Six workshops at DISC

03 Nov 2023

This year DISC was held in L’Aquila, in Italy, and there were six workshops. It’s above average, and I have heard that they were all packed (I attended two of them). I guess this is a clear indication of the vitality of the community and the involvement of Yannic Maus as workshop chair.

In this post, I’ll quickly list and describe these workshops.

WAND: Workshop on Analysis of Network Dynamics.

This workshop is a new one, organized by three postdocs: Emilio Cruciani (University of Salzburg), Francesco D’Amore (Aalto University) and Isabella Ziccardi (Bocconi University).

It’s nice to see this type of topic having a workshop: network dynamic shows up in many different places in distributed computing (social networks, robots, biological systems etc.), but it seems that the communities are not as connected as they could be.

FRIDA: The 10th Workshop on Formal Reasoning in Distributed Algorithms

FRIDA is the place where people interested in bridging the gap between formal methods (verification, certified algorithms) and distributed algorithms meet. I had the feeling that it was not held every year, but this is because it is not always co-located with DISC: along the years, it has also been held with FORTE, FLoC, QONFEST. (It seems that the current regime is to have it with DISC every other year.)

This year, the main organizers were Marijana Lazić (TU Munich) and Stephan Merz (INRIA Nancy).

ADGA: Workshop on Advances in Distributed Graph Algorithms

I’m partial on this workshop: it focuses on topics I like, and I was chairing it this year. So instead of telling you how great the talks were (you can check the webpage for the abstracts), I’ll tell you about how the workshop works, which is interesting I believe.

ADGA is a workshop held every year with DISC since 2012, with Amos Korman (CNRS) and Jukka Suomela (Aalto University) as the steering committee. Every year they appoint a chair, who decides on the list of speakers, and takes care of the technicalities. The shape of the workshop is basically always the same: 6 talks of approximatively one hour each. I think this format is very nice: on the one hand, people are used to it and are looking for it every year, but on the other hand, since the chair changes the program always has a slightly different flavor, and the workload is not always on the same shoulders. When I was a student, ADGA was my highlight of DISC, since the talks are more detailed, thus more accessible, and with more background.

AMG: Algorithms for Massive Graphs

This is the second edition of this workshop on a topic that is growing in the PODC/DISC scene: models that are in between parallel, centralized and distributed models, such as the MPC model. These have very strong links with more classic LOCAL/CONGEST models, but with new perspectives and exciting twists.

This year it was chaired by Jara Uitto (Aalto University) (who also founded the workshop). I really enjoyed the talks.

HACDA: Highlights of Asynchronous Concurrent and Distributed Algorithms

HACDA is a new workshop, and as you might guess from the name, it has some relation with ADGA. The idea is to use the successful format of ADGA, but for a different topic: asynchrony and concurrency. I usually don’t work on this kind of topic, but the lineup of the workshop looked amazing, and was probably a good entry point to the area. Naama Ben-David (Technion) organized the workshop, but could not come to the conference, hence Rati Gelashvili (Novi) chaired it.

PODL: Workshop on Principles of Distributed Learning

This is the second edition of the workshop, that had its first edition at PODC 2022. Actually it was both a tutorial and a workshop: in the morning, the basics were presented, while the most recent works were discussed in the afternoon. So, there was something for everyone!

I couldn’t attend it, but given the prevalence of AI these days, it’s exciting to see it co-located with DISC. It was organized by Nirupam Gupta, Rafael Pinot and Rachid Guerraoui (all three from EPFL).