CSE Prof. Shachar Lovett is eliciting recommendations for a topical subject on which to organize a workshop or winter school to be held in January 2018. Since 2014 Lovett has organized an annual meeting for the Theory community in CSE and beyond. The first workshop focused on complexity and coding theory. Then in 2015 participants worked on algorithmic challenges in machine learning, and the following year the topic was "Big Graphs: Theory and Practice". The first winter school took place January 3-6, 2017, focusing on the Sum of Squares algorithm.
Now Lovett is asking for suggestions for the next "trends in theory" workshop or winter school. "The topic should be recent and exciting to both the theory and (some) non-theory communities," noted Lovett. "However, the subject should be mature enough so that we can actually run a workshop or winter school on it with enough content. It can also be a topic that emerged outside theory, but which has theoretical aspects or appeal." Lovett is also taking suggestions for speaking slots during the workshop.
Lovett was also responsible for reviving the joint Southern California Theory Day in 2014, hosted by CSE at UC San Diego. It brought together researchers in Southern California working in theoretical computer science. Since then SoCal Theory Day has been hosted by the University of Southern California (2015), and Caltech (2016), with the 2017 meeting at UCLA (date not yet finalized). But the winter theory workshops held each January at UC San Diego bring in many speakers and participants from beyond Southern California, as did the first winter school in 2017 that was taught by Harvard's Boaz Barak and Cornell's David Steurer.
To suggest a workshop topic in Theory for the meeting next January, email Prof. Lovett at slovett@eng.ucsd.edu.