Lausanne, Algorithmic Meeting, and a New Paper

While visiting Aleksander Mądry at EPFL, I participated in the Algorithmic Meeting. This was the first time this event was organized and judging from the participants’ response,  not the last. The idea is to bring the european TCS community together and encourage more collaboration, joint research projects etc. The talks were supposed to be about plans for future research and open problems, rather than the typical conference style paper talks. I enjoyed the event and I think it served its purpose. One thing that was disappoing was the lack of chocolate filling in croissants served during coffee breaks. We collected a rather sizeable sample with Marcin Bieńkowski, and the results really leave no doubt. Hopefully, whoever organizes the next edition will take care of this small but important detail.

On a completely unrelated note (well, I guess it is a bit related since my Algorithmic Meeting talk was about it), my new paper on No-wait Flow Shop Scheduling, written together with Maxim Sviridenko, has just appeared on arxiv. I think the results are really nice, and the paper has something for everyone: metric embeddings (sort of), gadgets and plenty of epsilons. I will not give any more spoilers here, you can read more about it on our group’s blog.