Sunsetting ICORE

When friends remember me, I am happy to go to distant lands. I managed to travel to Israel to give a talk at the ICORE day.  I-CORE is Israeli Center for Research Excellence program, and the day marked the end of the funding period. Israel has great talent, so any money the govt puts in finds great use; in  this case, it seems to have filled a severe need, providing much-needed support for postdocs.

I talked about Heavy Hitters (HHs), a bit of the classical Count-Min stuff but also much less sculpted stuff like high dimensional HHs, H-influence and other topics. I find HHs interesting because it is not top k, it is a distinct concept, and a concept that represents what is (often the only thing) possible within resource constraints. Robi asked a great question, if this can be formalized.

There were many good talks. I managed to catch a bit of the talks by Rotem Oshman, Michael Shapira, Shahar Dobzinski, and others. I also managed to catch Yuval Ishai and Eylon Yagev talk secure multiparty computing and complexity theory resp in Hebrew. Finally, Bernard Haeupler gave an excellent  talk on using shortcuts to break natural bottlenecks with message passing algorithms. This talk introduced the audience to principled theory methods (was happy to see Leighton-Maggs-Rao O(Congestion+Dilation) result reenter the psyche) to attack worst case performance of message passing algorithms.

ps: Thanks to Moni for mentioning Mossel's paradox with dice/6 over dinner, he said there was an elegant solution, and my neurons stayed awake figuring it out.