From Lane: “On Labor Day (Sept. 4), URCS will host a day of talks by wonderful speakers … in honor of our wonderful colleague Joel I. Seiferas’s retirement.”
JS: “Good morning and welcome. As the ‘Joel’ of ‘JoelFest,’ I have asked to say a (very) few words of introduction.
I can’t take credit for today’s program of distinguished speakers (or the presence of other notable colleagues), but I am happy that my recent retirement can be the excuse for it. I hope everyone enjoys and is stimulated by what you hear today.
…
Thanks for today are also due to all of the following: …
- the entire well-oiled machine of an organizing committee, including, in addition to Muthu and Lane, Prof. Daniel Stefankovic and my wife Diane, and of course our distinguished speakers, to be introduced individually.
Anyway, the U. of R. is clearly a great place to retire from.
More significantly (but briefly), Rochester also has been a wonderful place to work since I came here in 1979:
- Faculty, past and present, have always been collegial, generous, smart, eloquent, and a pleasure to work with.
- Past and present staff has always been eager and successful in providing the best support for the department.
- The graduate students, especially, have been enthusiastic participants in the community, even in learning experiences much broader than what they needed for their theses.
- In later years, the growing undergraduate community has become an impressive part of the mix, with many remarkable gems emerging there as well.”
Speakers at JoelFest (full details see http://www.cs.rochester.edu/~lane/=joelfest/)
- Zvi Galil, the John P. Imlay Dean of Computing and Professor at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, “Online Revolutions: From Stringology with Joel to Georgia Tech’s Highly Affordable Master Degree”
- Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, “Pseudo-determinism”
- Jon Kleinberg, Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, “Social Dynamics and Mathematical Inevitability”
- Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester, “The Status of Zero-Knowledge Proofs”
Rochester Programming Systems Reseach 