About: Eleanor Rieffel
- Website
- http://www.fxpal.com/people/rieffel/
- Profile
Posts by Eleanor Rieffel:
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Overflow overflow?,
27 Aug 2010 in Computer Science& cryptography and security& culture/society& mathematics& social impact of technology
Ten days ago, a theoretical computer science community Q&A site went beta and seems to be generating a fair amount of activity. I’m a big fan of MathOverflow, and am delighted to see a similar site springing up for a different field.
Thirty-nine days ago, a new mathematics site went beta, which initially puzzled me since [...] -
When to stop searching?,
02 Aug 2010 in Information seeking& Quantum computation& collaborative search
Frequently, particularly when searching for work related to possibly novel research ideas I or others at FXPAL have had, it is not easy to determine when to stop searching. This dilemma comes up any time anyone is searching for something we are not sure exists. After doing N searches, and finding nothing, how certain can [...]
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On non-anonymous reviewing,
26 Jul 2010 in scientific publishing
Some journals ask reviewers not to reveal themselves. A review process in which the reviewers are anonymous, unless they choose not to be, makes sense. But why shouldn’t reviewers be free to reveal themselves if they wish?
Twice, I have received non-anonymous reviews. In both cases, receiving the non-anonymous review was a thrill. Both reviewers were [...] -
Computing with Secrets,
14 Jul 2010 in Programming& cryptography and security& mathematics
Tom Simonite of Technology Review interviewed me about the breakthrough in fully homomorphic encryption that I blogged about here. I very much enjoyed talking with him, and was pleased to see that he wrote a good article on the subject: Computing with Secrets, but Keeping them Safe: A cryptographic method could see cloud services work [...]
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Revisualizing a past FXPAL researcher,
11 Jun 2010 in News& culture/society& visualization
Chris Culy, who worked on discourse parsing at FXPAL a number of years ago, is now in Italy working as a Senior Researcher and the Language Technologies Technical Officer at the Institute for Specialised Communication and Multilingualism. He oversees language-related software development and leads a research project on linguistic data visualization. But the real excitement [...]
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Research advice and a search challenge,
20 May 2010 in Advice and inspiration& Information seeking& Puzzles and Challenges& Research& mathematics
I was intending to write a post on the varied reasons mathematicians give for taking long walks as an aid to research. I couldn’t find my favorite quote, so instead I’m posting a search challenge.
I thought I remembered reading, in the book Littlewood’s Miscellany, something along the lines of the following advice:
Researchers spend the vast [...] -
Toward pragmatic definitions of privacy,
29 Mar 2010 in cryptography and security& privacy& social impact of technology
The success of de-anonymization efforts, as discussed here, suggests that older anonymization methods no longer work, especially in light of the large amount of publicly available data that can serve as auxiliary information. The quest to find suitable replacements for these methods is ongoing. As one starting point in this broader quest, we need useful [...]
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Whither data privacy?,
17 Mar 2010 in Research& cryptography and security& culture/society& privacy& social impact of technology
On Friday Netflix canceled the sequel to its Netflix prize due to privacy concerns. The announcement of the cancellation has had a mixed reception from both researchers and the public. Narayanan and Shmatikov, the researchers who exposed the privacy issues in the original Netflix prize competition data, write “Today is a sad day. It is [...]
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Recent Progress in Quantum Algorithms,
04 Feb 2010 in Quantum computation& Research
Dave Bacon, who wrote the elegant overview of the research discussed in my New Year’s Day post, just published his review, joint with Wim van Dam, of Recent Progress in Quantum Algorithms. Bacon writes beautifully, and this piece is no exception.
Most people have heard of no more than two quantum algorithms: Shor’s factoring algorithm and [...] -
How to compute without knowing anything,
03 Feb 2010 in Research& cryptography and security
In my post on quantum inspired classical results, I gave as one example Gentry’s recent discovery of a fully homomorphic encryption scheme. His beautiful work deserves its own blog post. Initially I approached his work with trepidation, worried that it would be so technical I would not understand anything without a lot of work. Others [...]