NSTCS'98: Eighth National Seminar on Theoretical Computer Science

Bhuvaneshwar, June 11 to 14 1998

A Report, by

Deepak D'Souza, B. Meenakshi

SMI, Chennai
E-mail: {deepak, meena}@smi.ernet.in

The theoretical computer science community found themselves on another trip to the East with this year's National Seminar on Theoretical Computer Science being held in the temple city of Bhuvaneshwar. Despite apprehensions of the mid-summer heat and low attendance due to the holiday season, the Seminar passed off rather pleasantly with an enthusiastic local organizing team, a near five-star venue, and frequent showers contributing to the success.

The main attraction of this year's Seminar was a four-part tutorial by Kamala Krithivasan on recent trends in formal language theory with regard to DNA computing and computer imagery. In her well laid out presentation, she covered Adleman and Lipton's much talked of experiments in DNA computing and the role of grammar systems in studying the expressive power of these radically different means of computation. She also introduced notions of communicating grammars and their applications to distributed computing.

The invited talks featured an entertaining presentation by Abhi Dattasharma on Tamal Dey's $k$-sets theorem. Tamal uses a new proof technique which considerably improves results on a long standing combinatorial geometry problem. In her couple of talks, Mohua Banerjee showed us how we can hope to reason sensibly with fuzzy or imprecise notions. Meena Mahajan spoke on her work with V. Vinay on computing determinants combinatorially. Finally, R. Ramanujam gave us all a very motivating invitation to study Rabin's theorem relating tree automata and the logic S2S.

The paper presentations were relatively sparse this year, and the quality of submissions makes one wonder if NSTCS, without some competition in the review process, might not lose out on some of its enthusiastic submissions and hence participants. There were a few well-presented talks nonetheless, notable among them were Manoranjan Satpathy's talk on register spillover in functional languages, and, particularly, some lively presentations on probabilistic data structures by R. Sridhar and K. Rajasekhar from IIT, Madras. H. K. Rath also gave a good talk on computing visibility polygons.

A notable feature of the Seminar was some informal pre-dinner talks organized at the Family Welfare Guest House where most outstation participants were put up. Jaikumar Radhakrishnan, Venkatesh Raman, and S. Venkatesh contributed talks, with a good deal of participation from the audience. Jaikumar treated us to an enjoyable account of his recent work with Aravind Srinivasan on two-colorings for $k$-regular hypergraphs.

If this sounds like all work and no play, it was not the case. The local organizers extended their hospitality by providing conveyance for touring around the temple city. Some of the outstation participants teamed up and spent the evenings visiting the temples around. The prominent spots were the Shanti Stupa of Lord Buddha, the Lingaraj temple (which had a temple for 'Jam'raj too!) and the temple for Sun God located at the neighbouring town of Konark.

Finally, our grateful thanks to the local organizing team lead by M. Nayak for their generous hospitality. Special thanks are due to Jaikumar for all his efforts co-ordinating the Seminar and taking personalized care of us during our stay in Bhuvaneshwar.

Tail-piece: overheard amid talk of the imminent prospect of DNA Computers: ``What will `Segmentation Fault' errors be replaced by?'' The answer: ``Test-tube broken!''