Mid-November (non-technical) notes
12 Nov 2019Some notes about a new conference, a new research organization etc.
A picture from November 2019 in Chile.
Conference model survey
An online survey has been created here to gather the opinions of the distributed computing community about its model of conferences. Topics include:
- changing from one deadline to three deadlines a year. Basically it’s like having the reviewing process made three times (with a smaller number of papers), and then having a conference with the papers accepted to any of the three phases.
- collocating the two main conferences of the domain.
- changing the format (more keynotes, or shorter talks etc.)
- transitioning to a journal model.
Details can be found in the survey.
Paper presentation videos
One of the side topics of the survey is the possibility for the authors to upload a video presenting their papers. It’s something I have thought of doing for my papers, but finally didn’t try.
Till Miltzow is a researcher in graph theory and he records a talk for every paper he has, see here. I think it’s good!
The PolyTCS project
You may know the Polymath Project, which is a project from the math community. It consists in choosing an open problem, and then working on this problem in a massively collaborative way: everything is public, and everyone can help. This project has been quite successful, with great collaborations, and great papers.
A similar project has been launched in TCS: The PolyTCS project. The first problem is about boolean functions, see here.
FORC conference
A new conference in TCS: Symposium on the Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC). Topics include privacy, fairness and electoral processes.
Symbolic computations in python
I recently had to do a lot of small computations on toy examples. To check the computations, I wanted to have some symbolic math software, but the usual ones (e.g. Maple) are big machines, and often not open-source. If you are in the same situation, python with sympy is a good choice.
Pull requests for this blog
This blog is a github page, that is, it works as a git repository. I recently got some pull requests for it, from my friend Lilian Besson. Pull requests is a way to suggest changes, e.g. correct a typo. It is very convenient (on my side): I just have to pull these commits. If you want to know more and correct one of the many typos of this blog, you can take a look at this page.