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:

Parking Structure A (PSA) on campus. Enter through Gate 1 (Exposition Blvd. and Watt Way), and pay the $12 parking fee there. Make an immediate left on 37th Pl., then the next right onto McClintock Ave.; the structure will be on your left. PSA is about a 2-minute walk to EEB.
Find free parking in the neighborhood, West of Vermont Ave., between Exposition Blvd. and Jefferson Blvd. On a Saturday, this should not be too difficult. This will be about a 10-minute walk to EEB. Enter USC through Gate 6, on Vermont Ave and 36th Pl./Downey Way. After entering through Gate 6, make the first right onto McClintock Ave. EEB will be the last building on the left before McClintock ends in 37th Pl.

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

Southern California Theory Day 2014, UC San Diego

Organizers

Shaddin Dughmi and David Kempe.