As SIGACT chair I announced at the STOC’16 business meeting
that starting in 2017, STOC will turn into a 5-day event, a Theory Fest. This
idea was discussed at some length in a special
session at FOCS 2014 and the business
meeting at STOC 2015. Now the event is being planned by a
small group (Sanjeev Arora, SIGACT ex-chair Paul Beame, Avrim Blum, and Ryan Williams;
who also get guidance from me and STOC’17 PC chair Valerie King). We’re setting up committees to oversee various
aspects of the event.
Below is a brief
announcement from the organizing group about their plans! Please feel free to
write your suggestions here, though the outline below has been arrived at after
a fair bit of deliberation and consultation.
Update: Here is the web page for STOC 2017: (http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2017/)
Update: Here is the web page for STOC 2017: (http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2017/)
Michael.
------
We’re excited to
bring you the Theory Fest in Montreal, June 19-23 2017!
The following are the major features (caveat: subject to
tweaking in coming years):
(i) STOC talks go into 3 parallel sessions instead of two.
Slight increase in number of accepts to 100-110.
(ii) STOC papers also required to be presented in evening poster
sessions (beer/snacks served).
(iii) About 9 hours of plenary sessions, which will include: (a) Three
keynote 50-minute talks (usually prominent researchers from theory and nearby
fields) (b) Plenary 20-minute talks selected from the STOC program by the
STOC PC ---best papers, and a few others. (c) Plenary 20-minute talks on
notable papers from the broader theory world in the past year (including but
not limited to FOCS, ICALP, SODA, CRYPTO, QIP, COMPLEXITY, SoCG, COLT, PODC,
SPAA, KDD, SIGMOD/PODS, SIGMETRICS, WWW, ICML/NIPS), selected by a committee
from a pool of nominations. (Many nominees may be invited instead to the poster
session.)
(iv) 2-hour tutorials (three in parallel).
(v) Some community-building activities, including grad student
activities, networking, career advice, funding, recruiting, etc.
(vi) A day of workshops; 3 running in parallel. (Total of 18
workshop-hours.)
Our hope is that workshop day(s) will over time develop into
a separate eco-system of regular meetings and co-located conferences (short or
long). In many other CS fields the workshop days generate as much energy as the
main conference, and showcase innovative, edgy work.
Poster sessions have been largely missing at STOC, but they
have advantages: (a) Attendees can quickly get a good idea of all the work
presented at the conference (b) Grads and young researchers get more
opportunities to present their work and to interact/network, fueled by beer and
snacks. (c)Attendees get an easy way to make up for having missed a talk during
the day, or to ask followup questions. (d) Posters on work from other theory
conferences broadens the intellectual scope of STOC,
We invite other theory conferences to consider co-locating
with the Theory Fest. To allow such coordination, in future the location/dates
for the Theory Fest will be announced at least 18 months in advance, preferably
2 years. Even for 2017 it is not too late yet.
Finally, we see the Theory Fest as a work in progress.
Feedback from attendees will be actively sought and used to refashion the
event.
