Date: 10 Sep 2004
From: jyrki@diku.dk
Subject: Re: FIRST news

Gitte:

Here you get a corrected version of my text that you can publish on your 
webpage.

\Jyrki

=======

In connection with the Scandinavian algorithm week held in July 2004
in Humlebæk/Rungsted, two events were sponsored by FIRST: SWAT 2004
(the 9th Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory) and the Summer
School on Experimental Algorithmics. In total, SWAT 2004 attracted 91
participants (including 2 invited speakers) and the summer school 20
(including 3 invited speakers). I want to use this opportunity to
thank FIRST for the support we received.

Based on the written and oral feedback, SWAT 2004 was an unmitigated
success. In its entirety the scientific program was solid and of high
quality. The invited talks by Charles E. Leiserson (on multithreaded
algorithms using Cilk) and Gerth Stølting Brodal (on cache-oblivious
algorithms) generated interest and discussion.  In addition to the
invited talks, 40 papers were presented.  All the invited and refereed
contributions can be found from the proceedings published in the
Springer-Verlag series Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS 3111).

Also, the social program went well. The location (the Louisiana Museum
of Modern Art) and the hotel (Rungstedgaard) were praised. When we
decided to hold the traditional city-hall reception in Helsingør, we
did not know the entertainer qualities of the mayor (Per Tærsbøl). As
one of the participants put it "the meeting with the mayor was very
very fun!". People will remember us from the relax atmosphere. In
particular, the conference dinner was enjoyable. The concept of
self-entertainment worked extraordinarily well, and it was a great
pleasure to see all the creativity when people were solving our
artistic exercises.

The summer school was on my own research area so it is natural that I
found the talks stimulating and interesting. Alexander Stepanov's
message was that at the universities the senior faculty members doing
experimental work should program more, and let the students write the
papers, not vice versa as the tradition is today. He also called for a
forum where one could publish programs, like in the Communications of
the ACM in the sixties. Peter Sanders pointed out, among the other
things, that branch misspredictions are significant for the
performance of programs run on contemporary computers. For example,
these determine the efficiency of most integer sorting programs. Hervé
Brönnimann proposed a design for a geometric algorithm library which,
after some incubation period, may be useful for other teachers as
well.  In addition to the aforementioned invited speakers, most of the
other participants gave a talk too. All the invited talks were
recorded on videotape, and the slides shown by the speakers are
available via our website http://www.diku.dk/~jyrki/Sommerskole/.

As to the social program of the summer school, we started with a
dinner where after we watched the European soccer-championship final
on a big screen. My Greek colleagues, who sat beside me, were very
happy when their team won. For the barbecue the weather could have
worked out a bit better; we had to eat inside.

When organizing the algorithm week we produced software that may be
useful for other conference organizers as well. These include:
1) a submission server that can be used to receive submissions and to
support the program-committee work;
2) a web-based conference shop that can accept credit-card payments;
and
3) a script that generates, automatically from the author
contributions, the output required by Springer-Verlag for producing
LNCS proceedings.

I thank once more all of the many persons who took part in the
organization of the algorithm week and provided this service for the
whole algorithm-research community.

Jyrki Katajainen
jyrki@diku.dk