CMSA E-Newsletter 48

=Introduction=

Thanks to all CMSA members who have sent information for this newsletter, CMSA E-Newsletter 48, issued April 2017. Please send news as soon as you have anything of possible interest to CMSA members and the Combinatorial Community, even if no newsletter is imminent! Please email the Newsletter Editor (Kevin McAvaney): kevin.mcavaney at ozemail.com.au

CLOSING DATE for Issue 49: 30 June 2017. (Please email items to the newsletter editor ONLY in plain text.)

Old newsletters can be found here.

=Aims of the newsletter=
 * To promote combinatorics within Australasia.


 * To provide a forum for sharing combinatorial and related information.

=Workshop and conference announcements=
 * To keep CMSA members informed and in touch with combinatorial and related matters.

5ICC December 2017
The 5th International Combinatorics Conference (5ICC) will be held at Monash University in Melbourne from Monday 4 to Friday 9 December 2017. The ICC is held approximately every 10 years, and incorporates the annual meeting of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia

Provisional list of invited speakers


 * Bill Chen, Nankai University
 * Maria Chudnovsky, Princeton University
 * Charlie Colbourn, Arizona State University
 * Marston Conder, University of Auckland
 * David Eppstein, University of California, Irvine
 * Joanna Fawcett, Cambridge University
 * Jacob Fox, Stanford University
 * Daniela Kühn, Birmingham University
 * Barbara Maenhaut, University of Queensland
 * Brendan McKay, Australian National University
 * Alexander Scott, Oxford University
 * Paul Seymour, Princeton University
 * Balázs Szegedy, Rényi Institute
 * Le Anh Vinh, Vietnam National University

More Information

Conference website: http://monash.edu/5icc/ Contact: ian.wanless at monash.edu. Telephone: +61 3 99054442

IWOCA July 2017
The 28th International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms (IWOCA 2017) will be held from Monday 17 to Friday 21 July 2017in Newcastle, Australia. It is dedicated to the memory of Professor Mirka Miller. who died in January 2016. Mirka was one of the founders and continuing supporters of this series of workshops, formerly known as A(ustralasian)WOCA.

Invited speakers include


 * Martin Baca (University of Kosice)
 * Henning Fernau (University of Trier)
 * Costas Iliopoulos (King’s College London)
 * Zdenek Ryjacek (University of West Bohemia)

Topics include (but are not limited to) the following:


 * Algorithms and Data Structures
 * Complexity Theory
 * Graph Theory & Combinatorics
 * Combinatorial Optimization
 * Cryptography & Information Security
 * Algorithms on Strings & Graphs
 * Graph Drawing & Labelling
 * Computational Algebra & Geometry
 * Computational Biology
 * Probabilistic & Randomised Algorithms
 * Algorithms for Big Data Analytics
 * New Paradigms of Computation

More Information

Conference website: https://carma.newcastle.edu.au/meetings/iwoca/index.html Contact: co-chairs Ljiljana Brankovic and Joe Ryan

61st Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society December 2017
The 6ist Annual Meeting of the Australian Mathematical Society will be held at Macquarie University, Sydney, from Tuesday 12 to Friday 15 December 2017

Invited speakers include Catherine Greenhill (UNSW): Graph theory, random algorithms

More Information

Conference website: http://www.austms.org.au/tiki-calendar.php?calitemId=727 Contact: co-directors Paul Smith and Xuan Duong

Cheryl Praeger Retirement Mini-symposium 13 April 2017
The University of Western Australia is hosting this symposium in celebration of Cheryl's distinguished career on the occasion of her recent retirement after 40 years service. There will be four plenary lectures devoted to Cheryl’s legacy given by some of her closest colleagues:


 * Cai Heng Li (Southern University of Science and Technology, China)
 * Martin Liebeck (Imperial College, University of London)
 * Alice Niemeyer (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
 * Jacqui Ramagge (University of Sydney)

There is no registration fee, but the organisers ask to be notified if you are attending. More Information

Website: http://www.cmsc.uwa.edu.au/news/cheryl-praeger-retirement-mini-symposium Organisers: John Bamberg (John.Bamberg at uwa.edu.au) and Michael Giudici (Michael.Giudici at uwa.edu.au)

Buildings and Symmetry Workshop September 2017
The workshop “Buildings and Symmetry” will be held at the University of Western Australia from Monday 25 to Friday 29 September 2017. There will be an emphasis on the symmetries/group theory/Lie theory aspects of built structures. More Information

Website: https://buildingsandsymmetry.wordpress.com/ Contact: Alice Devillers (alice.devillers at uwa.edu.au)

More combinatorics conferences
Finite Geometry Workshop, Szeged, Hungary, 28 April - 1 May 2017 http://www.math.u-szeged.hu/~nagyg/GeoWs2017.html

The 10th International Conference on Algorithms and Complexity (CIAC 2017), Athens, Greece, 24-26 May 2017 http://www.corelab.ntua.gr/ciac2017/

The Second Malta Conference in Graph Theory and Combinatorics (2MCGTC), Qawra, Malta. 26-30 June 2017 http://www.um.edu.mt/events/2mcgtc2017/

Permutation Patterns 2017(PP2017), Reykjavik, Iceland, 26-30 June 2017 https://pp2017.github.io/

The 26th British Combinatorial Conference will be hosted by the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, 3–7 July 2017 http://combinatorics.cis.strath.ac.uk/bcc2017/

