Monday, September 4, 2017 (Labor Day), 9AM—5PM
Warmest thanks to everyone who attended JoelFest
and made it such a memorable day!
We're very excited to announce
that the four speakers will be:
- Zvi Galil,
the John P. Imlay Dean of Computing and Professor at
Georgia Tech's College of Computing,
- Shafi Goldwasser,
the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT,
- Jon Kleinberg, Tisch University Professor
of Computer Science at Cornell University, and
- Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester.
The schedule for the day is as follows:
| 9:00 |
-10:00 |
Zvi Galil; talk title:
Online Revolutions: From Stringology with Joel to Georgia Tech's Highly Affordable Master Degree.
|
| 10:00 |
-10:30 |
Break. |
| 10:30 |
-11:30 |
Jon Kleinberg; talk title: Social Dynamics and Mathematical Inevitability.
|
| 11:30 |
-2:30 |
Free Time for Lunch (see the Lunch Break section on this page). |
| 2:30 |
-3:30 |
Shafi Goldwasser; talk title: Pseudo-determinism.
|
| 3:30 |
-4:00 |
Break. |
| 4:00 |
-5:00 |
Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam; talk title: The Status of Zero-Knowledge Proofs. |
The registration for attending the JoelFest talks
is now closed; all space is filled.
Thanks to everyone who replied and registered,
and see you at JoelFest. (Note: Please be aware that you are
unlikely to have an empty seat next to you to put a handbag
in, as we are in the building's largest room and it will be
stuffed; so think of this like being on a crowded, but fun, airplane,
and please put your (small!) bag under your seat.)
If you did not already register it now is, with our apologies for any
disappointment, too late to register/attend.
But please feel very much invited to
send a warm message to be
given to Joel on that day (and some perhaps will, if time permits at
the event, be read out loud to all), by emailing your
message to
lane.hemaspaandra "at" icloud.com, with (utterly exactly)
"Message for Joel" as the subject field.
The lunch period is left free for people to find food
(or prove theorems!) in groups of their own, with old or newly made friends.
As to where to do that, there are more than half a dozen different
food options available in College Town (though some might be
closed due to it being a holiday/Monday), and to see all of them
listed so one can choose, simply go to
this
page and click the "Eat" button! That same "Eat" page
has at its bottom a "Download directory" button that will
take you to a map that shows where everything is in College
Town, and will even show (roughly speaking) how to get there
from the UR Campus (basically, go east along Elmwood Ave.,
which is the two-lanes-each-way street that you almost
surely will have used to enter campus, and College Town is
the area bounded on the north be Elmwood Ave., on the east
by Mt. Hope Ave., on the south by Crittenden Blvd., and on
the west by East Dr.; the map that the "Download directory"
button leads to shows all of this). To get there very
efficiently, a great idea might be to meet a UR CS student
at the talks, and ask him or her to be part of your lunch group (and
to share with him or her your love of the field!).
College Town is a bit surprisingly far from the
campus (because there is a historic cemetery
in-between, the
Mt. Hope Cemetery, where
Susan B. Anthony and Frederick
Douglass are buried). The walk is about 24 minutes. But
the lunch break is three hours long, leaving time to walk there, eat,
and walk back.
An alternative would be that one
can stay on campus and eat at one of the (usually quite decent)
on-campus eating places (although beware of holiday
closures). In particular, your best options regarding
on-campus eating on Labor Day (these both ARE open on
Labor Day) are "The Pit" or the "Douglass Dining Center."
At the former you pay for what you eat (just as at a
restaurant), and that latter is basically a giant dining
hall that is all-you-care-to-eat (which might actually
mean all you can fit on your tray in a single pass of
collecting food; we are not quite sure) at a flat rate of
$9.75 per person. Both are right on campus, about a 4-minute walk from the room our talks are in. To help you
decide, and to let you know what buildings they are in
(they basically are just to the north of the main
university library, which is the building with the tall
round tower), here is what Dining Services sent when we
asked for their advice on what places to recommend to
people for eating on Labor Day on River Campus: "The Pit
is on the 1st floor of Wilson Commons (and used to be
called The Commons Food Court). Essentially they are all
the same place. It is our main retail food court and sells
items a la carte, so you purchase each item
separately. The Pit houses a variety of options including
a grill, full soup and salad bar, Asian-fusion,
burritos/bowls and pizza. Also on the 1st floor of Wilson
Commons is Rocky's Sub Shop, which will be open Monday.
The Pit and Rocky's have plenty of tables to sit and eat
at if you choose to go there for lunch on Monday.
Douglass Dining Center (1st floor of Frederick Douglass
building) is an all-you-care-to-eat dining center. So
guests pay one price at the door and are free to enjoy all
the dining center has to offer. On Monday, Labor Day, they
will be serving brunch due to the holiday, and the
lunch/brunch rate at Douglass is $9.75 for guests who are
not on a campus meal plan."
