Tuesday, June 04, 2013

STOC is Burning

Bill and I are in Palo Alto this week for the co-located meetings of STOC and Complexity. In a new ACM policy, the STOC 2013 papers are freely downloadable by all for the next month. Check out the best papers and best student papers.

Last night smoke from a burning car preemptively ended the STOC business meeting.

Photo from Moritz Hardt

Before the fire I live tweeted the business meeting. In short, a possible record attendance for a west coast meeting (364), one less than New York last year. Next year's STOC will be in the same hotel in New York. A record number of accepted papes (100). PC chair Joan Feigenbaum talked about her two-tiered committee and several potential experiments for future STOCs (eliminate proceedings and just point to Arxiv papers for instance). Read her blog interview for more. 

Lane Hemaspaandra received the SIGACT distinguished service prize for running the SIGACT News complexity column. Gautam Kamath won the STOC 2012 best student presentation award. No award this year because there aren't videos for the talks.

Gary Miller gave the Knuth Prize lecture. He talked about new techniques for solving systems of equations based on graphs that has many applications including new almost linear time algorithms for approximating undirected max flow. 

More from Palo Alto later this week. 

6 comments:

  1. Free papers for the next month? How generous of them. When are we going to find the will to really change this ridiculous system?

    (Congrats to the prize winners...)

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  2. When I go to the ACM Digital Library site that is linked to, I don't see a way to download the proceedings?

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  3. Jakob Nordstrom1:32 AM, June 05, 2013

    I knew the proposed changes to the way the TCS community runs conferences would be controversial, but to the extent that people would start burning cars to disrupt the discussions at the business meeting... I mean, this isn't Sweden, after all.

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  4. @Anon Towards the bottom, click on "Table of Contents".

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  5. Would like to know the name of the "genius" who came up with the idea of free downloads for the next month.

    Screw the archaic ACM, just keep posting your papers on arXiv so people can freely access them.

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  6. "eliminate proceedings and just point to Arxiv papers for instance" This will be great. Any substantial decision on this yet? Also, why not upload videos on Youtube. Any particular reason why there were no videos in 2013 STOC? I feel often a 20 minute overview is a great companion to reading a great paper.

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