Thursday, September 27, 2007

Allerton Conference, Part III

I very much enjoyed the Allerton Conference again this year.

The highlight for me was the sessions on Networking Games and Algorithms. Bruce Hajek has been organizing excellent networking sessions for years, and I think this year the focus on network games really paid off and led to some very compelling sessions. I arrived to hear Ramesh Johari, Vijay Vazirani, Tim Roughgarden, and David Kempe all give great talks back-to-back. I'm expecting they'll have a similar set of sessions next year, hopefully expanded!

A small disappointment was that there seemed to be fewer talks on coding theory this year. Plenty on network coding, but very little on standard coding theory. (This may have to do with Ralf Koetter recently leaving UIUC; in any case, many people I usually see there, like Muriel Medard, Ralf Koetter, Michelle Effros, Alexander Vardy, and so on didn't seem to be there.) A top coding theorist who was there independently confirmed this impression; hopefully, things will be back to normal next year. This year, I'm glad the network games sessions kept me so busy.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Also, allerton many times has conflicting parallel sessions where you want to attend more than one talk... (It happened to me with your talk and massimo franceschetti's talk and I happened to miss your talk - something I wish I didnt have to)

Michael Mitzenmacher said...
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Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Off topic comment:
"This post has been removed by the blog administrator."

These things just makes ppl be more curious about the comment. Is there a way to completely remove them?

Anonymous said...

can you elaborate on why these sessions were so compelling?

Michael Mitzenmacher said...

Unfortunately, I came home to a stack of things to do, and didn't have time to write all about the talks individually. And at Allerton you turn the paper it at the conference, and the proceedings comes later, so I don't have the papers to refer to. Tim talked about his work Designing Networks with Good Equilibria, the full version of which will appear in SODA 08; it was particularly interesting since I'd heard a bit about the work from Greg Valiant earlier and liked seeing the final outcome. Vijay talked about New Market Models and Algorithms; the talk is on his web page. David Kempe talked about generalizing the notion of selfishness in a way that made nice sense and led to mathematically interesting results (I don't see the talk/paper on his home page yet.) Good stuff.

Anonymous said...

what did johari talk about?