Three Decades of DIMACS: The Journey Continues

In 2019, both DIMACS (the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science) and the National Science Foundation's Science and Technology Centers program celebrate thirty years of operation and thirty years of defining and shaping modern research. In today's dynamic research landscape, thirty years is a remarkable milestone, and one that this project proposes to commemorate with a major conference, "Three Decades of DIMACS: The Journey Continues," that looks to the future as it honors the past when DIMACS was one of the original class of NSF Science and Technology Centers (STCs). The conference will explore future directions of traditional DIMACS topics and highlight emerging topics of growing importance. The conference will consider broad questions such as: What is the future of theoretical computer science? What are new challenges for algorithms? For discrete mathematics? How do they tie to applications areas? How do they connect to data science? To AI and machine learning? To privacy and fairness? Finally, the role of centers is changing in a world with instant communication, data everywhere, and disciplines increasingly merged to address fundamental problems of great variety. The conference will explore the implications for DIMACS, STCs, and other centers of various types. The planned program includes many women and underrepresented minorities as speakers and panelists and will highlight innovative programs for broadening participation in computer science and mathematics that may serve as models elsewhere. The program also features discussions of how to educate students to work across disciplinary boundaries and operate in a world where science has become an international activity and the nature of work will change in the age of intelligent machines. It features teachers describing their experiences with innovative education programs and materials that integrate mathematical and computational methods with science content for high school classrooms. Such programs hold promise for building a future workforce that is able to cross disciplinary boundaries and harness the power of computing to address future challenges. Presentations will also address current research that has global societal importance in areas such as sustainability and climate change, epidemiology, homeland security, privacy, and aspects of socially responsible algorithms. The conference will look to the future with presentations describing ongoing research and emphasizing important challenges and questions that will propel us into the next decade. It will emphasize important themes in computer science theory such as complexity and machine learning (particularly deep learning), as well as the socio-technical challenges, such as privacy and fairness, that arise in a world with increasingly intelligent machines and ubiquitous data. The conference will explore applications in robotics enabled by theory from statistical physics, computational challenges in ecology and related social sciences in the face of climate change, as well as new capabilities in healthcare made possible by advances from computational biology and mathematical epidemiology. Presentations will also look at current and future research directions in traditional DIMACS areas, such as discrete mathematics, optimization, and statistics and their central role in harnessing the data revolution. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.