We study semidefinite programming relaxations of Vertex Cover arising from
repeated applications of the LS+ ``lift-and-project'' method of Lovasz and
Schrijver starting from the standard linear programming relaxation.

Goemans and Kleinberg prove that after one round of LS+ the integrality
gap remains arbitrarily close to 2. Charikar proves an integrality ... more >>>

We study the correlation between low-degree GF(2) polynomials p and explicit functions. Our main results are the following:

(I) We prove that the Mod_m unction on n bits has correlation at most exp(-Omega(n/4^d)) with any GF(2) polynomial of degree d, for any fixed odd integer m. This improves on the ... more >>>

Interactive hashing, introduced by Naor et al. [NOVY98], plays
an important role in many cryptographic protocols. In particular, it
is a major component in all known constructions of
statistically-hiding commitment schemes and of zero-knowledge
arguments based on general one-way permutations and on one-way
functions. Interactive hashing with respect to a ... more >>>