We are happy to invite you to Columbia University to celebrate Christos Papadimitriou’s contributions to science on the occasion of his 70th birthday, through a mix of talks, panels, and fun activities. One of world’s leading computer scientists, Christos is best known for his work in computational complexity, helping to expand its foundations, methodology and reach. Using computation as a scientific lens, he has also made seminal contributions to biology and the theory of evolution, economics and game theory—where he helped found the field of algorithmic game theory, artificial intelligence, robotics, databases, networks and the Internet, and more recently the study of the brain. In this 3 day celebration, we will celebrate the wealth of areas that Christos’s work has influenced directly, as well as areas that have been influenced, are being influenced, or might be influenced by the “algorithmic lens.”

Day one:
8:15-8:50am: Coffee/breakfast(provided)

8:50-9am: Opening remarks

9-9:45am: Scott Shenker - Why the Internet Architecture is almost perfect, but our core beliefs about it are entirely wrong

9:45-10:30am: Michael I. Jordan - Dr. AI: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Economics

10:30-11:00am: Coffee break

11-11:45am: Anna Karlin - An improved approximation for TSP in the half-integral case (and why Christos is my hero)

11:45am-12:30pm: Michael Collins - Neural Models for Speech and Language: Successes, Challenges, and the Relationship to Computational Models of the Brain

12:30-2:00pm: Lunch(provided)

2-3:30pm: AI Panel moderated by Jitendra Malik

3:30-4pm: Coffee break

4-4:45pm: Elias Koutsoupias - On the k-server problem and its variants

4:45-5:30pm: Rump session