Public Lectures: Avi Is 60

Silvio Micali and Dorit Aharanov will deliver two public lectures. Algorand: The Public Ledger Silvio Micali, Massachusetts Institute of Technology A public ledger is a tamperproof sequence of data that can be read and augmented by everyone. Public ledgers have innumerable and compelling uses. They can secure, in plain sight, all kinds of transactions—such as titles, sales, and payments—in the exact order in which they occur. Public ledgers prevent corruption and enable very sophisticated applications, such as cryptocurrencies and smart contracts, and stand to revolutionize the way a democratic society operates. However, they scale poorly and cannot achieve their enormous potential. Silvio Micali will explore Algorand, a new efficient way to construct and manage a public ledger. Quantum Physics and the Computational Lens Dorit Aharonov, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem While the jury is still out as to whether the impressive experimental progress on quantum gates and qubits will lead one day to a full scale quantum computing machine, a new and exciting development had been taking place over the past decade. Computational notions such as reductions, hardness, and completeness are quickly starting to be integrated into the very heart of the research of many body quantum systems. Dorit Aharanov will explore how the computational perspective brings deep new insights into physical questions that seem completely unrelated to computers, spanning precision measurements and sensing, testing quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics and even black holes and quantum gravity.