The wait is over.<\/p>\n
Yes, that’s correct: the Call for Papers<\/a> for the 2017 Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science (ITCS) conference, to be held in Berkeley this coming January 9-11, is finally\u00a0up. \u00a0I attended ITCS’2015 in Rehovot, Israel and had a blast, and will attend ITCS’2017 if logistics permit.<\/p>\n But that’s not all: in a Shtetl-Optimized<\/em> exclusive, the legendary Christos Papadimitriou<\/a>, coauthor of the acclaimed\u00a0Logicomix<\/a> and ITCS’2017 program chair, has written us a guest post about what makes ITCS special and why you should come. \u00a0Enjoy! \u00a0–SA<\/p>\n ITCS:\u00a0 A hidden treasure of TCS<\/strong><\/p>\n by Christos Papadimitriou<\/p>\n Conferences, for me, are a bit like demonstrations: they were fun in the 1970s.\u00a0 There was the Hershey STOC, of course, and that great FOCS in Providence, plus a memorable database theory gathering in Calabria.\u00a0 Ah, children, you should have been there\u2026<\/p>\n So, even though I was a loyal supporter of the ITCS idea from the beginning \u2013 the \u201cI\u201d, you recall, stands for innovation<\/em> \u2013, I managed to miss essentially all of them \u2013 except for those that left me no excuse.\u00a0 For example, this year the program committee was unreasonably kind to my submissions, and so this January I was in Boston to attend.<\/p>\n I want to tell you about ITCS 2016<\/a>, because it was a gas.<\/p>\n First, I saw all the talks.\u00a0 I cannot recall this ever happening to me before.\u00a0 I reconnected with fields of old, learned a ton, and got a few cool new ideas.<\/p>\n In fact, I believe that there was no talk with fewer than 60 people in the audience \u2013 and that\u2019s about 70% of the attendees.\u00a0 In most talks it was closer to 90%.\u00a0 When was the last conference where you saw that?<\/p>\n And what is the secret of this enhanced audience attention?\u00a0 One explanation is that smaller conference means small auditorium.\u00a0 Listening to the talk no longer feels like watching a concert in a stadium, or an event on TV, it\u2019s more like a story related by a friend.\u00a0 Another gimmick that works well is that, at ITCS, session chairs start the session with a 10-minute \u201crant,\u201d providing context and their own view of the papers in the session.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 for a moment there, the seventies were back.<\/p>\n Ah, those papers, their cleverness and diversity and freshness!\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n (A parenthesis:\u00a0 The last two papers make the following important point clear: Innovation<\/em> in ITCS is not<\/em> meant to be the antithesis of mathematical sophistication.\u00a0 Deep math and methodological innovation are key ingredients of the ITCS culture.)<\/p>\n
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