Guest post by Aleksander Mądry

This summer, on June 6-8 in Paris, we will be having a new algorithmic event: Highlights of Algorithms 2016 (HALG 2016) conference.

This conference will be quite unlike the conferences we are all used to. First of all, it will consist mainly of invited talks and tutorials, accompanied by a smaller number of contributed talks and posters. Secondly, there will be no conference proceedings, i.e., presenting work already published at a different venue or journal (or to be submitted there) is absolutely welcome and even encouraged.

The call for submissions  of contributed short talks and posters has been just posted online. The program committee is currently in the process of selecting invited speakers (partially based on the nominations from the community).

We already have a number of very exciting speakers committed and we expect to add a few more names shortly.

The intention here is to make HALG a forum for presenting the highlights of some of the most exciting recent developments in algorithms, discussing potential further advances in this area, as well as networking and initiating new collaborations. In a way, we want HALG to be a place one can go to catch up on what are the hottest results/topics
at the moment, as well as what one missed by not being able to attend all the STOC/FOCS/SODA/ESA/ICALP/PODC/ITCS/… conferences that year.

We believe that this kind of venue is very much needed today and will help to make our community stronger and more cohesive. In particular, we hope that the success of the first edition will make HALG become a recurring event. In fact, HALG draws some inspiration from Highlights of Logic, Games and Automata (HLGA) conference series that became very successful in its respective community already. There are some differences in how both conferences are constructed: HALG will concentrate on invited talks with some contributed talks, whereas HLGA was only having short contributed talks so far; but the overall premise is the same and seems to be working very well. (We also heard some rumors that the next edition of HLGA will move in the direction of HALG and have invited talks too.)

In any case, the HALG 2016 in Paris should be a lot of fun. We hope to see many of you there! So please submit your work to HALG.