The Business Meeting

Update (9/3/03): STOC 2004 CFP

Last night was the business meeting for STOC. This used to be a raucous affair with major battles over issues like whether to have parallel sessions, but now in its old age is more for distributing information like

• Awards: Godel Prize for best paper published in a journal in last seven years: Yoav Freund and Rob Schapire for their adaboost algorithm.
  Knuth Prize for lifetime research activity: Miklos Ajtai.
  STOC Best Paper: Jointly to Impagliazzo and Kabanets for "Derandomizing Polynomial Identity Tests Means Proving Circuit Lower Bounds" (you read it here first) and Oded Regev for "New Lattice Based Cryptographic Constructions".
  The Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award: Thomas Hayes for "Randomly Coloring Graphs of Girth at Least Five" Thomas Hayes is from my once and future department at U. Chicago.
• Future Conferences: FOCS 2003 in Boston, STOC 2004 in Chicago and FOCS 2004 in Rome, its first time outside North America. On Friday, a day after agreeing to return to Chicago, Janos Simon asked me to give the presentation on STOC 2004, which is always fun. Laszlo Babai, another member of the Chicago faculty, will be PC chair of that meeting.
• Registration numbers, NSF report, progress on scanning in old papers and redoing submission software. I'm not going to do a full business meeting report--someone else does that and will eventually appear in SIGACT news.