This week I am recollecting what services I enjoyed at past conferences, and perhaps more importantly, what services I would like them to have but they didn’t. By “services”, I mean things that are mostly for the convenience of the attendees. Traditional things like “local maps” and “unlimited supply of bottled water” (*) are in this category, but specialties like “a blog set up for the conference” are also OK. (AAAI did it.)
Note that I am *not* in charge of the Local Arrangements of FOCS 2005, so I can’t guarantee anything. But I can guarantee that your inputs will be heard. In fact, I imagine such a list can be useful to organizers of any conference, so consider my posting of this right before FOCS merely a coincidence. 
To make this post extensible, I guess I am going to use the threaded-comments feature and post my day-dreaming one at a time. Please feel free to chip-in yours. It can only make better conferences.
Note also that there is an RSS feed for the comments on this site, so you don’t have to come back to check the comments.
(*) I don’t necessarily think the latter is a good thing due to environmental concerns, but it does have its appeal over cups… Plus, the hotel may not like the idea unless you order from them at their price…
baselinestretch in the main body of a paper, I believe there are other reasonable things to tweak. In particular, I often find the space used by itemized lists to be a bit more than desirable. But how can we cut the space down without inserting \vspace*{-1ex} before every \item?
Well, I just figured it out last week: you want to use the paralist package. What it does is to provide several new list environments that consume no space between list items by default. You can add some space back in, but this time you can control the amount. Here is an example:
\usepackage{paralist}
\setlength{\pltopsep}{0.5ex} % space before first item
\setlength{\plitemsep}{0.25ex} % space between items
\newenvironment{itemizeC}{\begin{compactitem}}{\end{compactitem}}
The last line in the example is really just for convenience if you happen to want to switch between normal lists and compact lists easily.
Also note that paralist is quite a feature-rich package. Among other things, it can let you customize the item bullets and margins, as well as providing an enumerated list environment inparaenum that wraps its items in a paragraph like: (i) blah; (ii) blah blah. Be sure to check out its documentation!
(*) You know I really meant conference proceedings, don’t you?
I have installed Instiki on Abu. Instiki is a wiki server intended for simple wikis. The server itself is written entirely in Ruby and is extremely extensible. In its lingo, a server hosts a list of “webs”, each corresponding to the wiki of a project. To see the current list of webs hosted by Abu, use this URL:
http://abu.aladdin.cs.cmu.edu/
So far we have two sandboxes for playing and two actual webs. There is a web unofficially used by the FOCS 2005 local arrangements (I guess we really just use it as a notepad online). There is also a web called Papers Illustrated, which is Dan Golovin’s brain child if you recall the Town Meeting we had in the beginning of the semester. PI is password protected for the moment, but most CMUers know the password anyway. I imagine that when PI gets more content, we will publish the web so that Google can crawl it.
I have also patched Instiki a bit to add ASCIIMathML to it. Now you have another way to play with ASCIIMathML by going into the Sandbox.
Finally, since we have the server software set up already, if you want to have your own simple wiki hosted on Abu, let me know. Instiki is not as industrial-strength as MediaWiki, but it is probably adequate for most small projects.
Cheers!
Speaker: Vineet Goyal
Time: Wednesday 12-1pm
Place: NSH 1507
Title : How to Pay, Come What May: Approximation Algorithms for Demand-Robust Covering Problems
Abstract:
Robust optimization has traditionally focused on uncertainty in data and costs in optimization problems to formulate models whose solutions will be optimal in the worst-case among the various uncertain scenarios in the model. While these approaches may be thought of defining data- or cost-robust problems, we formulate a new “demand-robust” model motivated by recent work on two-stage stochastic optimization problems. We propose this in the framework of general covering problems and prove a general structural lemma about special types of first-stage solutions for such problems: there exists a first-stage solution that is a minimal feasible solution for the union of the demands for some subset of the scenarios and its objective function value is no more than twice the optimal. We then provide approximation algorithms for a variety of standard discrete covering problems in this setting, including minimum cut, minimum multi-cut, shortest paths, Steiner trees, vertex cover and uncapacitated facility location. While many of our results draw from rounding approaches recently developed for stochastic programming problems, we also show new applications of old metric rounding techniques for cut problems in this demand-robust setting.
This is joint work with Kedar Dhamdhere, R. Ravi and Mohit Singh.
