International Conference on Algorithmic Aspects in Information and Management (AAIM) is intended to provide a forum for researchers working in design and analysis of algorithms, game theory, and combinatorial optimization to present their newest results.
In AAIM 2009 conference which is being held in San Francisco, on of my co-authors will be presenting our paper in the game theory session. The title of the paper is “Power indices of spanning connectivity games” and is joint work with O. Lachish, M. Paterson and R. Savani.

In the paper, we study the problem of computing the influence of edges in a network. Game theorists have studied notions of efficiency, fairness and stability extensively. Therefore, it is only natural that when applications in computer science and multiagent systems require fair and stable allocations, social choice theory and cooperative game theory provide appropriate foundations. For example, a network administrator with limited resources to maintain the links in the network may decide to commit resources to links according to their connecting ability. A surveillance network comprises communication channels. In order to intercept messages on the channels, resources may be utilized according to the ability of a channel to connect all groups. In a social network, we may be interested in checking which connections are more important in maintaining connectivity and hence contribute more to social welfare. The paper is in the line of recent work where economic paradigms are used in computer science applications where there are multiple agents with with their own strategic motives.

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as a merger of three highly respected individual conferences: the International Conference in Autonomous Agents, the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, and the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems. The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally respected archival forum for research in all aspects of the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

Although the conference is AI oriented, there is a good portion of papers from a theoretical computer science, algorithms and game theory perspective. It will also be a good opportunity to listen to some really interesting presentations and tutorials. There are also accompanying workshops.

The conference also has a doctoral training program especially for final year PhDs. However, I did not register for that. This is because the training program required too much extra paper work for participation. Moreover, if I want to get advice I can just go and ask the person concerned. Academics are generally very approachable people.

Budapest itself is an amazing city and I look forward to taking some time out to look around.

The first day was dedicated to tutorials. Vincent Conitzer from Duke University gave a very good overview of algorithmic game theory. Sasa Pekec, another academic from Duke was impressive in his tutorial on auction theory and prediction markets. The meeting was a good blend of academics and practitioners. Among practitioners, there was a researcher from IBM who spoke about business analytics. Tuomas Sandholm is a good example of someone who combines theory and practice. He provided insight into his company’s (CombineNet) work on bidding-auctions, which are useful to both suppliers and buyers.

From the mention of Cost action programs, it is apparent that many big collaborative projects in European countries are being funded by ESF. The details of the projects also give a good idea of funding trends in various scientific areas.

All in all, the workshop was a great opportunity to learn some new things and also to meet interesting people. The next meeting in algorithmic decision theory is in Venice. This is definitely one event I’ll consider for next year.

In academic circles, there is a nice tradition of arranging a conference on the birthdays of senior professors. It is a coming together of researchers in the area. On his 66^th birthday, a workshop on theoretical computer science was arranged to honour Prof. Mike Paterson, who is my supervisor. This turned out to be an exceptional event where two Turing award (equivalent to a Nobel Prize for computer science) winners gave talks. The official description of the event was as follows:

Mike has been a leading figure in the research of theoretical computer science for nearly 40 years, and this workshop will celebrate Mike’s contribution through a number of invited talks that will cover several of Mike’s research areas as well as some exciting new results.

The workshop lasted for two days and it was a succession of talks by collaborators, colleagues and students of Mike. The talks consisted of two parts: anecdotes about Mike and then technical discussion about work done jointly with Mike or inspired by Mike. The host of the workshop was DIMAP, which is a leading interdisciplinary centre, with participation from the computer science department, mathematics institute and the business school.

In academic life, taking part in these events is essential to developing and maintaining a research community. This point was highlighted by Maurice Nivat, one of the founders of theoretical computer science. Such events are also an excellent forum for an exchange of ideas. Mike was, of course, at his most gracious and witty during the conference. It was also interesting to meet some well-known theoretical computer scientists.

