[Forwarding an announcement by Prasad Raghavendra –Boaz]
FOCS 2015 will be held at Berkeley, California on October 18–20, 2015. Registrations are open at:
The deadline for early registration is Sept 25th.
KARPfest80
On Saturday October 17, the day immediately before FOCS 2015, the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing will host a celebration of the work of Dick Karp on the occasion of his 80th birthday. This event, which features a dozen speakers from across the spectrum of theoretical Computer Science, will also be held at the DoubleTree Marina Hotel, the same venue as FOCS itself. All participants are asked to register to attend; registration is free, and is done in conjunction with FOCS registration. Visit KARPfest80 for more information.
Windows On Theory 
As usual, links to the main FOCS 2015 page, and past FOCS conferences, videos, etc are at http://ieee-focs.org
What about the application for travel grants? Are the grants available this year?
It was great to attend this event and hear reminiscences from a very different time in the field. Prabhakar Raghavan’s talk captured very well the playful spirit of TCS –especially Dick Karp’s work—in those days.
I believe all talks will be on the website soon.
In my talk I tried to make the point that the preference in our field for big, general theory (results that apply to big classes of objects) that arose post-1980s tilts our field towards proving hardness rather than easiness, and thus take a too-pessimistic view of reality. This somewhat relates to the discussion generated by Boaz’s recent post.
ps This post of Boaz’s https://windowsontheory.org/2015/09/22/is-computational-hardness-the-rule-or-the-exception/