Friday chest-thumping.

• My paper with Amirali Abdullah (or should I say Amir's paper with me) got into STOC ! One aspect not discussed in the linked blog post is the connection to Partial Match (a notoriously hard problem in the data structures literature).  In brief, our result allows for a "smooth-ish" interpolation between approximate near neighbor lower bounds in $\ell_1$ and general partial match lower bounds, reinforcing the intuition that Partial Match is an "extremely asymmetric" nearest neighbor problem. 
• Another paper with 'the Streaming Kings' (said to the sound of a flamenco strum) of Cormode, Chakrabarti, McGregor and Thaler got into CCC (and this is my first paper at Complexity). I'll have more to say about this work in a separate post: in brief, we looked at streaming interactive proofs (of the kind first developed by Cormode, Thaler and Yi) where you have a prover and a streaming verifier and wish to verify a computation with constant rounds of communication. There's a 3-round nearest neighbor protocol in this paper, as well as a number of subtle results about the nature of multi-round communication protocols in the streaming setting. 

"Well Suresh, you have two new papers, what are you going to do next" ?

• I'm going to DisneyWorld ! DC !! I'll be attending the CCC sponsored Leadership in Science Policy Institute April 26-27 in DC. And there's homework to boot !

SODA 2014 travel awards and other news

Via Cliff Stein and Kirsten Wilden:

The SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA14) will be held January 5-7, 2014 at the Hilton Portland & Executive Tower in Portland, Oregon, USA. Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX14) and Analytic Algorithmics and Combinatorics (ANALCO14) will be co-located with the conference on January 5 and 6, respectively.
 The deadline for students to apply for travel support is approaching!   The NSF, Google, IBM Research, and Microsoft Corporation have provided generous travel support for students interested in attending SODA14 or its associated meetings, ALENEX14 and ANALCO14. Application materials and a letter of recommendation from your advisor are due by November 15. Please visit http://www.siam.org/meetings/da14/tsupport.php for detailed funding information and application procedures.

Pre-registration for all three meetings is also available at http://www.siam.org/meetings/da14/reginfo.php.

Additional conference information is available at the following websites:
SODA14:  http://www.siam.org/meetings/da14/ANALCO14: http://www.siam.org/meetings/analco14/ALENEX14: http://www.siam.org/meetings/alenex14/

SODA 2012 student travel support

While it's not a free round trip to Japan for blogging, ....

Well actually it is !

David Johnson asks me to point out that the deadline for applying for student travel support to SODA 2012 has been extended to Nov 29.

The United States National Science Foundation, IBM, and Microsoft have provided funding to support student travel grants. The nominal award is $1000 toward travel expenses to Kyoto, Japan for SODA12, or ALENEX12 or ANALCO12. In special cases of large travel costs somewhat larger grants may be given.

Any full-time student in good standing who is affiliated with a United States institution is eligible to receive an award. All awardees are responsible for paying for meeting registration fees. However, registration fees may be included in travel expenses

Top priority will be given to students presenting papers at the meeting, with second priority to students who are co-authors of papers. Ties will be broken in favor of students who have not attended a prior SODA.

For more information, visit the SIAM travel support page. 

And if you'd also like to blog about the conference once you're there, the cstheory blog is always looking for volunteers !