From the SIGACT executive committee:
The deadlines to submit nominations for the Gödel Prize and the SIGACT Distinguished Service Award are coming soon. Calls for nominations for both awards can be found at the links below.
The Breakthrough Prize committee is now accepting nominations for the Breakthrough Prize as well as New Horizons Prizes in Mathematics. The New Horizons Prizes are awarded to early-career researchers (Ph.D. within the last 10 years) who have already produced important work. In addition, for the first time, nominations will be taken for the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize – an annual $50,000 award that will be presented to early-career women mathematicians who have completed their PhDs within the previous two years.
Further information is available at https://breakthroughprize.org/Rules/3. Nominations for 2021 are due on April 1, 2020.
Please consider nominating deserving candidates. The task of nominating someone for a high-profile award can be daunting, but the CATCS is available to help. Please contact us if you need help with preparing a nomination.
Earlier this academic year, CATCS started a project to collect the profiles of TCS candidates on the job market this academic year. Those profiles can now be found at this webpage (Updated link; here is the deprecated link.). The webpage offers a limited amount of search functionality, and we are continuing to improve the layout and add features.
If you are at an institution that is hiring in theory, please feel free to use this database and share it with your colleagues as appropriate.
If you are going on the job market and would like to fill out a profile, please use this form. We will periodically update the webpage adding newer profiles.
Many thanks to Nicole Immorlica, Jack Snoeyink, and Chris Umans for putting together the website, and to all those who contributed their profiles. Questions and comments may be emailed to Shuchi Chawla.
CATCS is piloting an effort this year to collect and disseminate profiles of junior theory researchers who are going on the job market during the 2019-20 academic year, complementing the job postings collected under the Jobs tab. The SIGecom community has run a similar effort very successfully for a number of years and we are following their lead. The goals are two-fold:
Candidates looking for theory jobs can fill out this form. The form asks for basic personal information, thesis title, graduation date (past or future), research/teaching interests, bibliographic information for three publications, and allows you to add links to publications and a brief CV.
The responses will be reviewed and, if approved, edited and posted on Theory Matters starting in Nov’19. There is no deadline, but for responses received after Nov 1 please allow two weeks for review before your profile appears on the website. Responses received by Dec 15 will have summaries published in the following issue of SIGACT News.
FOCS 2019 will be held in Baltimore, MA from Nov 9-12, 2019. The early registration deadline is October 9th.
For students interested in attending, Shang-Hua Teng has asked me to relay the message that there is some travel funding available, courtesy of the NSF. For details, see this website. Ignore the deadline on that page, but apply ASAP for full consideration. Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply. Having or presenting papers at FOCS’19 is *not* a prerequisite.
This event was a great success! Thank you to all of the participants for contributing your time. Please keep up the momentum and continue to edit the pages you made a start on. Please continue to record your progress on the list of topics. Special thanks to Aviad Rubinstein and Yuval Filmus for offering expert advice at the event.
We plan to organize this event again at future STOCs, and hope many more people can participate. Even an hour of your time can have a huge impact on the community!
CATCS is organizing a Wikipedia edit-a-thon at STOC in Phoenix this year. The goal is to create/edit Wikipedia articles on TCS topics that need improvement. (A crowdsourced list of such topics is maintained here.) The event will be held on June 24th, 2019 in West 104A, starting right after the STOC business meeting around 9-9:30 pm.
We invite members of the community to participate. Prior experience with Wikipedia is a plus, but is not necessary. If you are interested in participating, please fill out this form. Participants are asked to bring their own laptop or other device. Power outlets will be available. Light refreshments will be provided.
If you are interested in helping improve TCS coverage on Wikipedia but are unable to attend this event, please see this post for how you can help.
CATCS is starting up a new mailing list to send out annual newsletters. Messages will be sent out 1-2 times every year describing recent projects undertaken by the committee, funding opportunities, links to useful resources, etc. Anyone interested in hearing about our activities is welcome to sign up at this link. You do not have to be a member of SIGACT to sign up.
A reminder about a fairly new major prize that is highly relevant to the TCS community (won last year by Prasad Raghavendra and David Steurer):
The National Academy of Sciences has initiated the Michael and Sheila Held Prize. The prize of $100,000 will be presented annually. The Prize honors outstanding, innovative, creative and influential research in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimization, or related parts of computer science, such as the design and analysis of algorithms and complexity theory. The prize is intended to recognize recent work(defined as published within the last eight years). The prize was established in 2017 by the bequest of Michael and Sheila Held.
Nominations are due on October 1, 2018, and information about the submission process can be found at http://www.nasonline.org/held.
PS: You can find information about many other awards related to TCS at the CATCS awards list.
Here are the slides from Shuchi Chawla’s CATCS presentation at the STOC ’18 business meeting. Shuchi will be the new CATCS chair, starting September 1.
Theory Matters 