Research News

"If an adversary gives you a machine learning model and secretly plants a malicious backdoor in it, what are the chances that you can discover it? Very little, according to a new paper by researchers at UC Berkeley, MIT, and the Institute for Advanced Study."

Update (06/17/2022): This research is now published in Astrophysical Journal Letters and can be accessed here.

Looks can be deceiving. The light from an incandescent bulb seems steady, but it flickers 120 times per second. Because the brain only perceives an average of the information it receives, this flickering is blurred and the perception of constant illumination is a mere illusion.

"For nearly two centuries, all kinds of researchers interested in how fluids flow have turned to the Navier-Stokes equations. But mathematicians still harbor basic questions about them. Foremost among them: How well do the equations adhere to reality?"

"When the mathematicians Jeff Kahn and Gil Kalai first posed their 'expectation threshold' conjecture in 2006, they didn’t believe it themselves. Their claim — a broad assertion about mathematical objects called random graphs — seemed too strong, too all-encompassing, too bold to possibly be true."

Past Member (2020–21) Jinyoung Park, a Szegö Assistant Professor at Stanford University, and Huy Tuan Pham, a Stanford Ph.D. student, proved the Kahn-Kalai Conjecture, a central problem in probabilistic combinatorics.

A cross-discipline analysis of ancient genomes by a team of geneticists, archaeologists, and historians from institutions across Europe, Asia, and North America—with Professor Emeritus Patrick Geary as one of four principal investigators—has answered questions about the mysterious Avar population whose origins have remained enigmatic for 1,400 years. 

"In a nearly 400-page paper posted in March, the mathematicians Mohammed Abouzaid and Andrew Blumberg of Columbia University have constructed a major extension of one of the biggest advances in geometry in recent decades."

A new state of matter, known as quantum spin liquid (QSL), was observed for the first time by IAS and Harvard University researchers. The results were published today in the journal Science in a paper co-authored by Subir Sachdev, Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences.

Roman Rafikov of the School of Natural Sciences, visiting from the University of Cambridge, with co-author Kedron Silsbee of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, has brought this Hollywood scene several steps closer to reality, producing the most realistic model to date of planet formation in binary star systems.

The most accurate distance measurement yet of ultra-diffuse galaxy (UDG) NGC1052-DF2 (DF2) confirms beyond any shadow of a doubt that it is lacking in dark matter. The newly measured distance of 22.1 +/-1.2 megaparsecs was obtained by an international team of researchers led by Zili Shen and Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and Shany Danieli, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Institute.