SODA, NIPS, Larry, Ed, Bob, Dick.

• SODA results are out; you can find the list of accepted papers on at least five other blogs. Two of my submissions were accepted: Finding one tight cycle (with Sergio Cabello, Matt DeVoss, and Bojan Mohar), and Empty-ellipse graphs (with Olivier Devillers and Xavier Goaoc). My other two submissions will not, alas, have the privilege of being in the same conference as UIUC PhD student Ke Chen's brilliant paper on approximate clustering with outliers, or UIUC PhD student Nitish Korula's brilliant paper on approximate orienteering, or the first observation-in-the-wild of the iterated inverse Ackerman function (thanks Mihai), or Mike Mitzenmacher's forays into practical hashing or hiring in Lake Wobegon, or the latest witness complex result from the Stanford topology crowd (as opposed to the Duke topology crowd, the INRIA topology crowd, or (dare I suggest) the Illinois topology crowd), or Uri Zwick's latest two-word title.

• A NIPS workshop on Topology Learning, to be held December 7 and 8 in Whistler, British Columbia, was recently announced on the computational geometry mailing list. The deadline for submitting 2-page abstracts is October 12.

• Psst! Wanna buy a formula? (cough cough)

• By Friday afternoon, the population had risen to a somewhat alarming number.

• Bob Dylan gives a good 10-second slide talk.

• And this year's Emmy for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics goes to a song by the Erik Demaine of sketch comedy and some other guy in a fake beard. Meanwhile, this year's Google Research Award was won by the Andy Samberg of theoretical computer science and some other guy in a fake beard. Neither the song nor the research proposal is likely to be performed at the Emmy's, but who knows, maybe we can convince one pair or the other to make an appearance at SODA.

  What? Look, if Scott can talk about vaginae dentatae...

Comments

[MiP]

Actually, I imagine Google gives quite a few "Research Awards", but thanks for the publicity ;)

[Michael Mitzenmacher]

Hey Jeff. I hope this last week means you're back to regular blogging. (I know the whole child thing can be time-consuming, but c'mon, we need you here...)

Mike

[Teresa]

Jeff,

Ditto what Mike said. (Blogging can involve baby pictures!)

[The flying chmichanga]

You forgot the paper:

Greedy Drawings of Triangulations
Raghavan Dhandapani

which is probably the best geometry paper in SODA this year. Also,

Fast dimension reduction using rademacher series on dual BCH codes
"Nir Ailon"

is interesting. And of course

Coresets, Sparse Greedy Approximation, and the Frank-Wolfe Algorithm
Kenneth L. Clarkson

is shocking - is there anything new in this world, ever?

Now, to add to the shock, a rare paper showing exact algorithm for k-clustering:

On Clustering to Minimize the Sum of Radii
Matt Gibson and Gaurav Kanade and Erik Krohn and Imran Pirwani and Kasturi Varadarajan

But you think you know everything, dont you? Well, did you know that you can do this?

Cutting Cycles of Rods in Space: Hardness Results and Approximation Algorithms
Boris Aronov and Mark de Berg and Chris Gray and Elena Mumford

You did??? OH well, sorry for wasting your time.