The 2017 Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) conference, will be held in Berkeley on January 9-11, 2017. the Call for Papers is online. Submission deadline is September 15th. At the request of the program chair, Christos Papadimitriou, I am mirroring his take on the conference (which previously also appeared here).
ITCS: A hidden treasure of TCS
by Christos Papadimitriou
Conferences, for me, are a bit like demonstrations: they were fun in the 1970s. There was the Hershey STOC, of course, and that great FOCS in Providence, plus a memorable database theory gathering in Calabria. Ah, children, you should have been there…
So, even though I was a loyal supporter of the ITCS idea from the beginning – the “I”, you recall, stands for innovation –, I managed to miss essentially all of them – except for those that left me no excuse. For example, this year the program committee was unreasonably kind to my submissions, and so this January I was in Boston to attend.
I want to tell you about ITCS 2016, because it was a gas.
First, I saw all the talks. I cannot recall this ever happening to me before. I reconnected with fields of old, learned a ton, and got a few cool new ideas.
In fact, I believe that there was no talk with fewer than 60 people in the audience – and that’s about 70% of the attendees. In most talks it was closer to 90%. When was the last conference where you saw that?
And what is the secret of this enhanced audience attention? One explanation is that smaller conference means small auditorium. Listening to the talk no longer feels like watching a concert in a stadium, or an event on TV, it’s more like a story related by a friend. Another gimmick that works well is that, at ITCS, session chairs start the session with a 10-minute “rant,” providing context and their own view of the papers in the session.
Our field got a fresh breath of cohesion at ITCS 2016: cryptographers listened to game theorists in the presence of folks who do data structures for a living, or circuit complexity – for a moment there, the seventies were back.
Ah, those papers, their cleverness and diversity and freshness! Here is a sample of a few with a brief comment for each (take a look at the conference website for the papers and the presentations).
- What is keeping quantum computers from conquering all of NP? It is the problem with destructive measurements, right? Think again, say Aaronson, Bouland and Fitzsimons. In their paper (pdf, slides) they consider several deviations from current restrictions, including non-destructive measurements, and the space ‘just above’ BQP turns out to be a fascinating and complex place.
- Roei Tell (pdf, slides) asks another unexpected question: when is an object far from being far from having a property? On the way to an answer he discovers a rich and productive duality theory of property testing, as well as a very precise and sophisticated framework in which to explore it.
- If you want to represent the permanent of a matrix as the determinant of another matrix of linear forms in the entries, how large must this second matrix be? – an old question by Les Valiant. The innovation by Landsberg and Ressayre (pdf, slides) is that they make fantastic progress in this important problem through geometric complexity: If certain natural symmetries are to be satisfied, the answer is exponential!
(A parenthesis: The last two papers make the following important point clear: Innovation in ITCS isnot meant to be the antithesis of mathematical sophistication. Deep math and methodological innovation are key ingredients of the ITCS culture.)
- When shall we find an explicit function requiring more than 3n gates? In their brave exploration of new territory for circuit complexity, Golovnev and Kulikov (pdf, slides) find one possible answer: “as soon as we have explicit dispersers for quadratic varieties.”
- The student paper award went to Aviad Rubinstein for his work (pdf) on auctioning multiple items – the hardest nut in algorithmic mechanism design. He gives a PTAS for optimizing over a large – and widely used – class of “partitioning” heuristics.
Even though there were no lively discussions at the lobby during the sessions – too many folks attending, see? – the interaction was intense and enjoyable during the extra long breaks and the social events.
Plus we had the Graduating Bits night, when the youngest among us get 5 minutes to tell. I would have traveled to Cambridge just for that!
All said, ITCS 2016 was a gem of a meeting. If you skipped it, you really missed a good one.
But there is no reason to miss ITCS 2017, let me tell you a few things about it:
- It will be in Berkeley, January 9 -11 2017, the week before the Barcelona SODA.
- It will take place at the Simons Institute just a few days before the boot camps on Pseudorandomness and Learning.
- I volunteered to be program chair, and the steering committee has decided to try a few innovations in the submission process:
- Submission deadline is mid-September, so you have a few more weeks to collect your most innovative thoughts. Notification before the STOC deadline.
- Authors will post a copy of their paper, and will submit to the committee a statement about it, say 1000 words max. Think of it as your chance to write a favorable referee report for your own paper! Telling the committee why you think it is interesting and innovative. If you feel this is self-evident, just tell us that.
- The committee members will be the judges of the overall worth and innovative nature of the paper. Sub-reviewers are optional, and their opinion is not communicated to the rest of the committee.
- The committee may invite speakers to present specific recent interesting work. Submitted papers especially liked by the committee may be elevated to “invited.”
- Plus Graduating Bits, chair rants, social program, not to mention the Simons Institute auditorium and Berkeley in January.
You should come!
Turing's Invisible Hand 