The First Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms will be co-located with The 29th ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2018) in New Orleans, LA, USA, January 7–10, 2018.

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Symposium on Simplicity in Algorithms is a new conference in theoretical computer science dedicated to advancing algorithms research by promoting simplicity and elegance in the design and analysis of algorithms. The benefits of simplicity are manifold: simple algorithms manifest a better understanding of the problem at hand; they are more likely to be implemented and trusted by practitioners; they are more easily taught and are more likely to be included in algorithms textbooks; they attract a broader set of researchers to difficult algorithmic problems.



Papers in all areas of algorithms research are sought. An ideal submission will advance our understanding of an algorithmic problem by, for example,

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introducing a simpler algorithm, or

presenting a simpler analysis of an existing algorithm, or

offering insights that generally simplify our understanding of important computational problems.

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An ideal submission will contain novel ideas or attractive insights but is not expected to prove novel theorems, i.e., the results themselves can be known, but their presentation must be new.



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Proceedings:

The proceedings will be published in Schloss Dagstuhl's OpenAccess Series in Informatics (OASIcs).



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Paper Submission:

Authors must submit their papers electronically, in PDF format. Authors are encouraged to submit their papers in the OASIcs LaTeX template. The submission server will be open in August, 2017.

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Format:

Each submission should begin with a title page containing the paper title, each author's name, affiliation, and email address, and an abstract summarizing the contributions of the paper. There is no page limit. The paper should begin with a clear description of the algorithmic problem to be solved, a survey of prior work on the problem (including a candid assessment of prior work in terms of simplicity and elegance), and a discussion of the contributions of the paper. The body of the paper should be written for a general theoretical computer science audience, and substantiate the main claims of the paper with full proofs. The submission should be visually easy to read.


Brevity is a hallmark of simplicity. Authors are specifically encouraged to submit short and simple papers.

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Important Dates:

Submission deadline: August 24, 2017
Notification of acceptance/rejection: TBA (October, 2017)
Camera-ready deadline: TBA (November, 2017)

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Program Committee:

Keren Censor-Hillel, Technion
Edith Cohen, Google, Mountain View
Edith Elkind, University of Oxford
Jeremy Fineman, Georgetown University
Mohsen Ghaffari, ETH Zürich
David Karger, MIT
Richard Karp, University of California, Berkeley
Valerie King, University of Victoria
Dániel Marx, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Moni Naor, Weizmann Institute of Science
Raimund Seidel (Chair), Universität des Saarlandes
Robert Tarjan, Princeton University
Virginia Vassilevska Williams, MIT
David Williamson, Cornell University
David Woodruff, IBM Almaden
Uri Zwick, Tel Aviv University

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Steering Committee:

Michael A. Bender, Stony Brook University
David Karger, MIT
Tsvi Kopelowitz, University of Waterloo
Seth Pettie, University of Michigan
Robert Tarjan, Princeton University
Mikkel Thorup, University of Copenhagen