I’ve been upstreaming a bit of my compiler work to the MLIR project. Yesterday, I merged in a tutorial on mlir-opt, the main debugging tool for running passes on MLIR code. This is roughly the upstreamable parts of my first MLIR tutorial entry, MLIR — Running and Testing a Lowering. Mehdi Amini also provided a lot of useful information during review that taught me some stuff I didn’t know about the tool.

In this living document, I will list all production systems I’m aware of that use fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). For background on FHE, see my overview of the field. If you have any information about production FHE systems not in this list, or corrections to information in this list, please send me an email with sufficient detail allow the claim to be publicly verified.

Ben Recht, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley, recently wrapped up a 3-month series of blog posts on Paul Meehl’s “Philosophical Psychology.” Recht has a table of contents for his blog series. It loosely tracks a set of lectures that Meehl gave in 1989 at the University of Minnesota. In it, he surveys of the philosophy of science, lays out a framework for scientific debate, and critiques scientific practice.

A quick note: you can use C++11 templates to detect struct fields by name and type, and statically branch on them. I first heard of this solution from breeze1990. Say I want to detect if a struct has a field size of type int. Create two template instantiations of the same name, here HasStaticSize that defaults to false.

In my studies of the Remez algorithm, I learned about the barycentric Lagrange interpolation formula.

I added Twitter syndication, and because I have nothing to test it with I’ll share some random life updates. My daughter was born recently, which means I’m on paternity leave for a few months. Hopefully in the liminal hours of sleep training, I’ll have some time to work on my book. Or at least catch up on reading. I finally published my grandmother’s autobiography.

Steven Clontz informed me of an effort he’s involved in called code4math. It’s described as a professional organization for the advancement of mathematical research through building non-research software infrastructure. By that he means, for example, writing software packages like Macaulay2 or databases of mathematical objects that other researchers can use to do their research.

POSSE stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I first heard about it from Cory Doctorow. I’m experimenting with automation to convert posts tagged shortform into Mastodon threads (I’m mathstodon.xyz/@j2kun). I’m using Hugo as a static site generator, with the source a (private) GitHub repository, and Netlify for deployments.

I’ve been learning recently about how to approximate functions by low-degree polynomials. This is useful in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) in the context of “arithmetic FHE” (see my FHE overview article), where the computational model makes low-degree polynomials cheap to evaluate and non-polynomial functions expensive or impossible. In browsing the state of the art I came across two interesting things.

About two years ago, I switched teams at Google to focus on fully homomorphic encryption (abbreviated FHE, or sometimes HE). Since then I’ve got to work on a lot of interesting projects, learning along the way about post-quantum cryptography, compiler design, and the ins and outs of fully homomorphic encryption.

It’s April Cools! Last year I wrote about friendship bracelets and the year before about cocktails. This year it’s parenting. Parenting articles are a dime a dozen and always bury the lede behind a long story. I’ll skip that. How to think about your child and your role as a parent These are framing devices. Concrete things to do to work toward these are in the next section.