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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · 1d

In anticipation of this week’s Nobel prizes? Sign next to UCPH Nobel prize reserved parking says ”Beware of crossing traffic”

Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · 2d

My run yesterday passed by Malmö Stadium, where West Germany defeated Argentina 3-1 in the 1958 soccer World Cup, after an early Argentinian goal. Sadly the stadium will soon be demolished to make room for new sports facilities.

View of Malmö Stadium from above, Öresund in the background

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Reposted by Rasmus Pagh

Signal @signal.org · 5d

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

signal.org

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · 12d

Proud to learn that BARC alumnus Jakub Tětek was chosen as one of 4 winners (out of 260 PhD theses) of the @ucph.bsky.social SCIENCE PhD award. Congratulations to Jakub and the other winners!
kunet.ku.dk/newsroom/new...

kunet.ku.dk

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · 16d

150 years ago the first women were enrolled at University of Copenhagen. To celebrate, four of my awesome BARC colleagues are arranging the WAVE workshop on October 10th.

Amazing speakers and panelists, full-day catering, and Copenhagen culture night in the evening! Join us!

t.co/zIeUnYVXMC

https://barc.ku.dk/wave-conference/

t.co

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Sep 4

Agreed, if what we are seeing is a lot of AI-generated, mediocre applications being added to the pool it won't mean much for the chances (but additional work for the panels...). I guess time will tell.

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Sep 4

Announcement: vldb.org/2025/?confer...
Paper: vldb.org/pvldb/volume...

VLDB 2025 - Conference Awards

Best Paper, Best Demo, and Distinguished Reviewers.

vldb.org

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Sep 4

Happy to learn that work on dynamic range filters by my frequent collaborators Navid Eslani, Ioana Bercea, & Niv Dayan has been recognized with a best paper award at VLDB! The paper is a great example of theoretical understanding informing practical engineering of data structures. Congratulations!

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Sep 2

Good question. I would be curious to know if applications from researchers in the United States has significantly increased following the decrease in funding there?

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Sep 2

An 8% funding rate is... tough

European Research Council (ERC) @erc.europa.eu · Sep 2

In 2025, the ERC received 3,329 proposals for Advanced Grant funding — 31% more than last year!

The selected projects will likely be announced in the spring of 2026.

More facts and figures on #ERCAdG applications 👇 europa.eu/!bm9gPT

#FrontierResearch

Applications for ERC Advanced Grants 2025: Facts and figures

The ERC Advanced Grants 2025 call closed for applications on 28 August 2025. These are the preliminary data on the submitted proposals:

europa.eu

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Sep 2

The Open Diffix synthetic data generator system can be found at www.open-diffix.org

Open Diffix

Strong Anonymization for Structured Data. Open. Free.

www.open-diffix.org

Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Sep 2

I wonder if there are independent attempts to attack the protections of this software and/or quantify its utility? (A prior version of Diffix was famously broken by Aloni Cohen and Kobbi Nissim, @kobbini.bsky.social, in arxiv.org/abs/1810.05692)

Linear Program Reconstruction in Practice

We briefly report on a successful linear program reconstruction attack performed on a production statistical queries system and using a real dataset. The attack was deployed in test environment in the...

arxiv.org

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Sep 2

Only discovered today that AirCloak, the company behind the Diffix system for differential privacy-inspired query answering, is no longer operating. An open source project focusing on synthetic data, made in collaboration with MPI-SWS, has inherited the Diffix name.

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Reposted by Rasmus Pagh

Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · Aug 27

A thought experiment: What if every sufficiently expensive machine learning model was required to immediately be open-sourced?

I explore this in a new blog post:

togelius.blogspot.com/2025/08/mand...

Mandatory open-sourcing

A thought experiment: What if every sufficiently expensive machine learning model was required to immediately be open-sourced? This would me...

togelius.blogspot.com

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Aug 22

@randomwalker.bsky.social @astralcodexten.com.web.brid.gy

Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Aug 22

Space flight as a normal technology

Largest distance from Earth surface reached by humans. Shows exponential growth between 1905 and 1970, then growth stops.

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Aug 13

One a more serious note: It is obvious to anyone with mathematical training that a sequence of improvements in capability (by whatever metric) may not lead to an "explosion" in capability. Instead, it may very well be that there are limiting factors that keep the total progress bounded.

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Aug 13

Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of how our new ladders can be used to build even longer ladders. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing a ladder to the stars is now in sight.
(Paraphrasing www.meta.com/superintelli...)

Personal Superintelligence

Explore Meta's vision of personal superintelligence, where AI empowers individuals to achieve their goals, create, connect, and lead fulfilling lives. Insights from Mark Zuckerberg on the future of AI...

www.meta.com

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Reposted by Rasmus Pagh

Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · Aug 11

While Helen Toner is more sympathetic to the grandiose possibilities of AI than I am, her talk here is a terrific and highly accessible overview of the core debates happening in the AI research community. Worth your time.

open.substack.com/pub/helenton...

Unresolved debates about the future of AI

How far the current paradigm can go, AI improving AI, and whether thinking of AI as a tool will keep making sense

open.substack.com

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Aug 9

Another great piece in @quantamagazine.bsky.social, this time on new surprising algorithms for shortest paths. With quotes from BARC head and shortest path grand-old-man Mikkel Thorup

Ben Brubaker @benbenbrubaker.bsky.social · Aug 6

My latest in @quantamagazine.bsky.social: a new algorithm solves the classic single-source shortest paths problem faster than ever before — by finding paths out of order:

New Method Is the Fastest Way To Find the Best Routes | Quanta Magazine

A canonical problem in computer science is to find the shortest route to every point in a network. A new approach beats the classic algorithm taught in textbooks.

www.quantamagazine.org

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Reposted by Rasmus Pagh

FOCS 2025 @focs2025.bsky.social · Aug 6

The Call for Workshops for #FOCS2025 is up! Submit a proposal by September 5!

📋 focs.computer.org/2025/call-fo...

Workshop chairs: Mohsen Ghaffari and Dakshita Khurana

Call for workshops – FOCS 2025

focs.computer.org

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Aug 5

The ”Ethics declaration” is interesting and may shed some light on why the EiC was reluctant

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

SAT requires exhaustive search - Frontiers of Computer Science

In this paper, we identify the distinction between non-brute-force computation and brute-force computation as the most fundamental problem in computer science. Subsequently, we prove, by the diagonali...

link.springer.com

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Jun 28

DARA (Danish Advanced Research Academy) is a new initiative in which exceptional STEM candidates can get fully funded PhD scholarships at Danish universities. Those who are interested in applying should reach out to potential supervisors as soon as possible. daracademy.dk/fellowship/f...

Dara

daracademy.dk

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Jun 26

Finally a workshop on Differential Privacy in Europe! Organized by Monika Henzinger at IST Austria next year in September, so reserve the date! Monika’s STOC keynote, where the workshop was announced, was about the intersection of privacy and dynamic algorithms. Lots of questions in this space!

First European Workshop on Differential Privacy
September 17, 2026
At IST Austria

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Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · Jun 13

Jonas Klausen hashing out the details at his PhD defense at BARC yesterday. Congratulations to Jonas for a successful defense!

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