iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I don't understand all this hand-wringing about "paperclip maximization." I would love to see a very, very big paperclip

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Louis Barclay @louisbarclay.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The report from the AI + TCS Working Group held at the @simonsinstitute.bsky.social is out, including "twelve concrete near-term recommended actions." Currently reading it: while I have some reservations, but there is some good in it! Notably items 7, 8, and 11. simons.berkeley.edu/ai-tcs-worki...

7. Best works and technical talks in interviews.

- Emphasize quality over quantity. Evaluate candidates on no more than three works of their choosing, with this fact explicit in the instructions for candidates and their letter writers.

- Test technical depth. Evaluate the depth of the candidates’ understanding of the aforementioned works more than was done normally until now.

8. Additional postdocs. Establish additional postdoctoral positions for the TCS community, a temporary measure that will be phased out after a few years.

9. Workshops for identifying new theory directions. First, organize a workshop (or several) with the goal of identifying a list of modern topics related to AI; and second, run a series of workshops on each of these topics to identify fundamental directions and establish foundations and agendas for future work.

10. “TCS in the Age of AI” series at the Simons Institute. Establish a recurring and widely accessible “TCS in the Age of AI” series at the Simons Institute.

11. Opportunities for training and evaluation without AI assistance. To ensure development of necessary skills for a successful career in academia, a PhD in TCS should partially include training and evaluation components where the use of AI is forbidden.

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The latest urgent research from the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers: alignmentalignment.ai/caaac/blog/p...

alignmentalignment.ai

Prediction: AI will kill every human by next year, or not

Our latest prediction model uses cutting-edge binary methodology to forecast potential AI futures

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@tdietterich.bsky.social Maybe an obvious question or existing feature I don't know, but has @arxiv.bsky.social considered implementing a notification or announcement system for when papers are *updated*? (Especially useful for cases where the update is a correction, or adds new results)

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By my wonderful colleague Katy Gero: A 4-month artist residency, Feb to May 2027, at the School of Computer Science at #USyd, "to support artists working on projects that involve serious consideration of computation and its related subjects." Share broadly, and apply! www.writefutureslab.com/air/

writefutureslab.com

Artist in Residence

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TCS+ @tcsplus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

writefutureslab.com

Artist in Residence

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This is this week! Register here (free) for Sepehr's talk: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

docs.google.com

TCS+ RSVP: Sepehr Assadi (2026/09/30)

Greedy is Optimal for the Semi-Streaming Matching Problem

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I don't have a blog, I don't do podcasts, but I have thoughts (sometimes), and to put my money where my mouth is I may write something about what I think the values of Theoretical CS are, should be, and where to (possibly) go from there these days. Would there be some interest?

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Research update: turns out you can't do that

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usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com

From our friends at the School of #Mathematics and Statistics at #USyd: positions as 'Magma Research Associates / Magma Research Fellows to develop and maintain the Magma computer #algebra system." 2 positions, each for 3 years: apply by October 20 usyd.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/USYD_E...

Magma Research Associate / Magma Research Fellow

2 x full time, 3-year fixed term positions, located on the Camperdown Campus at the School of Mathematics and Statistics Opportunity to drive research in computational pure mathematics through the dev...

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This is what "research" looks like for many paper-producing groups or individuals, in light of the recent advances in LLMs/AI systems. PSA: this may look tempting! But this is not good, this is not research, and, very much like when I tried to play Quake 3 back in the day, this will not end well.

Capture the Flag starting screen from a game of Quake 3 Arena

Screenshot (thumbnail) from https://youtu.be/cDq2LOQlAG4?si=iplz1qQELCdG_zIT

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Reposted by Clément Canonne

When I say "this is not good" let me be more specific: (1) this is not good for academia (destroying the current system before it has a chance to reassess its incentive structure), (2) it is not good for science (flooding the gates with ill-understood results and insightless or badly written proofs)

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Applying for a passport, and I have reached new levels of confusion. Why would one ever choose the first option here? How does this make sense? Has the person who created this form ever taken Logic 101? I am really trying here.

Select 3 documents from Category B, including 1 that is a passport;
OR
Select any 2 documents from Category B.

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QIP @qipconference.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

On the Theoretical CS job market? "The Algorithms and Complexity group of 🇫🇷 IRIF is seeking excellent candidates for postdoctoral positions in classical and quantum computing, with starting date in October 2027 (negotiable)." @irif-paris.bsky.social cstheory-jobs.org/2026/09/25/p...

