The Seventh National Seminar on Theoretical Computer Science (NSTCS-7) was held at Madras Christian College (MCC), Chennai from June 11 to 14, 1997. Madras Christian College is located at Tambaram in the suburbs of Chennai. The campus is large and green and boasts of many deer and a wide variety of birds. There is also a farm within the campus which was an interesting place to visit. Though the month of June brings soaring temperatures and soaking humidity to Chennai, we were lucky to have a few showers during our stay at MCC, which made the weather more pleasant, especially at nights.
One has to commend the organisers for the amount of work they put in to ensure that the seminar went off smoothly. MCC has a severe water problem in the summer, and we had to be in sync with the municipal water supply times! But in spite of all the attendant problems, the volunteers at MCC did their best to ensure that everybody was taken care of. Another problem faced by people staying at MCC was that the gates of St. Thomas Hall (where all the participants were put up) would be closed by 10 pm, which was a major inconvenience to those of us who would be coming back from the city in the night.
During the business meeting at NSTCS-6 held at Banasthali Vidyapith, Banasthali, Rajasthan, there was a general opinion that more emphasis should be given to tutorials and invited lectures. Suggestions were given to increase the number of hours allotted to tutorials. During NSTCS-7 some of these suggestions were acted upon. The number of hours devoted to tutorials were increased from nine to twelve. Also only two tutorials were held, making it six hours per tutorial. This, I feel, will make the tutorials far more intensive and the topics can be covered in much greater depth than before. I think this trend should be continued and we should in future, have only two tutorials of six hours (or more) each. I think that greater depth would be more useful and inspiring to researchers than a broader but shallower coverage.
This year, the two tutorials were on Randomised Algorithms for Combinatorial Enumeration by Ashok Subramanian (IISc) and on Agreement among Rational Agents by R Ramanujam (IMSc). Both the tutorials were very nice and inspiring. Ashok effortlessly led the audience from scratch to the theory of rapidly mixing Markov chains through a series of enumeration and counting problems of various common combinatorial objects. His enthusiasm for the subject was infectious and soon one could appreciate the beauty and elegance behind this relatively new field. A set of notes and papers were distributed to those who had asked for them. I am sure they will be very useful to anyone who wishes to seriously read about or work in this fascinating field. The tutorial concluded with a list of open problems.
Ramanujam started off his tutorial with three puzzles to amuse the audience. The puzzles grabbed everybody's attention and soon we were gently led to logics of knowledge through attempts to solve the puzzles. At the end of the day, it was indeed stunning that what began with relatively innocuous puzzles would soon flower into an intricate theory and logic of knowledge. Applications to game theory were also discussed. The tutorial concluded with a discussion on agents (both deterministic as well as Bayesian) and their connections to distributed computing. All in all, it was an enjoyable tutorial, which was further enlivened with puzzles and jokes throughout.
Besides the two tutorials, there were five invited lectures on various topics of current interest. Priti Shankar (IISc) was supposed to give a talk on New Applications of the LR Parsing Technique . Unfortunately, due to bad health, she could not make it to the seminar. The talk was delivered on her behalf by her student, Maya Madhavan. Venkatesh Raman (IMSc) spoke on Parametrised Complexity . It was interesting to learn how one can try to solve NP-complete problems for fixed parameter values in a more efficient manner than brute force. Rani Siromoney (MCC) spoke about the new and highly talked about field of DNA Computing . Abhiram Ranade (IIT Bombay) talked on Partitioning Geometrically Embedded Graphs . It was in some sense, an extension of his work which was reported in NSTCS-6. It was nice to see how results on partitioning many graphs which are important in practice (like graphs arising from finite element method computations) follow from one single concept of geometrically sparse graph, which he motivated and defined in the course of the talk. Girish Palshikar (TRDDC, Pune) spoke on Building Multi-Paradigm Formal Specifications . He described an ongoing project at TRDDC in which Z and Esterel are used jointly to formally specify large software systems.
This year, the technical report presentation sessions were all relegated to the late afternoon and were restricted to fifteen minutes each. There had been 31 submissions and 29 of them were accepted. Also the submissions were restricted to four pages each, having been regarded as extended abstracts. Many of the authors felt that four pages was too restrictive and not enough to convey their ideas and results. Also some of them felt that the fifteen minutes presentation time was inadequate. These and other points were raised in the business meeting. There was a general feeling that the format of the seminar as regards tutorials and invited lectures was satisfactory, but that something remained to be done regarding the technical report presentations. Many people said that they did not know anything about the copyright status of the ``papers'' submitted, whether they could be republished and so on. They also felt that the term ``Call for Papers'' is misleading and gives a submission the status of a conference paper. The fact that the submissions to NSTCS have the status of technical reports was not highlighted adequately at the seminar. The discussions regarding length, kind and content of submissions, their legal status, time to be given for the presentations etc. remained inconclusive at the time of the business meeting. It was felt that the topics should be taken up again later on at a suitable time.
And it was so that four hectic days at the seminar passed off in the twinkling of an eye. It was time for some of us to leave Chennai, while some others trooped to IMSc to attend an update meeting on timed systems. The author was one of those in the first category, and so with a last bow, he relinquishes the stage for somebody else to tell all about the update meeting.