Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Allerton 2011

I woke up at an absurdly early hour this morning to get on a plane and go to the Allerton conference.  I'm giving a talk this afternoon on Invertible Bloom Lookup Tables (arxiv link) (joint work with Michael Goodrich).  It's a "lookup table", not a Bloom filter, because you want to be able to store key-value pairs;  you query for a key, and get back a value.  It's invertible, because besides being able to do lookups, you can "invert" the data structure and get back all the key-value pairs it contains (with high probability, assuming you haven't overloaded the structure).  This paper is really on the theory, but if you want to see a cool use for IBLTs, there's a paper by Eppstein, Goodrich, Uyeda, and Varghese from this year's SIGCOMM (Efficient Set Reconciliation) with a compelling application.

Allerton is a different sort of conference, as I've discussed before (like here and here, among others).  A mix of invited and submitted papers, a wide diversity of topics, lots of parallel sessions.  It seems absurdly crowded this year -- I had to park in the ancillary parking because the lot was full, and the rooms where the talks are held all seem to be bursting.  (The conference, unfortunately, really has outgrown the space where the conference is held.)  I'm guessing well over 300 registered;  I'll have to check.  The conference gives me a chance to catch up with colleagues who are more on the EE/networking side;  I've seen other CS theorists here in years past, but I haven't noticed anyone yet. 

If you're here, maybe come by my talk this afternoon, or say hi if you see me hanging around.

1 comment:

Mahdi said...

Regarding CS theory people, I'm here, and so is Michael Langberg. Avi is also giving a talk on Friday morning. It's indeed quite crowded this year; maybe we get a chance to have a chat tomorrow.