About the young researchers forum (3)
28 Jul 2025Third post about the PODC/DISC young researchers forum. Here, I will give some details about the schedule and its rationale.
General schedule
We organized the day around three activities: talks by junior researchers, keynotes by senior researchers and junior-senior meetings. In terms of availability (CET time), we had approximately 5 who were available only in the morning, 12 only in the afternoon, and 20 available for both. This was not always correlated to the affiliation time zones, some people had other commitments, while others had more flexible work hours.
To accommodate as many people as possible, we decided to have a bit of everything both in the morning and in the afternoon. The final schedule looked like this:
- 9-10: Keynote by Christian Scheideler.
- 10-11:30: Junior talks.
- 11:30-12: Two junior-senior meetings in parallel.
- 12-13: break.
- 13-13:30: Two junior-senior meetings in parallel
- 13:30-14:30: Junior talks.
- 14:30-14:45: Break
- 14:45-15:45: Junior talks
- 15:45-16:15: Keynote by Peter Davies-Peck
- 16:15-16:30: Closing remarks.
- 16:30-17:00: Two junior-senior meetings in parallel.
About junior talks
Given the number of submissions, and to keep the event short enough to be pleasant, we allocated 15 minutes per talk, including questions and transitions. We had a 6-talk session in the morning, and two 4-talk sessions in the afternoon.
It worked very well. All speakers stayed on time, which was great. The short talk format proved to be a good decision: we could understand what everyone was doing, without being exhausted at the end of day. Scheduling was driven more by participants’ time zones than by talk topics, but it was fine.
About the keynote talks
Initially, we were not sure about having keynotes, since we wanted a junior-oriented event. But then it seemed like a good idea to share experience and to attract people. They were both very appreciated.
We had asked Christian to give a talk with accessible open problems, and he proposed to share three topics he’s currently interested in, and it was a good choice: we could discover emerging topics with many new questions and directions.
For Peter, we had simply asked him to talk about his exciting new STOC paper. Unexpectedly, he chose to focus more on the story behind the paper than its technical content—which was great. It gave juniors a direct glimpse into the research process, which is invisible when one only looks at lists of published papers. In particular, Peter told us how some seemingly unrelated topics gave him some ideas on the problem, how reviewing some papers was essential, how he first got a less prestigious publication that in the end did not even use the idea, how he left the topic on the side during postdocs, and how he got back to it successfully.
About junior-senior meetings
This is a format that Billy has been experimenting at PODC/DISC for some time: matching a voluntary senior with a bunch of junior for informal discussions, usually over lunch. It’s a good way to make these discussions happen, and they are very appreciated.
We wanted to mimick this online. In the end we had six seniors, each meeting with group of approx 4 juniors. We made the matching oursleves for simplicity, trying to have balanced groups where people would not know each other already.