Today, another driver drove me to the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), where FST&TCS was held. The driver took me through a new route to impress me with his knowledge of Madras roads. And as usual he was disappointed with the money he got, but promised to pick me up at 5 p.m. if he happened to be around that area.
Following the tradition established over the years, the first session is usually the first invited talk. This year, we had Neil Immerman as the first invited speaker. The essence was that transitive closure logic on two variables embed CTL and CTL$^*$ more naturally than $\mu$-calculus does. These characterizations also result in efficient algorithms for these logics.
John Reif was the other invited speaker for the day. John's talk was on alternative computational models. Specifically, DNA and Quantum Computing. John had about 3600 view graphs, which we viewed at the rate of one every second. Sometimes, he even showed us two or three slides at the same time to maintain the pace. There was simply too much to cover in too little time.
The second day's proceedings was initiated by Erik Schmidt. The topic: BRICS and Quantum Information Processing. To be fair, he did put two slides on quantum information processing, actually on quantum cryptography. But otherwise, the talk focussed completely on BRICS. It was a nice sort of documentary on BRICS which was all fine except that it had nothing to do with the conference. As I am writing this article in my personal capacity, I would say the PC slipped somewhere, but maybe I won't!
The afternoon had an invited talk on ``Efficient Formal Verification of Hierarchical Descriptions'' by Rajeev Alur. This was followed by an invited talk by Ken McMillan on model checking. The question was how one could verify properties of temporal systems that manipulated data. Ken discussed several practical ways of reducing the complexity of such problems which would otherwise be forbidding. Ken is a wonderfully gifted speaker and I really enjoyed this talk.
I have not said anything about the evening though. The organizers had thoughtfully organized two cultural programmes at the Women's Polytechnic. One of them was on classical music and the other on classical dance. I attended only the dance programme which was good and I was told that the music concert was also of good quality.
There was also the traditional Director's dinner at IMSc for the FMT workshop, as also the FST&TCS conference dinner at a local hotel. Both evenings were enjoyable---which were reflected as higher auto fares to return to Koyambedu!
The third and final day of the conference (which make it more of a Ranji match than a test match :-) ) started with an invited talk by Umesh Vazirani on (what else!) Quantum Computation. He is so passionate about the stuff that it is impossible for him to give a bad talk! He took the audience through most of the early quantum algorithms but ran out of time when it came to quantum codes. Jaikumar's comment summed it up, ``We should have allowed him to go on, why stop him because of the watch ... ''
Finally, a word about the organizers of the conference. They did
an excellent job. In fact, the organizers were deservingly
garlanded on the last day by an unknown patron. It was a
thoughtful and touching gesture from the unknown patron. I should
not forget to add that the afternoon food was quite good---from
Eden, a place I used to frequent when at Matscience. The only
disappointment was the lack of a big
The 1998 edition of FST&TCS thus ended. The next morning, I was off by Brindavan to Bangalore. At 3 p.m., Abhu was there to interrogate me with a what-have-you-got-me look.