CSE Prof. Shachar Lovett and CSE visiting assistant professor Alexander (Sasha) Kulikov, a senior research fellow in the Laboratory of Mathematical Logic of St. Petersburg (a department of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics), have launched a new website for the computer-science theory community. Called CS Theory Events, the site invites members of the broader community to advertise and learn about relevant workshops, conferences and other events with a focus on algorithms and complexity.
professor Sasha Kulikov develped the CS Theory Events
website.
According to a post on CSE's Facebook account by Kulikov, the site includes the top theory conferences, but that's not the primary focus. "The goal is to mainly focus on events that do not repeat annually," noted Kulikov in a Facebook post, "and that people may not be aware of."
"When I organized the Sum of Squares school this year, as well as workshops in the past, it was always challenging to get the word out," explained Lovett, who implemented scripts for automatically posting events from a Google form to the site and calednar. "I ask colleagues to advertise these events on their institutes' theory mailing lists, but it is a very ad hoc process, and more than once I know that people have missed out on events just because the net was incomplete, or discovered these events by chance."
Lovett also learned by chance about a "Recent Advances in Algorithms" school that Kulikov is organizing in St. Petersburg later this year through a poster on the department wall. "So I thought, we need a better solution," added Lovett. "This was the motivation for the website."
The site allows members to subscribe to new events (to get a notification when a new event is published), to see the list of upcoming events, and to link to a Google calendar with relevant dates, not just when a meeting will take place, but also deadlines for registering (e.g., March 15 is the deadline to register for Theory and Applications of Models of Computation, a conference set for April 20-22 in Bern, Switzerland). The calendar also flags readers about cutoff dates to submit papers or abstracts in response to a call for papers from conference organizers.
Kulikov, who is currently in San Diego teaching a course during the winter quarter, has established close collaborations with other CSE faculty in addition to Lovett. He previously worked as a researcher in the Algorithmic Biology Lab in St. Petersburg co-founded by CSE Prof. Pavel Pevzner, and he helped create a series of courses on Data Structures and Algorithms for the online Coursera learning platform. Kulikov's co-creators of those courses included Pevzner and CSE Prof. Daniel M. Kane, as well as former CSE lecturer Neil Rhodes and Higher School of Economics lecturer Michael Levin.
Visit the CS Theory Events site.
Post a new event on the website.