Understanding the power and limitations of classical and quantum information, and how they differ, is an important endeavor. On the classical side, property testing of distributions is a fundamental task: a tester, given samples of a distribution over a typically large domain such as \{0,1\}^n, is asked to verify properties ... more >>>
We prove that for every decision tree, the absolute values of the Fourier coefficients of given order \ell\geq1 sum to at most c^{\ell}\sqrt{{d\choose\ell}(1+\log n)^{\ell-1}}, where n is the number of variables, d is the tree depth, and c>0 is an absolute constant. This bound is essentially tight and settles a ... more >>>
The threshold degree of a Boolean function f\colon\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\} is the minimum degree of a real polynomial p that represents f in sign: \mathrm{sgn}\; p(x)=(-1)^{f(x)}. A related notion is sign-rank, defined for a Boolean matrix F=[F_{ij}] as the minimum rank of a real matrix M with \mathrm{sgn}\; M_{ij}=(-1)^{F_{ij}}. Determining the maximum ... more >>>
Interactive coding, pioneered by Schulman (FOCS 1992, STOC 1993), is concerned with making communication protocols resilient to adversarial noise. The canonical model allows the adversary to alter a small constant fraction of symbols, chosen at the adversary's discretion, as they pass through the communication channel. Braverman, Gelles, Mao, and Ostrovsky ... more >>>