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For talk submissions, remember to register by 28 Sep (23:59 AoE)! Registration only requires a title, short abstract, authors, and topic selections, but do keep in mind the recommended cutoff for the subsequent arXiv submission and talk submission - read the details at qipconference.org/2027/call/

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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 25/09/2026

Regarding the incident involving 🇦🇺 Medicare and OpenAI... www.newscientist.com/article/2590...

David Tuffley at Griffith University, Australia, says it isn’t the first time such a breach has occurred, even if it is the first government hack by an agent from a big AI firm to be made public, and it won’t be the last.

These agents don’t always stick to the rules, he says, as the Hugging Face incident earlier this year, where another OpenAI agent hacked into another AI company, demonstrates. “People throw up their hands in horror and say: ‘Oh no, it’s rogue AI.’ But it’s not, it’s really just AI doing what it was trained to do,” he says.

Failure to bring agents to heel should have criminal consequences, just as it would if it was a person who led the cyberattack, says Clément Canonne at the University of Sydney. “The issue with private data is once it’s leaked, it’s not going to come back.”

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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 25/09/2026

Great progress! Just circumvented an information-theoretical lower bound by unilaterally deciding it didn't apply

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TCS+ @tcsplus.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

📢 Our next TCS+ will be Wednesday, Sep 30 (10am PT, 1pm ET, 19:00 CEST): Sepehr Assadi, from Waterloo, will tell us how "Greedy is Optimal for the Semi-Streaming Matching Problem" RSVP to receive the link (one day prior to the talk): docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

docs.google.com

TCS+ RSVP: Sepehr Assadi (2026/09/30)

Greedy is Optimal for the Semi-Streaming Matching Problem

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Toby Murray @tobycmurray.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Sick of hearing about #AI #agents breaking containment? Want to apply formal methods to develop secure, verified sandbox tech atop #seL4? Want to work in beautiful Melbourne? Multiple #postdoc roles available at various levels. Apply now unimelb.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/UOM_Ex...

unimelb.wd105.myworkdayjobs.com

Postdoctoral Research Fellow / Research Fellow / Senior Research Fellow

Role type: Full time, Fixed-term until November 2027 (part-time considered) Faculty: Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology Salary: Level A - $87,266 - $118,416 p.a. plus 17% super Level B ...

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Exponential Quantum Advantage in Testing Fourier Dimensionality

He did it again! My PhD student Kenny Chen has a new preprint on the arXiv, establishing (nearly) tight classical and quantum query complexity bounds for testing Fourier dimensionality, which show an exponential quantum advantage for the task! arxiv.org/abs/2609.25816

arxiv.org

A boolean function $f$ has Fourier dimension $k$ if its nonzero Fourier coefficients span a subspace of dimension $k$. We consider the property testing task of determining whether a function has Fouri...

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Reposted by Clément Canonne

Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing @simonsinstitute.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Looking for takes by TCS (Theoretical Computer Science) senior academics/researchers about AI and their discipline/research values. E.g., essays, detailed blog posts. (Specifically TCS: there is a lot from Maths, but while adjacent there are enough differences in culture it's worth distinguishing)

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We invite your project proposals for Circles, the Simons Institute – Jane Street Small Group Collaborations, which supports groups of 3-6 researchers for 4 weeklong gatherings over 2 years. Apply by Oct. 15 (deadline extended). simons.berkeley.edu/participate/...

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Clément Canonne @ccanonne.github.io · 22/09/2026

Tuesday, September 29, 3:30pm PT (8:30am on Wednesday in Sydney), livestream and in-person attendance available. And, obviously, Ryan is a truly great speaker! Register: simons.berkeley.edu/events/my-fa... @simonsinstitute.bsky.social

Expander graphs are sparse graphs for which, whenever you split the graph into two parts, the number of edges going between the parts is proportional to the size of the smaller part. There are extremely simple, strongly explicit expander families whose analysis requires only a tiny bit of group theory. This fact is perhaps not so widely known. In this lecture, Ryan O’Donnell will show some of these constructions/analyses, and also indicate how they can be used to get even stronger kinds of expanders, such as “super-expanders,” and “non-sofic property (T) groups.”

Ryan O’Donnell is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his BSc from the University of Toronto in 1999, and his PhD in applied mathematics from MIT in 2003, where he was advised by Madhu Sudan. His research interests include complexity theory, quantum computation, and spectral graph theory. He is the author of the book Analysis of Boolean Functions.

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