Complexity Day 1

I arrived at the Institut Henri Poincaré in time to catch the last half of Ryan Williams giving a talk on our paper with Rahul Santhanam. I missed the first set of talks including Mark Braverman's Poly-logarithmic independence fools AC0 circuits. To no one's surprise Braverman won the best paper award for this work. The Ronald V. Book Prize for Best Student Paper went to Akitoshi Kawamura for his paper Lipschitz Continuous Ordinary Differential Equations are Polynomial-Space Complete.

A good turn out, about a hundred for the conference including many notables such as Steve Cook, Manindra Agrawal and of course Bill Gasarch. Eric Allender is here so we are now both at 24 and counting for perfect attendance at complexity conferences. Great to see many friends, colleagues and former students including Sophie Laplante, the main local organizer. Something about Paris draws people to the conference.

With my jet lag I realized I would just snooze through any afternoon talk so I had a pleasant time talking research in the Jardins de Luxembourg (near the conference site). Now I'm off to bed and hopefully well rested for day 2.