ICITS 2012 — playing with the format

I am the program chair for this year’s ICITS, the International Conference on Information-Theoretic Security. (The acronym is admittedly a bit of a mouthful. I like “ickets” as the pronunciation. That way, papers at ICITS are “pickets”, talks there are “tickets”, you get the idea.) ICITS will be held in Montreal right before CRYPTO, August 15-17, 2012.

ICITS occupies an interesting spot at the intersection of a few different fields: crypto, information theory, quantum computing and combinatorics. In the past, ICITS has worked like a normal computer science conference: papers are reviewed carefully, papers cannot have appeared at other conferences or journals, etc. However, because ICITS serves several different communities, the format has sometimes cost it good papers: some are lost to more specific or better-known venues in computer science, others are lost because conference “publication” doesn’t fit well with the culture in other fields, etc.

So to try to broaden participation and make the conference more scientifically useful, we’re shaking up the format this year with a two-track submission process. The “conference” track will operate like a traditional conference with the usual review process and published proceedings. The “workshop” track will operate more like an informal workshop, without published proceedings. Submissions to the former track will follow a traditional page-limited format. Submissions to the latter are much more flexible in format (they can range from full papers or to extended abstracts), and may consist of previously published papers or works in progress. For example, the workshop track would be a great place to come present your Crypto/Eurocrypt, QIP or ISIT paper to the other communities that work on info-theoretic security.

You can see the call for papers if you’re curious about the process. But most importantly, get your papers ready for submission! The deadlines are

• March 12 for the regular track and
• April 9 for workshop papers.

In addition to the contributed papers we will have a great slate of invited speakers from a broad range of disciplines. And did I mention that the program committee rocks?

Of course, the best part of this is that ICITS will be in Montreal in the summer time. Despite its French character, not all of Montreal goes on vacation in August (in fact, the city does shut down for two weeks, the “construction holidays”, that will be over by the time ICITS hits town). There are festivals, tasty food, nice weather and, for me, lots of friends and family to see.

So submit your papers! And attend!

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Postdocs in data privacy at Penn State

I have been excessively delinquent in posting to this blog for the last little while (ok, two years). But a postdoc announcement is a terrible thing to hide from public view in the current economy.

Postdoctoral positions in statistical, computational and learning-theoretic aspects of data privacy

As part of a joint project between Penn State, CMU and Cornell, we are inviting applications for several postdoctoral positions at Penn State University.

The principal investigators at Penn State are:
– Sofya Raskhodnikova,
– Aleksandra Slavkovic  and
– Adam Smith.

The other principal investigators on this project are:
– Stephen Fienberg (CMU) and
– John Abowd (Cornell).

We are looking for strong candidates interested in algorithmic, cryptographic, statistical and learning-theoretic aspects of data privacy. Candidates should have a Ph.D. in statistics, computer science or a related field and a strong record of original research. The positions are for one year, extendable to up to three years. The starting date is negotiable.

The project spans a broad range of activities from the exploration of foundational theory to the development of concrete methodology for the social and economic sciences. Postdoctoral fellows may be involved in any of these aspects, depending on their interests and expertise. Extended research visits at CMU and Cornell are possible, though not necessary.

Interested candidates should send a CV and brief research statement, along with the names of three references, to one of the three Penn State investigators (sofya@cse.psu.edu, sesa@stat.psu.edu, asmith@psu.edu). Applications received before February 25, 2012 will receive full consideration. Applications will continue to considered after that date until the position is filled.

Looking for a different postdoc?

In case the opportunity above isn’t your cup of tea, here are some public service tips on where to look for postdoc announcements.

• Princeton’s CCI has a decent list of TCS-related jobs
• The IACR has a list of open positions in cryptology [sic]

… and that’s pretty much it. The postdoc market, especially in CS, is ridiculously inefficient. That’s partly because many postdocs (like mine) are project specific, and partly because there’s just no good central repository of relevant jobs.

With that in mind, I will mention the postdoc position in the theory of privacy and economics at the University of Pennsylvania. If you really want to do a postdoc on data privacy, and the Penn State/CMU/Cornell position won’t work for you, then talk to Aaron Roth (or Mike Kearns, Sham Kakade or Mallesh Pai).