Contents: Application Areas Selection of Papers Abstract Submission Deadlines for Submission Abstract Formats Program Committee Electronic Access Paper Format & Proceedings Meeting Format Invited Speakers Exhibits Request Information Form Registration Hotel Information Transportation Program Committee Robert E. Tarjan (Co-chair) Princeton University Tandy Warnow (Co-chair) University of Pennsylvania Nina Amenta University of Texas Craig Benham Mount Sinai School of Medicine Derek Corneil University of Toronto, Canada Herbert Edelsbrunner University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Joan Feigenbaum AT&T Laboratories - Research Dan Gusfield University of California, Davis Michel Habib Université Montpellier II, France Leslie Hall Johns Hopkins University Pavol Hell Simon Fraser University, Canada Anna Karlin University of Washington Richard Karp University of Washington Valerie King University of Victoria, Canada Daphne Koller Stanford University Brendan McKay Australia National University, Australia Bernard Moret University of New Mexico S. Muthukrishnan Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies Cindy Phillips Sandia National Laboratories Prabhakar Raghavan IBM, Almaden Research Center Dana Randall Georgia Institute of Technology Edward Scheinerman Johns Hopkins University Martin Strauss AT&T Laboratories - Research Steering Committee Carla Savage (Chair) North Carolina State University David Johnson AT&T Laboratories - Research Robert E. Tarjan Princeton University Exhibits Publishers, software and hardware suppliers, service organizations and others having products or services to offer, are invited to participate in the exhibition. For further information and fees, please return the reply form or contact the SIAM Marketing Representative at [email protected]. Registration The program, with the registration and hotel information will be available in early November, 1998. To ensure that you receive your copy, complete the fill-in form and submit it to SIAM.                             Questions? E-mail [email protected] SIAM Conferences

The Tenth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), jointly sponsored by ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory and SIAM Activity Group on Discrete Mathematics, will be held January 17-19, 1999 in Baltimore, Maryland. This symposium concerns research on the use, design, and analysis of efficient algorithms and data structures, and on the mathematical problems related to the development and analysis of discrete algorithms. Performance analysis may be analytical or experimental, and may address worst-case or average-case performance. These studies can be theoretical or based on real datasets, and may address methodological issues involved in performance analysis. Application areas include, but are not limited to: Discrete Mathematics and Combinatorics Combinatorial Structures Communication Networks Computational Biology Computational Physics Computational Finance Computational Geometry Computational Topology Computer Graphics and Computer Vision Computer Systems Cryptography and Security Databases and Information Retrieval Discrete Optimization Discrete Probability Distributed Algorithms Experimental Algorithmics Graph Drawing Graphs and Networks Machine Learning Mathematical Programming Molecular Computing Number Theory and Algebra On-line Problems Pattern Matching and Data Compression Quantum Computing Random Structures Robotics Statistical Inference Symbolic Computation Selection of Papers The selection of papers will be based on the extent to which the results yield new insights for the design, use, or analysis of efficient algorithms. The program committee especially encourages submissions from researchers in the discrete mathematics and experimental and applied algorithms communities. Submissions from the discrete mathematics community may address the design and analysis of algorithms for discrete structures, and on the development of algorithms as tools for investigating significant open questions in mathematics. Researchers in this area who are contemplating making a SODA submission may find the article "How (and Why!) to Write a SODA Paper" by Peter Winkler, to be helpful. This article is available in PostScript format at www.siam.org/meetings/da99/winkler.ps. Experimental and applied submissions may deal, for example, with efficient implementation of fundamental algorithms, or with heuristics for basic difficult problems, and should provide new and significant insights into algorithmic performance and/or design, or discuss the methodology of doing experimental performance analysis. Applied papers should deal with algorithms applied in a specific practical setting, and should include convincing evidence that the algorithms or data structures discussed are useful and efficient in the particular context. This year as an experiment there will be two types of submissions allowed, "long form abstracts'' and "short form abstracts''. Long form abstracts are the traditional extended abstracts required in past years, and will be subject to the traditional program committee selection process. They should report on original research that has not been published elsewhere, nor concurrently submitted to some other conference with proceedings. Accepted long-form submissions will receive an allotment of 10 pages in the conference proceedings for their printed version, and a 20-minute talk slot during the conference. Short form abstracts