Guggenheim 2024

Edward Hirsch is the President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and has lead it since 2003. He just announced the appointment of 188 Guggenheim Fellowships to a distinguished and diverse group of culture-creators working across 52 disciplines. Chosen from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants, the Class of 2024 Guggenheim Fellows was tapped on the basis of prior career achievement and exceptional promise. As established in 1925 by founder Senator Simon Guggenheim, each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.

Edward Hirsch is a poet and shows that the depth and breadth of Guggenheim’s is large, See here

The range of the 188 new appointments is from 84 different academic institutions, 41 states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces are represented in this year’s class of Fellows, who range in age from 28 to 89. Many Fellows’ projects engage with issues like disability activism, climate change, identity, incarceration, AI, and democracy.

Computer Science

Gene Tsudik is the 2024 representative for computer science. He is a Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from USC in 1991. Before coming to UCI in 2000, he was at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory (1991-1996) and USC/ISI (1996-2000). His research interests include many topics in security, privacy and applied cryptography.

Tsudik is the only computer scientist to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, and he intends to use his fellowship funding to bootstrap a new line of research on building IoT devices resilient against devastating large-scale malware infestations that have become all too common in recent years. See his https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.03574.pdf} with Sashidhar Jakkamsetti and Youngil Kim.

He is also the author of the first crypto-poem published as a refereed paper. Perhaps this is why Edward Hirsch helped select him? Perhaps not? Tsudik also suffers from two incurable academic diseases: “Research ADHD” and “Munchausen-without-Proxy.” Congrats to him as a winner of a Guggenheim.

Open Problems

I enjoyed some of his different points about computing. See this:

There are two equivalence classes of idiots: Those who yearn for the past that never was. AND Those who dream of the future that never will be.

Congrats again.