(For completeness and to avoid confusion, we should mention
that, admittedly slightly awkwardly, on this same day there
is a separate event—an invitation-only departmental
retirement lunch for Joel. So the UR faculty/staff and a
small group of others such as the invited speakers will be
going to that during the lunch period. Professor
Štefankovič and Diane Seiferas have organized that
lunch, have already sent out the invitations and settled the
guest list, and as soon as the location of the lunch is
finalized Prof. Štefankovič will send out that
information to to all those who were invited and said yes.
(Added info: The by-invitation-only small private
lunch will be at noon at Grappa, in a private room;
Grappa is located in College Town at 30 Celebration Drive,
sort of embedded inside a hotel and accessed, sigh, from
a parking lot---walking over with people who know where they
are going might be a good idea if you were invited by
Daniel and said Yes
and thus
are headed there for lunch.)
If you were not invited please don't feel at all
bad—rather than (fun!) hearing wonderful things about our
wonderful colleague Joel during lunch, you'll be able to (fun!) full-court
press Proving Theorems with friends old and newly made.)
Joel I. Seiferas, an internationally respected theoretical computer
scientist, retired on December 31, 2016.
The Board of Trustees has appointed him Professor Emeritus of Computer Science
effective January 1, 2017.
Joel's S.B., S.M., and
Ph.D. degrees are from MIT. He joined our department in 1979 after
five years on Penn State's faculty.
The department will miss him dearly and deeply, though we are very
happy that in retirement he plans to continue his engagement with the
department. In September, the department will be hosting a day of
talks in honor of Joel.
It is difficult to guess what current research will be remembered for
posterity. But in Joel's case it is very easy indeed. Joel's work is
a central part of the foundation of the field's understanding of the
power of computational models and will be studied when the vast
majority of current computer science research has long been forgotten.
One of the most important questions in computer science is whether
more computing time lets one solve more problems. Joel's paper on
this joint with Michael J. Fischer and Albert R. Meyer showed that for
nondeterministic computation even very slightly more time allows
additional problems to be solved. Their work remains the most
important paper on that topic and part of the bedrock of the field.
Indeed, Ryan Williams's recent breakthrough on the weakness of even
nonuniform circuits, widely viewed as the strongest complexity advance
of the decade, draws centrally on Joel's hierarchy result; no earlier
result was tight enough to underpin Williams's proof. Joel's work is so
strong that decades after it was done it is underpinning some of the field's
greatest work.
Another core question of the field is the extent to which shared
access to memory affects power. A decades-open, focal-point issue on
that was whether a computer with one memory tape and two read/write
heads sharing that tape can in real time compute more than a computer
with two memory tapes each with one read/write head can compute in
real time. In a proof of tremendous insight and beauty, Joel,
jointly with Tao Jiang and Paul Vitányi, resolved this by showing that
shared access to memory provably yields greater power.
Those examples, and many others we have not mentioned in such
far-ranging other areas as string/pattern matching, sorting networks,
almost-everywhere separations, positive relativizations, and real-time
simulations, show how Joel's inspired work has resolved some of the
deepest of questions.
The fact that Joel is completely ego-free and did all that work (and the
single-handed development of widely used bibliographic bridging resources) purely
for the advancement of the science—while also mentoring (especially
in his ambitious and challenging courses) most of the
theory students the department has educated, shaping the department's
faculty recruiting in theoretical computer science, serving as the
department's chair, and wholeheartedly serving the University in his
many years on the Academic Honesty Board—makes him all the more of an inspiration to those who know him.
By coincidence, the great economist and public intellectual, Thomas
Sowell, retired from his decades of column writing at the same time
that Joel retired. At the end of a 2004 interview, Sowell
was asked how he would like to be remembered, and he replied: "Oh,
heavens, I'm not sure I want to be particularly remembered. I would
like the ideas that I've put out there to be remembered." Although
our dear colleague Joel is self-effacing and modest, there is no doubt
that the deep understanding of computer science that he has
contributed will be remembered beyond Joel's life and ours. We
are deeply grateful to him for those ideas, and for his warm, wise
friendship.
The room for the four talks of JoelFest will be
Wegmans Hall, Room 1400. That room is the large auditorium
partially on and partially below the ground floor of Wegmans Hall,
which is the brand new home the CS department moved into this summer.
This is the
the
UR River Campus Map.
You can see Wegmans Hall's location on
it; it is near the lower left-ish part of the core campus, a bit
east of the river, and in more detail: south of Hopeman Hall, east
of the Wallis Lot, west of Taylor Hall, and north of the (soon to
be rather poorly named) Computer Studies Building.
