Uploaded September 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Ronen Shaltiel (University of Haifa)
https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/ronen-shaltiel-university-haifa-2026-08-31
Joint Boot Camp: Spectral Theory Beyond Graphs + Pseudorandomness and High-Dimensional Expansion
The hardness versus randomness paradigm (initiated by Blum, Micali, Yao, Nisan and Wigderson) aims to show that randomized complexity classes can be derandomized assuming that certain complexity theoretic hardness assumptions hold. The key concept in this research is that of a pseudorandom generator, which stretches a short seed of random bits into a long string of pseudorandom bits that cannot be distinguished from uniform bits by any efficient algorithm. In the talk I will survey classical constructions of pseudorandom generators based on hardness assumptions, as well as implications of these constructions. I will also try to broadly survey some of the more recent work in this area.
Ronen Shaltiel (University of Haifa)
https://simons.berkeley.edu/talks/ronen-shaltiel-university-haifa-2026-08-31
Joint Boot Camp: Spectral Theory Beyond Graphs + Pseudorandomness and High-Dimensional Expansion
The hardness versus randomness paradigm (initiated by Blum, Micali, Yao, Nisan and Wigderson) aims to show that randomized complexity classes can be derandomized assuming that certain complexity theoretic hardness assumptions hold. The key concept in this research is that of a pseudorandom generator, which stretches a short seed of random bits into a long string of pseudorandom bits that cannot be distinguished from uniform bits by any efficient algorithm. In the talk I will survey classical constructions of pseudorandom generators based on hardness assumptions, as well as implications of these constructions. I will also try to broadly survey some of the more recent work in this area.










