ITCS’2018 and more
Shtetl-Optimized 2018-03-12
My good friend Yael Tauman Kalai asked me to share the following announcement (which is the only part of this post that she’s responsible for):
Dear Colleagues,
We are writing to draw your attention to the upcoming ITCS (Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science ) conference, which will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA from January 11-14, 2018, with a welcome reception on January 11, 2018 at the Marriott Hotel in Kendall Square. Note that the conference will run for 4 full days (Thursday–Sunday).
The deadline for early registration and hotel block are both December 21, 2017.
ITCS has a long tradition of holding a “graduating bits” event where graduating students and postdocs give a short presentation about their work. If you fit the bill, consider signing up — this is a great chance to showcase your work and it’s just plain fun. Graduating bits will take place on Friday, January 12 at 6:30pm.
In addition, we will have an evening poster session at the Marriott hotel on Thursday, January 11 from 6:30-8pm (co-located with the conference reception).
For details on all this and information on how to sign up, please check out the ITCS website: https://projects.csail.mit.edu/itcs/
In unrelated news, apologies that my entire website was down for a day! After noticing that my blog was often taking me like two minutes to load (!), I upgraded to a supposedly faster Bluehost plan. Let me know if you notice any difference in performance.
In more unrelated news, congratulations to the people of Alabama for not only rejecting the medieval molester (barely), but—as it happens—electing a far better Senator than the President that the US as a whole was able to produce.
One last update: my cousin Alix Genter—who was previously in the national news (and my blog) for a bridal store’s refusal to sell her a dress for a same-sex wedding—recently started a freelance academic editing business. Alix writes to me:
I work with scholars (including non-native English speakers) who have difficulty writing on diverse projects, from graduate work to professional publications. Although I have more expertise in historical writing and topics within gender/sexuality studies, I am interested in scholarship throughout the humanities and qualitative social sciences.
If you’re interested, you can visit Alix’s website here. She’s my cousin, so I’m not totally unbiased, but I recommend her highly.
OK, one last last update: my friend Dmitri Maslov, at the National Science Foundation, has asked me to share the following.
NSF has recently posted a new Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) inviting proposal submissions under RAISE mechanism, https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2018/nsf18035/nsf18035.jsp. Interdisciplinarity is a key in this new DCL. The proposals can be for up to $1,000,000 total. To apply, groups of PIs should contact cognizant Program Directors from at least three of the following NSF divisions/offices: DMR, PHY, CHE, DMS, ECCS, CCF, and OAC, and submit a whitepaper by February 16, 2018. It is a somewhat unusual call for proposals in this respect. I would like the Computer Science community to actively participate in this call, because I believe there may be a lot of value in collaborations breaking the boundaries of the individual disciplines.