Algorithmics, Social choice, Market Design, and Other Topics

Kenneth Arrow has written a comment piece on the recent credit crunch. He points out the " growing difficulty of understanding the underlying risks imposed by growing complexity ".

Peter Key has a post on Ryan O Donnell winning the Okawa Award. Ryan O Donnel is doing exciting research in fourier analysis, boolean functions and computational learning. Lee writes: Ryan has made several seminal contributions, particularly in the area of hardness of approximation. He showed in a recent series of papers that the current best 0.878… approximation factor known for the classic Max-Cut problem is in fact the best factor achievable by any polynomial-time algorithm, under a well-known conjecture in complexity theory. Ryan’s publications are many and have been making a big impact, and this year he was invited to give a special tutorial at the STOC conference — quite an honor and the only theory tutorial on the program this year.

DIMAP Warwick Algorithms Day will take place at DIMAP, University of Warwick, on October 24, 2008. The goal is to bring together the UK community of researchers and graduate students interested in the study of Algorithms, Data Structures, and Complexity. The event will provide exciting invited lectures presenting recent advances in the field and also will provide lots of opportunity for discussions. (Quoted from here ) The program is available here .