Southern California Theory Day 2015

After a long hiatus, Southern California Theory Day returned in 2014 to bring together researchers in Southern California working in theoretical computer science. This year's event will be held at the University of Southern California, on Saturday, November 14.


Logistics and Location

Date and Time: Saturday, November 14, 2015, 10:00-6:00
Location: EEB 132 on USC campus (Address: 3740 McClintock Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90089)

Parking

You have two natural options for parking:


Program

Time Event
10:00-10:30 Continental Breakfast
10:30-11:20 Invited Talk
Alexander Sherstov (UCLA):
The Power of Asymmetry in Constant-Depth Circuits
11:20-11:35 Marek Suchenek (Cal State Dominguez Hills):
On a Flaw in the Structure of Worst-case Heaps
11:35-11:50 Dakshita Khurana (UCLA):
How to Generate and Use Universal Samplers
11:50-12:05 Christopher Tosh (UCSD):
Mixing rates for the Gibbs sampler over Restricted Boltzmann Machines
11:05-12:20 William Devanny (UCI):
The Galois Complexity of Graph Drawing
12:20-1:45 Lunch (provided)
1:45-2:35 Invited Talk
Shaddin Dughmi (USC):
Algorithmic Information Structure Design in Games
2:35-2:50 Michael Bannister (Pomona College):
Crossing Minimization in Book Embeddings
2:50-3:05 Ehsan Emamjomeh-Zadeh (USC):
Deterministic and Probabilistic Binary Search in Graphs
3:05-3:20 Jiapeng Zhang (UCSD):
Barriers to Black-Box Constructions of Traitor Tracing Systems
3:20-3:35 Jenny Lam (UC Irvine):
The Subset Assignment Problem for Data Placement in Caches
3:35-3:50 Ananda Theertha Suresh (UCSD):
Competitive Distribution Estimation: Why is Good-Turing Good
3:50-4:20 Coffee break
4:20-5:10 Invited Talk
Huijia (Rachel) Lin (UC Santa Barbara):
Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Constant-Degree Graded Encoding Schemes
5:10-6:00 Invited Talk
David Eppsein (UC Irvine):
Treetopes and their Graphs
6:00 Theory Day ends

Registration

Registration (through Eventbrite) is free and strongly encouraged. (You registering lets us know how much food we need to provide. Plus you get a nice printed nametag instead of an ugly handwritten one.) Please register if you are reasonably certain you will attend.


Past Southern California Theory Days


Organizers

Shaddin Dughmi and David Kempe.