Conference reporters wanted, sponsorship available

There is a new post category on the CSTheory StackExchange Community Blog — Conference/Workshop Reports — and Dave Pritchard (who often goes by the nick daveagp online) has just posted the first such report, covering the sixth annual meeting of EuroComb in Budapest, a conference in honor of Gyula Katona’s 70th birthday, and the European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), which is part of ALGO this year (so the link points there).  Dave’s post is excellent, thank you very much!

I mentioned recently on this blog that we are looking for more people who can blog from conferences and workshops they attend, but there is a new wrinkle.  StackExchange has just inspired a formal policy of sponsoring (some) site bloggers who attend conferences.  (See this post, especially the section “Sponsoring Community Leaders to Attend.”)  Further, Jeff Atwood, founder of StackExchange, just posted on the CSTheory meta site, encouraging theoretical computer scientists to take him up on this.  Suresh Venkatasubramanian has started a thread, looking for reporters for the upcoming FOCS.

Here are five other conferences that are starting soon; all have a significant TCS component (with TCS broadly defined).

1. Conference on Computer Science Logic (Sept 12-15)
2. International Conference on Functional Programming (Sept 19-21)
3. International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming (Sept 19-23)
4. International Symposium on Distributed Computing (Sept 20-22)
5. International Symposium on Graph Drawing (Sept 21-23)

Anyway, you get the idea, I’m sure.  I just wrote someone who will be at DNA, asking about blogging.  If you will be attending an upcoming TCS event — or if know someone who will be, please share this information — please contact Joe Fitzsimons or me, or leave an answer on Suresh’s thread.  Thanks.

Theoretical Physics Q and A Site

UPDATE: The site has reached 100% commitment, and is about to launch a beta Q&A period.

There is an active proposal at StackExchange to build a research-level Q and A site for theoretical physics. There is a Physics StackExchange site already, for questions at the high school or undergraduate level.  The new site would be expert-level only, like MathOverflow for math, or CSTheory for theoretical computer science.

The new site is currently in the “commitment” phase, meaning more people need to add their names to a list of individuals who want to participate in the site when it does live. If enough people commit (at 79% of requirement as I write this) the site will enter a “private beta” phase, where only those who committed will be able to ask and answer questions for a while.

More information, and the commitment page, is here.