We construct pseudorandom generators that fool functions of halfspaces (threshold functions) under a very broad class of product distributions. This class includes not only familiar cases such as the uniform distribution on the discrete cube, the uniform distribution on the solid cube, and the multivariate Gaussian distribution, but also includes ... more >>>

We study lower bounds for Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) in the strongest setting: point sets in $\{0,1\}^d$ under the Hamming distance. Recall that $\mathcal{H}$ is said to be an $(r, cr, p, q)$-sensitive hash family if all pairs $x,y \in \{0,1\}^d$ with dist$(x,y) \leq r$ have probability at least $p$ ... more >>>

This article accompanies a tutorial talk given at the 40th ACM STOC conference. In it, we give a brief introduction to Fourier analysis of boolean functions and then discuss some applications: Arrow?s Theorem and other ideas from the theory of Social Choice; the Bonami-Beckner Inequality as an extension of Chernoff/Hoeffding ... more >>>

This paper addresses the problem of testing whether a Boolean-valued function f is a halfspace, i.e. a function of the form f(x)=sgn(w ⋅ x - θ). We consider halfspaces over the continuous domain R^n (endowed with the standard multivariate Gaussian distribution) as well as halfspaces over the Boolean cube {-1,1}^n ... more >>>

Motivated by the study of Parallel Repetition and also by the Unique
Games Conjecture, we investigate the value of the ``Odd Cycle Games''
under parallel repetition. Using tools from discrete harmonic
analysis, we show that after $d$ rounds on the cycle of length $m$,
the value of the game is ... more >>>

In this paper we show a reduction from the Unique Games problem to the problem of approximating MAX-CUT to within a factor of $\GW + \eps$, for all $\eps > 0$; here $\GW \approx .878567$ denotes the approximation ratio achieved by the Goemans-Williamson algorithm~\cite{GW95}. This implies that if the Unique ... more >>>