will also be reviewed by the program committee, but we expect to accept a broader range of types of papers in this category. Traditional SODA papers may be submitted under this category, but we also seek submissions that report on partial results, work-in-progress, and open problems of a theoretical or applied nature. We particularly encourage submissions that cover recent results that have appeared or are soon to appear in venues (conferences or journals) that typical SODA attendees do not usually see. The deadline for these abstracts is later than that for the long-form abstracts, so as to allow for presentation of more recent results. Accepted short-form abstracts will be allotted two pages in the proceedings and a 20-minute talk slot during the conference. Abstract Submission Papers will be selected for presentation based on abstracts in one of two forms: long form (up to ten pages) or short form (up to two pages). Either may be submitted in hard copy form, or in electronic form. Authors wishing to submit a hard copy of an abstract should send 23 copies of their abstract to: SIAM Conference Coordinator 3600 University City Science Center Philadelphia, PA 19104-2688, U.S.A. Deadlines for Submission Long form abstracts in hard copy form must be RECEIVED at the SIAM office by July 7, 1998 or postmarked by June 30, 1998 and sent airmail. Information about electronic submissions, also due July 7, no later than 5:00 PM EDT, is available at http://sigact.csci.unt.edu/~soda99/SODA99long.html. Short form abstracts in hard copy form must be RECEIVED at the SIAM office by August 7, 1998, or postmarked by July 30, 1998, and sent airmail. Information about electronic submissions, also due August 7, no later than 5:00 PM EDT, is available at http://sigact.csci.unt.edu/~soda99/SODA99short.html. Authors of long form abstracts should indicate in their submission whether they would like to have their submission considered for inclusion as a short form paper, if it is rejected in the long form category. The deadlines are firm; submissions received after the deadlines will not be considered. Letters of acceptance/rejection will be sent by August 31, 1998. Abstract Formats Long Form Abstracts: Abstracts should begin with the title of the paper, each author's name, affiliation, and e-mail address, followed by a succinct statement of the problems that are considered in the paper, the main results achieved, an explanation of the significance of the work, and a comparison to past research. This material should be easily understood by nonspecialists. Technical developments, directed toward the specialist, should follow as appropriate. The entire extended abstract must not exceed 10 pages (using 11 point or larger font, with not less than one inch margins all around). In cases where the author considers it essential to include additional technical details that do not fit into 10 pages, these details may be added in a clearly marked appendix that should appear after the body of the paper and the references; such an appendix is not considered a part of the submission and will be considered only at the committee's option. Short form abstracts: Abstracts should begin with the title of the paper, each author's name, affiliation, and e-mail address, followed by a succinct statement of the problems that are considered in the paper, the main results achieved, an explanation of the significance of the work, and a comparison to past research. This material should be easily understood by nonspecialists. Technical developments, directed towards the specialist, can be provided as space permits. The entire short form abstract must not exceed 2 pages (using 11 point or larger font, with not less than one inch margins all around), including the bibliography and title page. Abstracts that deviate significantly from these guidelines risk rejection without consideration of their merits. Electronic Access Electronic submissions are now being considered. Instructions on how to submit can be found at http://sigact.csci.unt.edu/~soda99/SODA99long.html and http://sigact.csci.unt.edu/~soda99/SODA99short.html for the long and short form submissions, respectively. The deadline for submissions of long form abstracts is no later than 5:00 PM EDT on July 7, 1998, and the deadline for short form abstracts is no later than 5:00 PM EDT on August 7, 1998. Paper Format and Proceedings SIAM will send instructions for preparing a camera-ready copy to authors of accepted papers. A LaTeX file and camera-ready copy of each accepted paper must reach the SIAM office by October 26, 1998; otherwise, the papers will not be included in the proceedings. The proceedings will be available at the conference. Macros for preparing your paper in TeX or LaTeX are available and should be used. Authors interested in using TeX should indicate this in the letter of submission. Meeting Format Authors of accepted papers will present their work at the symposium in a twenty-minute time slot. Invited Speakers The symposium will have two to three plenary speakers. At this point, Carsten Thomassen of the Technical University of Denmark has agreed to be one of them. Further information will be included in the symposium program, which will be mailed to participants in early November 1998. At that time, the program will also be available on the World Wide Web at www.siam.org/meetings/da99/. SIAM is cooperating in organizing the following workshop:"Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experimentation"