The Geomblog

Bernard highlights the 2nd incarnation of ICS, to be held again in Beijing between Jan 7-9, 2011.

What's newsworthy is the shifted submission deadline. Last year, the ICS submit-accept cycle was highly compressed, to make sure it didn't clash with either SODA or STOC. This year, it's in direct conflict with SODA (submission deadline Aug 2), which should make things interesting for the SODA submission levels.

Since the conference is still in some flux (I don't know where it will be next year), it's probably too soon to comment on the timing/deadlines, but I wonder whether it will continue to be a good idea to have SODA and ICS be in direct conflict.

As the polylogblogdogslogglog blog points out, the ICS results are out. 39 papers were accepted in all - at some point I knew the number of submissions, but I've forgotten since.

The ICS folks didn't make life easy for themselves by explicitly stating that they wanted "conceptual contributions". But looking over the list of papers, a few things come to mind:

• It's a great list of papers. Nothing to complain about really, and any of these could have been a credible paper at FOCS/STOC
• The Arora et al paper on designing derivatives using NP-hard problems has already received so much chatter, one might argue that the conference mandate has already been satisfied. Similarly for the quantum money followup.
  
• Even if the whole 'conceptual contributions' thing doesn't pan out, I see no harm in having a third conference inserted between FOCS and STOC - the more the merrier.
  
• I guess innovation = "game theory + crypto + quantum + misc" :)

A side note. 8 of the 12 PC members have papers at the conference. This is a departure from the theory "norm". While I don't necessarily think it's a problem (everyone except theoryCS does this, and this is also a new conference), it's worth discussing. Is this something we'd like to have happen in other theory conferences as well ? Recall that the first year of the SODA 2-page experiment also had PC-submitted papers (and that was mainly to ensure submission volume, from what I recall).

Update: Shiva Kintali has PDFs for the accepted papers.