Yes, the map (at least as of 2017/8/23) confusingly
says "Wegmans (construction)"
where Wegmans Hall actually now is; but have no fear...
the building was finished some
months ago, and we are all moved in, and so it really does exist.
The university and the (see the Lodging section below) suggested hotel are each about a 10-minute drive from
the airport.
Rochester, New York is served by the Greater Rochester International
Airport, whose airport code is ROC. (Please do not accidentally buy
plane tickets to Rochester, Minnesota; they probably don't even have
a theory seminar there that day!)
Rochester also has train service (Amtrak) and bus service (Greyhound),
which each drop you near downtown, about a 15-minute taxi ride to
the university and the suggested hotel.
Information
on visitor parking at River Campus of University of Rochester
(the "River Campus Visitors" initial parts
are what to look at, not the stuff at the bottom
about Eastman School of Music, which is downtown rather than
on River Campus,
so for goodness's sake, don't drive to Eastman).
You should please follow the instructions at that link.
But since it is a holiday, it is quite possible that
even during the day the information booth will be closed. So read on, please.
Thus what you should do is drive up to the visitor's
information booth. The Visitor Info booth
is just north of Elmwood Avenue and Trustee Rd.,
on Wilson Blvd.; you can find its location on this
map of the parking lots, namely, it is the thing labeled Visitor Info a bit to the east of the river in the lower half of the map. Or alternatively,
here is a map that puts a red pin in its location:
If the booth is staffed, buy (or get for free if they are
in holiday mode) a one-day guest permit if the agent there
says you need to (a one-day permit is currently—as of
5/2017—$5), get a campus map, and then park in whatever lot
the agent directs you to park in.
If the booth is not staffed (that would be if they don't staff it
on Labor Day due to the holiday; Parking says they often don't staff
the booth on holidays... except when they do; to be safe, please do
print out a
campus map and a parking map before arriving in Rochester), then the
right thing to do, Parking tells us, is to drive right about ten
feet past the booth, U-turn, then turn left on Trustee Blvd. and
then turn right on Intercampus Drive and then park in any space not
specially marked as Handicapped/Reserved/Etc. in the Zone 2 South
lots ("Bridge Lot" and the north end of Park Lot) or the Zone 3
South Lot (all of Park Lot except its north end). This
map of the parking lots shows
where both of those lots are; they are sort of near the bottom-left
of the map.
Oh... please leave extra time... parking will probably take longer
than you expect, and the Information Booth agent (depending on what is
available that day) may well put you in a lot halfway across campus,
although he or she will (unless the booth is closed, and by the way it
is likely to be closed) give you a campus map if you ask so you can at
least find your way to park at the appropriate lot and then to walk
to the talks.
For anyone who will be staying overnight,
we recommend the new
Hilton Garden Inn Rochester/University & Medical Center, located
at 30 Celebration Drive, Rochester, NY, 14620, in the new College Town
area; its phone number is +1-585-424-4404.
It is an 18-minute walk to the department from the hotel.
Melissa Singkhamsack, the CS department's administrative staff member
who most
often interacts with that hotel, says that you should be able to get the
(UR) corporate rate by letting them know you are coming to attend a
University of Rochester event. She says that if they need to verify
that you are, you should please ask them to contact her, at +1-585-275-5478
or at her email address of melissas@cs.rochester.edu.
Note, though, that: (a) If you are eligible for a AAA or AARP or
other discounted rate, please do also ask the hotel
about its rate under that
discount, as it could be better than the corporate
rate; and (b) Melissa warns that the corporate rate fluctuates
sharply (and as of when she last checked can be as high as the mid
$200s a night) based on availability, and so booking early may
result in a substantially lower rate than booking late.
The only other hotel within walking distance of the department is
Staybridge Suites
Rochester University (phone: +1-585-527-9110).
In case you arrive early or leave late, here are some pointers to
fun things to do in Rochester:
As our own advice, the
George Eastman House/Museum
is probably
the top attraction of Rochester. But there are many other
great things to see: the Strong National Museum of Play (esp. for kids),
the Seneca Park Zoo (esp. for kids), the Memorial Art Gallery (a very nice fine
art museum), the Rochester Public Market (a large street market),
the Lake Ontario shore (e.g., walking in Durand Eastman Park),
and much more.
The TripAdvisor.com link in the list above
provides links to each of these along with
reviews and information.
Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions; you can
email the entire set of organizers by sending an email to the user-id
"joelfest" in the domain "lists.rochester.edu".
Lane A. Hemaspaandra,
University of Rochester.
Diane Seiferas
, dseiferas at gmail.com.
Joel I. Seiferas, University of
Rochester.
Daniel Štefankovič, University of
Rochester.
Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam, University of
Rochester
.
