Friday, April 02, 2010

SIGACT Social Networking

STOC conference and hotel registration now live. Early registration deadline is April 30th. Registration for Complexity and Electronic Commerce coming soon. You can now submit your papers to FOCS, deadline 11 PM Eastern on Wednesday.

We are in the midst of reorganizing the SIGACT web presence. We have redesigned the SIGACT website now under the supervision of Amit Chakrabarti. As I've announced here before we have a new blog Theory Announcements that collects a broad set of TCS related announcements including from TheoryNet and DMANet. If you have an event or announcement you want to appear there, please submit it to one of those mailing lists.

But the days that one needs a theory portal are gone. Google and other search engines work well if you want information on a specific conference, journal or researcher. But what you do need is something to guide you through the clutter. Right now you have to rely on a network of theory bloggers and tweeters to keep you informed. But even then you get important theory information mixed in with personal stuff you may not care about (or vice versa).

So I've started a @sigact twitter where we will point to important information and news relating to the theory community. Recent tweets will also appear on the SIGACT home page. Lets me focus my own twitter and this blog away from announcements (like this one) and more on giving our opinions of the important issues of the theory community.

But that's only the start. We'll continue to search new ways to serve the needs of the theory community: a revamped theory calendar, some sort of jobs database, Facebook and other social networks, and a killer iPad/iPhone app. I don't really have plans for an iPad/iPhone app or know what should go in it but I'd love to have one. 

7 comments:

  1. would be great if theory could finally have an equivalent of (or just use) math jobs in order to simplify the jobs process.

    i.e. the biggest way that math jobs simplifies everything is that you only have to ask for one recommendation letter from each reference.

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  2. why is the STOC conference hotel so expensive?

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  3. "But the days that one needs a theory portal are gone."

    I would disagree.

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  4. "But what you do need is something to guide you through the clutter."

    how about a nice portal?

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  5. Speaking of guides, math people have MathOverflow. Maybe someone should start ComplexityOverflow?

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  6. Isnt it sad how microsoft research isnt able to host a website properly.

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  7. "I don't really have plans for an iPad/iPhone app or know what should go in it but I'd love to have one."

    classic example of the mentality that Apple is trying to foster

    whatever you would want in this app should really go in the portal and then be available to everyone rather

    please stop helping to build the iCult by pushing for apps mindlessly

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