Coding, Complexity and Sparsity 2013 (SPARC) 2013.

Atri Rudra reminds us that the 3rd incarnation of SPARC is soon to be upon us (disclaimer: I'll be speaking at the event):

Efficient and effective transmission, storage, and retrieval of information on a large-scale are among the core technical problems in the modern digital revolution. The massive volume of data necessitates the quest for mathematical and algorithmic methods for efficiently describing, summarizing, synthesizing, and, increasingly more critical, deciding when and how to discard data before storing or transmitting it. Such methods have been developed in two areas: coding theory, and sparse approximation (SA) (and its variants called compressive sensing (CS) and streaming algorithms). 

Coding theory and computational complexity are both well established fields that enjoy fruitful interactions with one another. On the other hand, while significant progress on the SA/CS problem has been made, much of that progress is concentrated on the feasibility of the problems, including a number of algorithmic innovations that leverage coding theory techniques, but a systematic computational complexity treatment of these problems is sorely lacking. The workshop organizers aim to develop a general computational theory of SA and CS (as well as related areas such as group testing) and its relationship to coding theory. This goal can be achieved only by bringing together researchers from a variety of areas. 

The Coding, Complexity and Sparsity workshop (SPARC 13) will be held in Ann Arbor, MI on Aug 5-7. 

These will be hour-long lectures designed to give students an introduction to coding theory, complexity theory/pseudo-randomness, and compressive sensing/streaming algorithms. We will have a poster session during the workshop and everyone is welcome to bring a poster but graduate students and postdocs are especially encouraged to give a poster presentation. 

This is the third incarnation of the workshop and the previous two workshops were also held in Ann Arbor in August of 2011 and 2012. 

Confirmed speakers:

* Jin Yi Cai (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

* Shafi Goldwasser (MIT)

* Piotr Indyk (MIT)

* Swastik Kopparty (Rutgers University)

* Dick Lipton (Georgia Tech)

* Andrew McGregor (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

* Raghu Meka (IAS)

* Jelani Nelson    (Harvard)

* Eric Price (MIT)

* Christopher Ré (University of Wisconsin, Madison)

* Shubhangi Saraf (Rutgers University)

* Suresh Venkatasubramanian (University of Utah)

* David Woodruff (IBM)

* Mary Wootters    (Michigan)

* Shuheng Zhou (Michigan)

We have some funding for graduate students and postdocs with preference given to those who will be presenting posters. For registration and other details, please look at the workshop webpage: http://eecs.umich.edu/eecs/SPARC2013/