Wednesday, February 10, 2010

STOC and More

The Snows of Maryland are keeping Bill away from this blog again. Here in Chicago we deal with snow (and even earthquakes) in stride--my kids still have yet to have a snow day this year.

So I'm back for a day to bring you some news.

The STOC accepted papers list is up, Shiva Kintali is collecting PDF pointers and Noam Nisan pulls out the AGT papers. Lots of goodies this year. You can change base without losing space (love that rhyming title), save space with algebrization and adding quantum to interactive proofs keeps it in PSPACE. 

You just don't see a lot of BLANK is computable results in STOC these days so nice to see a paper with BLANK=HOM=Is a given homomorphism of a regular language expressed by a tree automata itself regular? Sound technical but it actually has connections to XML.

So come to the conference. As Bill mentioned earlier, there are travel awards available for needy students even if you don't have a paper. Apply for visas if needed as soon as possible (click here if you need a letter). The Complexity and EC conferences will both be held also in Cambridge immediately following STOC.

The other big news, according to the Center for Computational Intractability, theory's own Subhash Khot wins the 2010 NSF Waterman award. The NSF gives away only one of these awards each year to a young researcher across all of science.

We are entering CS award season so keep an eye out for the Knuth Prize (the Knuth Prize Lecture will be at STOC), the EATCS award and Gödel Prize (presented at ICALP), Turing and other ACM awards. The SIGACT Distinguished Service award nominations are still open until March 1st which will also be presented at STOC.

15 comments:

  1. How's your book coming?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Do you Chicago types take three to four FEET of snow in a single week in stride? People like you disgust me.

    ReplyDelete
  3. "According to NOAA, before now, the snowiest month on record for Washington, D.C., was 35.2 inches, set in February 1899. By the end of the snowfall Wednesday, areas of Washington will have seen as much as 52 inches in February 2010."

    Bill, I hope you are well.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Due to blizzard conditions and near-zero visibility on the roadways, to protect the safety of city employees and residents, all snowplowing operations have been temporarily suspended until weather conditions improve."

    ReplyDelete
  5. woah anonymous # 2, learn to take a joke.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I don't remember the last time a major university in the Midwest like U. of Chicago, U. of Michigan, or U. of Wisconsin closing for snow. Has it ever happened?

    ReplyDelete
  7. At Northwestern, it is probably 5x more likely to close Tech for a chemical accident than for snow.

    ReplyDelete
  8. you people (#5 and #6) are morons

    ReplyDelete
  9. I checked for 2010 STOC papers with the word "quantum" in the title -- there were three ... this equals the all-time low (since 2002).

    This was surprising to me, since engineering interest in all aspects of QIT is ramping-up very rapidly.

    Data: "http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~iftgam/conflist.htm"

    ReplyDelete
  10. An online snow fight is going on here.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Actually #6, the U. of Wisconsin was closed last semester (Fall 2009) because of snow:

    "7 a.m. Wednesday [Dec.9, 2009] Update: UW-Madison classes are cancelled Wednesday and non-essential employees are asked not to report to work today. According to UWPD, campus roads and sidewalks are largely passable, but students, faculty and staff are advised to use extreme caution walking or driving and stay off the roads if at all possible. Power is on around campus, after several sporadic outages during the night. Numerous campus services are closed as a result of the blizzard. They including campus Libraries and Unions."

    (source http://www.news.wisc.edu/17451)

    ReplyDelete
  12. John, don't forget the quantum complexity classes! Searching for BQP and QIP will bring your total to 5, which is probably average.

    ReplyDelete
  13. The Dec 9, 2009 closing was ordered by the Governor of Wisconsin. Otherwise, snow days for colleges are indeed very rare in the Midwest.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Taking ..earthquakes... in stride?

    Maybe just a little oversensitive ...From the article, the initial report of a 4.3 magnitude ends up being only a 3.8. That's a huge difference.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Actually, for someone needing a visa support letter, the page says that you should send your registration number and the registration is not open yet.

    ReplyDelete