Travels

David Lodge manages to capture the madness of summer travels in academia, in his trilogy. Changing Places, for example, is a novel about a professor from an English university (hint: U. Warwick) exchanging places (and politics and finances!) with a professor from an American university (hint: U Cal), and is an amusing read; Nice Work and Small World, continue the storyline and are blander.

I have been tightfisted in commiting to travels this summer, in most cases, squeezing in no more than the number of days I need to be away:

• SADA in Finland (may 25--31). Summer school. 1 lecture on AMS/CM Sketch and applications, 1 lecture on Inverse sampling and applications, and 1 lecture on new topics in data streams such as probabilistic streams and mapreduce computing.
  
• SIROCCO in Italy (jun 5--8). Keynote talk on Data Stream Research. Goal is to give an updated talk, sorta Data Streams 2.0
  
• FCRC (jun 12--14). Talk on optimal suffix selection at STOC and learn from the kaleidoscope of talks in EC, STOC, Complexity, SIGMETRICS, COLT.
• MAPSP (july 1--5). Invited talk on Issues in scheduling sponsored searches. I have been putting together a talk on set of mechanism design/optimization results related to sponsored search, this will be first attempt at getting it out.
  
• von Neumann Symposium (july 8--9). Plenary talk on Algorithmic issues in sparse representations. Will focus on compressed sensing and low rank matrix approximation. Kickass group of speakers in the conf, I am so looking forward!
• CPM (jul 10--11). Invited talk. I will focus on new results and problems in string matching which is forever going through a limited renaissance in its cult.