Guest post by Samir Khuller on attending The TCS Women 2019 meeting

(I will post the solution to the problem in the last blog later in the week---probably Thursday. Meanwhile, enjoy these thoughts from Samir Khuller on the TCS Women 2019 meeting.) Guest Post by Samir Khuller: Am I even allowed here?” was the first thought that crossed my mind when I entered the room. It was packed with women (over 95%), however a few minutes later, several men had trickled in. I was at the TCS Women spotlight workshop on the day before STOC. Kudos to Barna Saha, Sofya Raskhodnikova, and Virginia Vassilevska Williams for putting this grand (and long needed) event together, which serves as a role model and showcases some of the recent work by rising stars. In addition to the Sun afternoon workshop, the event was followed by both an all women panel and a poster session (which I sadly did not attend). The rising stars talks were given by Naama Ben-David (CMU), Andrea Lincoln (MIT), Debarati Das (Charles University) and Oxana Poburinnaya (Boston U). After a short break the inspirational talk was by Ronitt Rubinfeld from MIT.  Ronitt’s talk was on the topic of Program Checking, but she made it inspirational by putting us in her shoes as a young graduate student, three decades back, trying to make a dent in research by working on something that her advisor Manuel Blum, and his senior graduate student Sampath Kannan had been working on, and I must say she made a pretty big dent in the process! She also related those ideas to other pieces of work done since in a really elegant manner and how these pieces of work lead to work on property testing. I am delighted to say that NSF supported the workshop along with companies such as Amazon, Akamai, Google and Microsoft. SIGACT plans to be a major sponsor next year. The Full program for the workshop is at the following URLhere.