ICALP/LICS 2015: Day 2

The second day of ICALP/LICS 2015 was kicked off by Daniel Kifer (Pennsylvania State University, USA) who delivered a talk entitled  Privacy and the Price of Data. Actually, Daniel renamed his talk on the fly into "assigning numbers to data queries" (or "assigning number to things"). The talk surveyed work motivated from the observation that data is increasingly being bought and sold on the web and that this leads to query-based pricing that is customized for buyers. A key question addressed by the research of authors such as Koutris et al. at the University of Washington and by Daniel and his co-workers is what are the properties that a good pricing function for queries should have. In his talk, Daniel gave us an overview of such properties and how they relate to issues such as privacy. I  encourage any interested reader to browse his recent papers and the work by Koutris et al. at the University of Washington for the interesting details.

In the second invited talk of the day, Valerie King (University of Victoria, Canada) told us about Dynamic Graphs: Time, Space, and Communication.  Valerie's talk was organized around seven ideas in connectivity. She started from the classic union-find data structure and led us all the way to the seventh idea, namely the XOR method and sub-linear space from her SODA 2013 paper. (Valerie told us that she got the idea for that paper in Kyoto.) Work by Tarjan, Even, Fredrickson, Thorup and several other researchers featured prominently in her entertaining and accessible talk.

I do not have time to report on the EATCS general assembly now, but I will write a report on that meeting for the EATCS Bulletin at some point soon. For the moment, I will limit myself to saying that ICALP 2017 will be held in Warsaw, Poland. The proposed dates are July 10-14, 2017. The local chairs will be Mikolaj Bojanczyk and Piotr Sankowski.

At the ICALP 2017 business meeting, the bid by my wife and me to organize LICS 2017 in Reykjavik 2017 was approved. So LICS 2017 will he at Reykjavik University in the period 19-23 June 2017. Start sharpening your pencils now.