STOC Festival Design: Improving interaction and fun factor; reducing information overload – guest post by Sanjeev Arora

~ Boaz Barak ~ 22 Comments

[Yet another personal post in our series] STOC Festival Design: Improving interaction and fun factor; reducing information overload. Sanjeev Arora How can we increase the value added by a conference in today’s information-rich world, when papers have been available on arxiv for months to the experts in that area? These are some personal thoughts (ie … Continue reading STOC Festival Design: Improving interaction and fun factor; reducing information overload – guest post by Sanjeev Arora

Why Doesn’t ACM Have a SIG for Theoretical Computer Science? – Guest post by Moshe Vardi

~ Boaz Barak ~ 29 Comments

[Boaz's note - this is another in the series of personal posts on STOC/FOCS reform, this time from Moshe Vardi, a renowned theoretical computer scientist who is also the editor in chief of the communications of the ACM. See also the discussion that's still going on in the comment section of Omer Reingold's post, as well … Continue reading Why Doesn’t ACM Have a SIG for Theoretical Computer Science? – Guest post by Moshe Vardi

Imagining a theory festival – a personal post

~ Boaz Barak ~ 8 Comments

This is a personal post, not representing the other members of our working group. While future discussion will naturally talk about (important) technical details such as amount of parallelism, scheduling of talks, number of days and length of breaks, I wanted to talk a bit about the broader vision. I hope other members will also … Continue reading Imagining a theory festival – a personal post

Cryptography Program@Simons: Historical Papers

~ Guy Rothblum ~ Leave a comment

The cryptography program at Simons is well under way and we're wrapping up our second week here at the wonderful Simons Institute at Berkeley. It's been a roller-coaster ride discussing the thrilling developments in the field: from fully homomorphic encryption to multilinear maps, obfuscation, differential privacy and more. The orientation/bootcamp week was an unqualified success: survey … Continue reading Cryptography Program@Simons: Historical Papers

DIMACS looking for an associate director

~ Boaz Barak ~ 1 Comment

The DIMACS Center at Rutgers University (dimacs.rutgers.edu) is seeking an Associate Director. DIMACS facilitates research, education, and outreach in discrete mathematics, computer science theory, algorithms, mathematical and statistical methods, and their applications.  The Associate Director is expected to play a leadership role in planning, developing, and running DIMACS activities and programs, including setting new directions.  A PhD in computer science, … Continue reading DIMACS looking for an associate director

2015 Swedish Summer School in Computer Science – apply soon

~ Boaz Barak ~ Leave a comment

Last summer I gave a mini-course on the Sum of Squares algorithm in the Swedish Summer School of Computer Science. It was a great experience - the venue was  Djurönäset  - a hotel in the beautiful Stockholm archipelgo with stunning views and great food. It was organized very smoothly by Jakob Nordström, Per Austrin, and Johan Håstad, … Continue reading 2015 Swedish Summer School in Computer Science – apply soon

NSF mandates (sort of) open access

~ Boaz Barak ~ 2 Comments

See here. NSF-sponsored papers should be freely available no more than 12 months after publication in a journal. This is not perfect, but a step in the right direction. Computer scientists should insist that conference proceedings are treated the same way, and made freely available no more than 12 months after publication. Hat tip: Lance Fortnow.