Wednesday, January 09, 2019

ANALCO, SOSA, SODA post

I spent the last few days at SODA-ANALCO-ALENEX-SOSA in San Diego.  (Nice location choice, I'd say!)  Here's some news.

This will be the last ANALCO (Analytic Algorithms and Combinatorics).  Apparently submissions have been decreasing, so they've decided it will halt and the work on these topics will go into SODA and other conferences.  I'm not sure how to think of it -- I think we as a community have far too many conferences/workshops generally, but I think the SODA model of having ANALCO and ALENEX (and now SOSA, I imagine) folded in cleanly into the main conference is an excellent model.  I also like the ANALCO topics.  But I can understand the time may have come to do something else.  Thanks to everyone who worked to organize ANALCO and keep it going these many years.

It looks like SOSA (Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms) will be taking its place in the SODA lineup.  I co-chaired the symposium with Jeremy Fineman this year, the second for the symposium.  I was surprised by the high quality of the submissions, and was then further surprised by the strong turnout at SODA.  The room was quite full for the Tuesday afternoon sessions, and there were easily 75+ people at several of the talks.  I do think there's a need for SOSA -- no other workshop/conference hits the theme of simplicity in our area, and it's a really nice fit with the rest of SODA.  I'm hoping it will last, and in particular that they'll continue to have a good number of high quality submissions, but that depends on all of you.  Ideally, there will be a positive feedback loop here -- now that there's a good home for this type of work (besides notes on the arxiv), people will be more inclined to write up and submit things to SOSA.  For Tuesday's talks, I'll call out Josh Alman's great presentation on "An Illuminating Algorithm for the Light Bulb Problem" as my favorite for the day.

With ANALCO exiting, though, I think there's more room for additional satellite events at SODA, so hopefully some people will get creative.

If I had thought about it I should have live-blogged the business meeting.  I'd say as highlights, first, Sandy Irani presented the report of the ad hoc committee to combat harassment and discrimination in the theory of computing community.   (See here for the report.)  There was an overwhelming vote to adopt their recommendations going forward.  It's good to see progress in addressing these community concerns.  Second, Shuchi Chawla will be the next PC chair, and she brought forward a plan to have SODA PC members be allowed to submit papers (with a higher bar) that was voted on favorably as well.

I suppose the last note is that Jon Kleinberg's invited talk was the conference highlight you expect a Jon Kleinberg talk to be, with interesting results and models related to fairness and implicit bias.

Thanks to SIAM and all the organizers for their hard work.