Career Opportunities for PhDs and MScs in
Singapore‘s Financial Services Industry
Friday 17th October, 4.00- 7.30pm
Roberts 106 lecture theatre
Roberts building
Malet Place
University College London WC1H 0AJ

The organizers have emphasized that Singapore is ranked third only behind London and New York among financial capitals. Singapore is also not a bad place to live in.

The official flyer for the event is here.

There are presentations by Contact Singapore, Standard Chartered Bank, Monetary Authority of Singapore, DBS Bank, OCBC Bank, General Insurance Association of Singapore and Asia Capital Reinsurance. The program is as follows:

4.00 – 4.30 Working and living in Singapore – Contact Singapore
4.30 – 4.45 Standard Chartered Bank
4.45 – 5.00 Monetary Authority of Singapore
5.00 – 5.15 DBS Bank
5.30 – 5.45 Break
5.45 – 6.00 OCBC Bank
6.00 – 6.15 General Insurance Association of Singapore
6.15 – 6.30 Asia Capital Reinsurance
6.30 – 7.30 Reception

If you are interested in other Contact Singapore’s events, please
visit: www.contactsingapore.sg/careers@singapore_uk. The website is run by Singapore Economic Development Board and the Ministry of Manpower and has considerable information about working and staying in Singapore and also advice about immigration.

The BCS is launching its first international academic conference, intended as a major international event to take place in the UK. This year’s theme is ‘Visions of Computer Science’. We aim to establish the pattern of a high-quality wide-spectrum UK-based conference, with a strong international profile. Moreover, the aim is to energise the UK community and bring it together around positive and inspiring visions of our discipline.

Some one seems to have done a great job in managing to attract seven Turning Award winners to speak at the conference. The registration fees are exorbitant so I’m reluctant to go there. Besides some of the speakers will be visiting Warwick before that so I’ll get to meet them.

However, for British computer scientists this appears to be a noteworthy event.

According to the press release:

Talks will include Maths in Finance, Maths behind Portfolio Optimisation, Life as a Post-grad and an Overview of the Further Mathematics Network ‘Mathematics at Work’ Competition.

The fee is just £10 for students. So if you are anywhere in or around London, it might not be a bad idea to drop by. I am particularly fascinated by the talks on ‘Optimisation techniques with financial applications’ and ‘The Maths of Google’. The event appears to be suitable for both academics and professionals.

The first meeting was on market based control and was funded by BAE, BT, HP and EPSRC. Among other things, market based control involves designing automated agents, which is especially relevant to the financial sector. The general theme of the project as quoted from the website is:

The problems of understanding, modelling, and above all, managing the complexity of large distributed systems are among the most pressing in contemporary computer science. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the use of economic methods for the design, management and control of complex computational systems.

The second meeting was on computational social choice which is closer to my research focus. It was great to meet people I ran into in Dagstuhl last year. Computational social choice includes the study of voting systems, coalition formation, social networks, ranking systems and auctions. The area is summarised on the website:

Computational social choice is a new discipline emerging at the interface of social choice theory and computer science. It is concerned with the application of computational techniques to the study of social choice mechanisms, and with the integration of social choice paradigms into computing.

I also got to explore Liverpool a bit. The city was named the European Capital of Culture for 2008. It was evident that the locals were proud of this honour and I noticed various events being organised under this theme.

It appears the rapidly growing areas of computational social choice and market based control have a lot of unexplored territory and many rich open problems. It is fascinating to see how some of the foundational work is directly relevant to companies such as EBay, Google and Yahoo.

Well firstly, funding concerns should not be a deterrent for students to attend conferences and workshops. First year students are especially hesitant to travel because they hardly have material to present. However, the first year is the best time to sample different events, get exposure to new ideas, meet potential collaborators and broaden the knowledge-base.

