Wednesday, April 01, 2009

STOC schedule

The Local Arrangements Team have the preliminary schedule up at the STOC Web site. I hope it helps everyone make their travel plans.

Since it's (more-or-less) apparent from the schedule, I suppose I'll announce here that the Best Paper Prize will be shared by:

A Constructive Proof of the Lovasz Local Lemma
Robin A. Moser

Public-Key Cryptosystems from the Worst-Case Shortest Vector Problem
Chris Peikert

The former also was awarded the Best Student Paper. These talks will be given without a parallel talk. (Who wants to give a talk against an award paper?)

Please don't tell the authors, as I haven't let them know yet. Perhaps, if we all keep quiet about it, they'll be surprised at the conference.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

parallel sessions:

codes versus complexity?

flows versus optimization?

power of 2 choices versus bloom filters?


happy april fools day!

Michael Mitzenmacher said...

Yes, I would have liked to mix up the codes/complexity and flows/optimization into some other combination -- but there were some presenters who asked to give their talk a specific day, and the alternative was to break up the semi-coherent groups. Rest assured I know it may not appear (or even be) optimal, but also be aware there are additional constraints you're unaware of.

I did try to set up individual talks so they wouldn't be on the same theme for these sessions. I'm hoping it won't disturb too many people -- I know I'm much more interested in one side of each of these pairings than the other myself...

junior theorist said...

Congratulations to the award winners!

It is noteworthy that this is the third STOC in a row where the best student paper shares the best paper award. One interpretation is that the "barrier" to entry (and to outstanding research) in our field remains not insurmountable.

Anonymous said...

Another interpretation is that we are becoming more like math in that all the six best paper/best student paper winners at STOC in the past three years have been single author papers.

Anonymous said...

I have kept the news secret from the award winners.