Thursday, October 21, 2010

Will there be a 50th CCC? Will you be there?

At the 25th CCC Juris Hartmanis gave a great talk to celebrate having a 25th. Will there be a 50th? I asked people at the conference. What did they say? Watch the video!

So what do you think? Will there be a 50th CCC? Will you be there?

Will there be conferences?
  1. Comp Sci may grow up.
  2. We may videotape the talks more. Then NSF will stop paying people to go since you can see the talks anyway. So less people will go. This is part of a more general trend where as a society we are sacrificing community for efficiency.
Will there be Complexity theory?
  1. The field will still be vibrant, P vs NP will still be unsolved.
  2. L=RL may be proven.
  3. Some form of the Unique Game Conjecture may be proven or disproven.
  4. If GI is in P we may see that proven within 25 years. If GI is not in P then I doubt we'll see that proven within 25 years.
  5. If Ketan's Geometric Complexity approach begins to work we may change the name to Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry and Representation Theory.
  6. If we find more and more about what we cannot do and less and less about what we can do, we may change the name to The Barrier's Conference.

12 comments:

  1. Any opinion about whether Factoring is in P will be resolved?

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  2. Conferences do appear to be highly impractical. They cost money, cause extra travel, bulk up the profits of hotels at the expense of students whose professors aren't in class. The works presented are often inferior to works seen in journals. I would like to see most conferences go away.

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  3. My prediction about factoring:

    1) Its NOT in P

    2) P vs NP will be resolved NOT by
    proving that SAT is not in P, but by
    proving that Factoring or some other
    thought-to-be-intermediate problem
    is not in P

    3) This will not be resolved by 50th CCC.

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  4. Personally, I can't stand watching talks on video (so I really hope the field doesn't head that way). I'm not really sure why, but I (oh-so-strongly) prefer to either see a talk in person, or to just read the paper.

    Also, it's very strange to hear your own voice on a recording.

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  5. Daniel,

    (1) why does it matter what your own voice would sound like on a recording if it is for others and that's how they hear you anyway?

    (2) should we assume you are assuming wide angle or talking head or something like that rather than full 3D video playback that feels and sounds more lifelike? there are already technologies that could make video-based presentations far better than what you see on a YouTube video of a talk

    (3) what's wrong with just reading the paper or maybe even an audio commentary about the paper like a DVD commentary track?

    Anon #2 is on the right track. We pay somewhere around $2000 for the privilege of being able to present our research at a conference? Why? Half the time there are talks going on at the same time so I can't even get my "money's worth" in the end.

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  6. Personally, I don't like works to be posted with errors and find it even more frustrating when those errors are known about and not fixed by the author who has the ability to do so.

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  7. Hopefully, in the future, CS-Stack-Exchange or a similar site (that supports the sorts of discussions there) will allow people to post papers as on arxiv.

    Then we can just discuss papers that way. That would be great.

    Although, on CS-SX, other people can edit your comments, which should not be allowed if you are leaving (possibly critical or even positive) comments about a paper.

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  8. I find online videos of talks extremely helpful. Sometimes they are better than actually attending the talk: more convenient, cheaper and more effective (you can listen to it at your own pace).

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  9. The conferece model should be extinguished from the face of the earth.

    If you want community, then go to a party or just pick your friends from the program committee and invite them over (a large part of the papers seen in conferences - what a surprise - come from papers of program committee).

    Like some anonymous said earlier, you pay $2000 for the privilege to present your paper and then you discover that the organizers had the brilliant idea to create parallel tracks. They should be awarded for stupidity, really.

    When you actually get to the conference you get to see all those pompous researchers with badges and they will not speak to you if your university or enterprise is not broadly known or not traditional.

    That is your idea of community? Small groups deciding the fates of everyone else? Conference model should be forgotten.

    That makes me really sad when I attend conferences, and, I know for a fact, that will NEVER change.

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  10. I hope conferences will still be around in the future. Usually, I find coffee breaks to be the best part of a conference. Not for the food or for the coffee (I don't drink coffee anyway), but for the informal conversations you can have with researchers in the field.

    As for the field of CC itself, I think that math and physics might play a larger role in the coming years and we might be "absorbed" or become some subfield of them.

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  11. but primes in P so factoring will also be likely in P. that simple.

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  12. Telling IF a number is prime or composite is in P. The algorithm does not actually
    give the factors if it outputs that the number is composite.

    Actually FINDING the factors of a given
    number seems to be a hard problem.

    GASARCH

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