Moreover, there are many avenues for funding than one should be aware of. The following are some things to keep in mind:

1. Scholarships: many PhD scholarships include a travel allowance.
2. Many events have special funds for young researchers so if you inform the event organizer that your trip is dependent on financial support, you might not have to pay the full amount.
3. Certain events sponsored by the same organization as the student’s sponsor will let the student in on discounted rates.
4. Most departments have a travel allowance for the whole year or the whole PhD.
5. There might be funds specific to your research group which may be used for certain conferences.
6. If the department funds don’t work out, it is worth checking the faculty funds.
7. The university may have some specific funds for country specific travel schemes. There is no harm in asking the graduate office.
8. Ask your supervisor. There is a reason that your supervisor with his years of experience is your supervisor! He may direct you to a channel which you did not think of. He might have money from his own research project. In any case, it is good to keep him or her in the loop for any future plans.
9. Publish or present! The best justification to get travel funds is to publish or present in a good conference. That is extra motivation for your work! Traveling is easier to justify if one is presenting rather than just attending.

Remain informed and keep your receipts. Just like any financial office, the university may ask you to fill up various forms and attach receipts. Therefore it is useful to know the process.

The 19^th Postgraduate Combinatorial Conference (PCC) was held at the University of Warwick. The event which is held annually under the auspices of the British Combinatorial Committee (BCC) was hosted this year by DIMAP (Centre for Discrete Mathematics and its Applications). PCC has been held previously at St Andrews, Glamorgan, Oxford, Queen Mary and Nottingham in the last few years. DIMAP’s area of interest is in discrete modelling, algorithmic analysis, and combinatorial (discrete) optimization. Therefore it was fitting that PCC was hosted by DIMAP this year.

The conference started with a short welcome note by Prof. Mike Paterson. The general format of the conference was longer talks by invited speakers along with shorter contributed talks by participating postgraduates.

The first invited speaker of the event was Prof. Olivier Hudry from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Paris, who gave a survey on properties of tournament solutions. Prof. Imre Leader, from University of Cambridge was the invited speaker for the second day. His talk was on matchings and paths in the cube. Prof. Ian Stewart from University of Warwick gave an entertaining final talk on generic bifurcation in network dynamics and how problems in the area have curious combinatorial links.

Apart from the three invited speakers, there was a careers guidance session provided by Dr Jenny O’ Leary who has a physics background. The idea of a guidance session was useful considering the conference was geared towards postgraduates. There were thirty registered participants along with many other Warwick researchers in the audience. The contributed talks ranged from extremal graph theory, combinatorics on strings, partial orders, and linear extensions to combinatorial games.

The conference banquet was arranged in the Rootes social building on campus. The organizers of the event were Haris Aziz (local organizer), Manuela Heuer, Emil Vaughan, and Simon Griffiths. The conference was sponsored mainly by LMS with important contributions from Open University, BCC and DIMAP.

1. Ensure that the poster guidelines for the event are clearly known. Most events have specific guidelines about poster size. Standard sizes for posters are A0 (84.1 x 118.9cm) and A1 (59.4 x 84.1cm).
2. The purpose of posters is to encourage interest in your research, so it should look interesting and eye catching! However, the poster should be able to explain itself by having sufficient content.
3. The content should be modified according to the audience.
4. There should not be too much text or look too ‘busy’. Simple backgrounds are better. Line spacing is preferable, too.
5. The material should be structured into sections just like in a paper. This includes a title, introduction, research methodology, results and conclusion.
6. The poster should be comfortable to view from about 5 feet.
7. Simple posters with only a few colours are better. I stick to black, white, red and blue.
8. The poster should include the contact details of the authors to enable further communication.
9. Posters may be made in latex or PowerPoint.
10. Lamination of posters gives a nice, professional image.
11. If the printing is done by a shop or university department, then it is advisable to keep a margin of a day or two before the display event to avoid last minute tensions. This is what my colleague didn’t realise until too late, much to his dismay.
12. It is good practice to acknowledge the collaborators and sponsors on your poster.
13. It may be helpful to have some smaller handouts to give at the poster session.
14. One may want to utilize a successful template instead of building things from scratch.
15. The poster stall looks empty with out the presenter! It is expected that the poster presenter will be next to the poster and ready to discuss and explain it.