I'm still staring at a wall wondering if there's anything obviously dumb I've missed

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 05/08/2025

or at least makes me want to study derandomized polynomial testing

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 05/08/2025

P=BPP is so interesting a problem it almost makes me want to study complexity theory

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 31/07/2025

word: painful LaTeX: irritating markdown: impossible

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 31/07/2025

Greatest unsolved problem of our time: creating nice tables in a document

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 30/07/2025

Does anyone know of a good collaborative pdf mark-up website or program? Kami works ok, but is a bit broken, regularly asks for permissions, and needs aggressive access to either Google drive or OneDrive

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 03/07/2025

God bless the LLMs: "I added a new macro for X late in writing, please identify where I've used X and replace it with the macro" is saving my life regularly (I plan my writing poorly)

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 02/07/2025

Annoyed that vscode has turned out to be the best LaTeX editor I've used so far. I'm sure nvim is competitive, but I haven't used it since undergrad

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 29/05/2025

Quite unbelievable density of cool talks going on, even while its past midnight in the US where most of these researchers are based

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 21/05/2025

current level of usage is purely for fun, just seeing how well they do on tasks I've already completed myself

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 21/05/2025

Fiddling with llms: Gemini seems to hallucinate a lot more obviously than any other models I've tried when asked for literature reviews

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 13/05/2025

Optus (phone provider) doesn't have our current address in it! I was so shocked I had to download the national address database and make sure our fairly new apartment is in it, and of course it is. Optus, put me in charge of your db I'll remember to download the quarterly updates for a modest salary

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 09/05/2025

I've been to one baseball game in my life and it was to see the Sox fail badly against the second worst team, which of course made me an instant fan

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Reposted by Abigail

dan sinker @dansinker.com · 08/05/2025

Best Chicago controversy of the new Pope is the Cubs trying to lay claim to him and his brother having to speak up to clear up that he's a Sox fan. blockclubchicago.org/2025/05/08/p...

blockclubchicago.org

Pope Leo XIV Is A Sox Fan, Despite The Early Hope From Cubs Fans, His Brother Confirms

The Cubs' Marquee Sports Network, citing ABC News, said the new pontiff supports the North Siders. But his brother said that is not true.

752769576

Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 05/05/2025

also I must be putting the poor librarians to work with the amount of storage requests I've been making for old stats and combinatorics books

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 05/05/2025

The 70s and 80s had way more of a randomised response boom than I ever imagined. These authors imagined the topic being taught in introductory statistics

Cover of the book "Randomized Response: Theory and Techniques" by Arijit Chaudhuri and Rahul Mukerjee"

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 02/05/2025

I've been trying out Typst a little and I'm glad to see them taking a definitive stance on the superior epsilon

$The symbol latex calls "\varepsilon" is registered under the name, "epsilon" by Typst, while the latex default "\epsilon" is "epsilon.alt"$

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 02/05/2025

Being a researcher is so hard! I'm still working through the 3000 ICML papers from 2024 and now there's going to be another 3000?

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 20/04/2025

In highschool our English teacher gave us an exercise to condense a paragraph into as few words as possible while retaining all of its meaning. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. Relatedly I'm writing an abstract right now

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 20/04/2025

Feel very proud of my first sole author paper, hope I get a chance to share it soon!

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 18/04/2025

the geometric interpretation is so great, I'm thankful to be working on a problem with very constrained PSD or even zero-one matrices so I can shortcut a lot of hard analysis

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 17/04/2025

☝️ spent an hour trying to eigendecompose a matrix of the form a𝐈 + b𝐉 without knowing about shortcuts for commuting matrixes

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 17/04/2025

The cost of not paying attention in linear algebra class is higher than I ever could have imagined

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 16/04/2025

Fun fact! Hadamard matrices have been used in Randomised Response procedures since 1979! (Raghavarao and Federer), and they sometimes even shuffled all the responses in a box! Not exactly Shuffle DP but I feel like they deserve a little credit

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 11/04/2025

I actually have started using Gilles Castel's snippets in my own writing! I just use obsidian these days because it's easier to write quick notes and link them for future reading. I may have to get back into using the overleaf git integration and vim again for papers though...

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 11/04/2025

no automatic tabbing and newline in align environments! no automatic closing of \left \right, the math preview doesn't load symbols defined in the preamble!

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 11/04/2025

It is remarkable how few quality of life features overleaf has given its total market dominance. If good multiplayer comes to @obsidian.md, and I figure out how to use pandoc properly I vow never to return

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 09/04/2025

careful, first day at skepticism school and everyone laughed at me for saying I believe in suspending judgement

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Abigail @abigailgentle.com · 08/04/2025

I've graduated from "foundational 60s monograph" to "80s graduate textbook" and soon I may even read "2000s journal article" levels of combinatorial competency

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