/dev/collective

So ICALP 2008 is on. I’m fortunate enough that it is held at my school (Reykjavik University) and that I was offered the chance to sit in on the talks in return for helping a little with the organization and administration.

The activities started on Friday with the DYNAMO 2008 PhD school. I didn’t attend many of the lectures, but the ones I did were very interesting. To name one, Elias Koutsoupias gave informative talks on Game Theory and its use for example in online auctions.

Yesterday, Sunday, there were several workshops. I mostly attended SOS’08, a workshop on Structural Operational Semantics. Dale Miller, a hard-core logician, gave an excellent invited talk on formalizing SOS specifications in logic and although I didn’t understand half of it I somehow found it very interesting. His slides are available at his website.

Today was the first day of the conference proper and started off with an invited talk by Google’s S. Muthukrishnan, where he explained how Google runs auctions to decide what ads are displayed along with search results. Attendance to the talk was excellent, and while I had my hands full with other duties, I can safely say it was interesting on many levels.

After lunch I mostly attended track B, on logic, semantics and theory of programming. I’m afraid I can’t say much of merit about the talks as I had to do my best to understand them properly myself. I can say that this first day of ICALP went very smoothly in my opinion. As a bonus, the weather turned out to be very nice so in the afternoon and during the welcome reception, people could stand outside and enjoy the fresh air.

For photos from ICALP, check out our Picasa web album (updated at the end of each day). For more authoritative information on some of the talks, check out MohammadReza’s guest posts on Luca’s blog