Tal Malkin

Professor Malkin explains everything clearly and puts in a lot of effort in showing the background behind certain ideas, as well as demonstrating why certain intuitive assumptions do not work. Her notes are also the clearest and easiest to follow I've seen in a long time, and she takes time to review everything important that was learned in the last lecture. Her and her TAs also frequently send out handouts that cover the most important information, and the workload was very fair in my opinion. She also allows 2 double-sided cheat sheets on exams, 150 late hours for homework, and a minimum grade for quizzes that are attempted. The exams are also not cumulative. I am surprised that her ratings on here aren't higher. I came into CST expecting a boring, tedious semester. But I left with a strong interest in the topic and with the feeling of having learned a lot.

What a fun course! Each lecture, professor Malkin presented an overview of a recent cryptography result. Very interesting without getting caught up in tedious details. Here [http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~tal/6261/SP16/] is an overview of the topics she did this semester, although it changes from class to class. Lecture was only a small part of the class. The main event the project. The goal was to read up on an area of cryptography, discuss an open problem, then attempt to do original research in it. Professor Malkin was very helpful in the process, and she put a lot of time into helping groups find papers and work on results. It presented a glimpse into what crypto research is like. Everyone presented their work on the last day of class. This class assumes a background in cryptography and theoretical computer science. You should be comfortable with proofs, especially the proofs of security used in cryptography.

A pretty good class. Prof. Malkin makes a point of offering both conceptual and formal treatments of the material, which in principle is nice (as just about every result in crypto is deeply counterintuitive); in practice, I found her lemma-proof-theorem teaching very clear, but the high-level explanations so vague as to be practically useless. Part of the issue was that a large portion of the class didn't really have the mathematical maturity necessary for this course, and she would get bogged down answering basic questions and then have to rush through material. She got better at this (i.e. stopped answering stupid questions) as the semester went on, but it remained frustrating throughout. Homework assignments were well-designed. Fernando (the TA) was a real stickler for rigor, and I definitely learned to be more careful about writing up proofs by the end of the semester. Midterm (in class) and final (take home) were both trivial; I don't know what the final average was, but due to the aforementioned mathematical maturity problem midterm scores were shockingly low. As a side note, this can be a great class even if you're not specifically interested in security. I was in learning theory at the same time, and my final project for that class relied on a bunch of cryptographic hardness assumptions---this is about a lot more than secret codes.

A great course with very interesting material. I've never been much of a theory person but I thoroughly enjoyed this class, especially the last Turing Machines unit. Professor Malkin is very caring towards her students and makes sure to ask for your name if you participate in class. When she goes through the lectures, she makes sure to reiterate certain points of confusion and was very receptive to questions. Although I was very confused initially, during some units, I managed to catch up by reading the textbook, lecture notes, and rewatching lectures. I also found her lecture notes to be incredibly clear- to be honest, you'll probably be fine just reading the notes. Yes, the proofs are a little tiresome at first, but as we progressed in the course, I thought the proofs started to get more creative and I got the hang of it more. The TAs were also great- there were a lot of office hours and the pre-exam review sessions were quite helpful.

This course is definitely a heavy theory course. The lectures were fairly long, but definitely well done; Professor Malkin is an excellent lecturer. She doesn't use PowerPoint, which I personally consider a plus, though it means that you can't skip lectures if you expect to learn something from them.

If you don't your remember probablity and other math from Algorithms then don't bother taking this class because you'll get killed. In other words, don't ignore the prerequisties for the class because the Prof. will assume that you're comfortable with all the concepts that she listed on the class website. Her lectures are not that good and neither is her handwriting. Fortunately, she makes everybody participate in this thing where in each lecture a student is chosen to take notes for the class. The student is then responsible for converting the notes into LaTeX or PDF and share it with the rest of the class. There are 6 homeworks and one final exam. The homeworks are pretty long so start early. They'll require you to do some mathematical proofs, encryption scheme design, and other theoretical stuff. Take this class only if you're really interested in Cryptography.

She is so brutal, so do not take her class. I SAID DO NOT TAKE HER CLASS

1 problem set, weekly readings, and 1 project. Grades were not a focus, I'm assuming everyone did well.

Light. A problem set once every couple of weeks that usually took me 2-3 hours (including typesetting). Don't cut corners on your proofs.

Tal is wicked smart, evident from day 1, and is super knowledgable about the subject. Unfortunately, I think this somewhat hinders her from succinctly explaining the concepts to half the class just because we're too dumb to understand it (at first at least). Another issue that I found out in the second half of the term is that I was getting too caught up in the fine details of what was being taught in the lecture and wasn't really getting a full picture. But taking a step back from the material to see the larger picture, especially during the Turing Machine section, helped immensely. Even though I struggled with just about everything in the course, I would recommend taking it with Tal because she is super intelligent and is really helpful and approachable in office hours. I only went to her office hours towards the end of the class because I thought she would be somewhat intimidating but this was not the case at all. Some, myself included, found her intimidating in class because she would sometimes answer student's questions with "I'm not sure where your getting confused" which can be awkward for the student asking the question but Tal doesn't mean it with an ill intention. So, if you can get over this bit you should be fine or go to her OH and ask in a smaller setting. I'm not sure how this course will be structured when we go back to campus but the format was three unit test…