ISAAC - Day 1

After a week of diving in Thailand (Similan Islands) together with my fellow blogger Tasos, I'm now attending ISAAC in Sendai. Yesterday there was a workshop in the honour of Prof. Nishizeki's 60th birthday. Prof. Nishizeki founded ISAAC in 1990 in order to expand the research community to Asia and the Pacific. Unfortunately I missed most of the talks but during the afternoon I attended a talk by Dorothea Wagner. She talked about her favourite topic, routing in transportation networks. This is a topic that I find very appealing. Dorothea and her group use more "algorithmic engineering" than what I'm used to but I still find both the problem and the techniques used to obtain a practical solution very interesting. She covered the algorithmic engineering approaches which proves that a good theoretical understanding of a problem can give very fast and effective solutions.


The first talk at ISAAC was an invited talk by Pankaj Agarwal. He talked about I/O-efficient algorithms for analysing terrain data. As usual Pankaj gave an excellent talk that was easy to follow and still gave some insight into the problems in the area. The rest of the day I mainly attended the computational geometry sessions. It's surprising how many of the papers that are in the computational geometry field. I went through the program and concluded that almost half the papers are geometry related.