FOCS 2012 workshops

STOC 2012 started a new experiment of a workshop and tutorial day in the beginning of the conference. The program looks fascinating and I hope many people attend.

FOCS 2012 will have also have such an event on Saturday, October 20. We (Boaz Barak and Avrim Blum) are looking for proposals for workshops to run on that day. So, if you want to organize a workshop that day, please do visit the link above and send us a proposal by June 20, 2012.

Hope everyone enjoys the STOC workshops and please do start thinking of ideas for great FOCS workshops!

DARPA Call for Proposals on “big data” (XDATA)

DARPA-BAA-12-38: XDATA is a call for proposals by DARPA on “big data”. Abstracts (not required, 4 pages) due April 20.  Proposals due May 30.

From the announcement:

The XDATA program seeks to develop computational techniques and software tools for analyzing large volumes of data, both semi-structured (e.g., tabular, relational, categorical, meta-data) and unstructured (e.g., text documents, message traffic). Central challenges to be addressed include a) developing scalable algorithms for processing imperfect data in distributed data stores, and b) creating effective human-computer interaction tools for facilitating rapidly customizable visual reasoning for diverse missions.

…

Proposals are encouraged from diverse areas of expertise including computer scientists, electrical engineers, statisticians, computational biologists, applied mathematicians, econometricians, economists, and others, groups with experience processing large amounts of data and/or visualizing information.

As always, when you think DARPA, think demo, though this BAA seems fairly algorithms-friendly.  Since it is probably too late to put together an abstract if you are just hearing about this for the first time, standard advice is to contact the program manager if you are interested in submitting.  Also if anyone would like to guest-blog about experiences/advice regarding DARPA from a TCS perspective, please feel free to contact any of us on the CATCS.

 

Upcoming deadlines

Two upcoming deadlines:

• Simons Graduate Fellowships in Theoretical Computer Science.   Deadline May 1.  These are 2-year awards and the intent is to offer 5 awards per year.  “The intent of the program is to support graduate students who have already produced outstanding results.  Awards will be based on the quality of the applicant’s research contributions, as outlined in the Research Statement, and the strength of the letters of support. To be eligible the applicant must be a Ph.D. student at a U.S. institution of higher education. A track record of outstanding results in theoretical computer science is the key criterion.”  Limit of one application per university.  See: https://simonsfoundation.org/mps-simons-graduate-fellowships-rfa

• STOC (in NYC) early registration deadline April 19.  See: http://cs.nyu.edu/~stoc2012/default.htm.  Note that on Saturday May 19, in addition to a tutorial in the morning by Michael Kearns (on algorithmic trading and computational finance), STOC is having a  workshop program  in the afternoon with 4 workshops in parallel.  The workshops are:
  • Computational Sustainability
    Steven Phillips, Kirk Pruhs, David Shmoys
  • Algorithms for Distributed and Streaming Data
    Ashish Goel, Andrew McGregor, Sergei Vassilvitskii
  • Algorithms for Memory-Sensitive Computing
    Michael Bender, Martin Farach-Colton
  • Unique Games Conjecture and Related Advances
    Sanjeev Arora, Moses Charikar

  Tutorials and workshops will be at NYU.