The 33rd International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG’17), Brisbane, Australia, 4-7 July 2017 http://www.computational-geometry.org/documents/2017_cfp.pdf

Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC2017), London, UK, 9-14 July 2017 https://sites.google.com/site/fpsac2017/

The 5th Workshop on Real and Complex Hadamard Matrices and Applications, Budapest, Hungary, 10-14 July 2017 http://www.renyi.hu/conferences/hadamard2017/

The 23rd Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON'17) will be held in Hong Kong, China, 3–5 August 2017 http://cocoon2017.comp.polyu.edu.hk/

European Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Applications (Eurocomb 2017), Vienna, Austria, 28 August - 1 September 2017 http://www.dmg.tuwien.ac.at/eurocomb2017/

=Recent news=

Vale Anne Penfold Street (1932-2016)
With sadness we report that Professor Anne Penfold Street AM passed away on Wednesday 28 December 2016.

Anne made numerous contributions to research in combinatorics and played a pivotal role for combinatorial mathematics in Australia and beyond. She was the founding President of the Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia Inc. and served as President for many years. She was President of the international organisation the Institute of Combinatorics and Its Applications from 1996 to 2002. Anne played a key role in establishing the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics and was Editor-in-Chief from 1990 to 2001.

Anne was the recipient of the first CMSA Medal, awarded for her long and meritorious service to combinatorics. In 1994 she received a Bernhard H. Neumann Award from the Australian Mathematics Trust for excellence in mathematics enrichment, and in 1996 she was awarded a Doctor of Mathematics (honoris causa) by the University of Waterloo. In 2014 Anne was named a Member of the Order of Australia for service to science education in the field of mathematics.

Two national awards are named after Anne. The Australian Mathematical Society Women in Mathematics Special Interest Group Anne Penfold Street Award, which is funded by the Society, provides additional financial support to Australian mathematicians for their caring responsibilities while they travel for conferences or research visits. On Monday 12 December 2016, the CMSA Council decided to rename the CMSA Student Prize as the CMSA Anne Penfold Street Student Prize from 2017.

Obituaries for Anne can be read at https://www.smp.uq.edu.au/node/2541 and http://www.austms.org.au/Publ/Gazette/2017/Mar17/ObitStreet.pdf

Anne is dearly missed by her many friends and colleagues in Australia and around the world.

CMSA Council, March 2017

New Fellowships
Three graph theorists at Monash University received Australian Research Council research fellowships. Daniel Horsley received a Future Fellowship, while Jane Gao and Anita Liebenau each received a DECRA (Discovery Early Career Researcher Award). Congratulations to all!

New PhDs
M​ohammad Adib Khairuddin was awarded a PhD degree from RMIT University recently for his thesis entitled 'Power of Posts: A Quantitative Analysis of Facebook Election Campaigning Interactions'. Senior Supervisor was Prof Asha Rao and Associate Supervisor was Dr John Postill.

Jessica Liebig was awarded a PhD degree from RMIT University recently for her thesis entitled 'Identifying significant behaviour in complex bipartite networks'. Senior Supervisor was Prof Asha Rao and Associate Supervisor was Emeritus Prof Kathy Horadam.

Zuhe Zhang was awarded a PhD degree from the University of Melbourne recently for his thesis entitled 'Analysis of networks: privacy in Bayesian networks and problems in lattice models'. Supervisors were Sanming Zhou and Benjamin Rubinstein. The abstract and full thesis are available at https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/128046?show=full.

ICA Medals
The Institute for Combinatorics and its Applications (ICA) recently announced that Cheryl Praeger (University of Western Australia) and Brian Alspach (university of Newcastle) have been awarded the Euler Medal. Euler Medals recognise distinguished lifetime career contributions to combinatorics research by Fellows of the ICA who are still active in research. Big congratulations to both awardees!

Online Seminars
The Discrete Structures and Algorithms research group at the University of Melbourne organises two series of research meetings: Discrete Structures and Algorithms (Seminar) and Discrete Structures and Algorithms (Reading Group). The seminars are usually broadcast using the Zoom video conferencing system (but reading group meetings may not be broadcast), and both onsite and online participation is welcome. Detailed instructions on how to participate online are included in the seminar announcements. Subscription to the announcements can be made on the School of Maths & Stats seminar subscription page at http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/research/subscribe.php

RMIT University News
Associate Prof Asha Rao was promoted to Professor in December 2016. In February 2017, she was appointed Associate Dean (Mathematical Sciences) on a 3 year contract. Professor Kathy Horadam retired on 31 August 2016, after 31 years of service. She has been appointed Emeritus Professor and continues her research in mathematics. Dr Joanne Hall was appointed lecturer in the School of Science (Mathematical Sciences) on 1 February 2017. Joanne completed her PhD at RMIT in May 2011. From June to July 2011, while awaiting the results of her thesis examination, Joanne was funded by the Slovak National Scholarship Program of the Slovak Republic, to visit the Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. From October 2011, Joanne spent two years as a Post-Doctoral Research Scientist at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Joanne was appointed lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology in 2013. While working part-time and raising children Joanne has published 12 papers in reputable journals and conferences, including the IEEE Transaction on Communication Theory, and joins RMIT with an excellent teaching record.

UNSW News
Thomas Britz is presently on sabbatical, visiting research groups led by Graham Farr (Monash University), Henrik Kragh Sørensen (The University of Copenhagen), and Camilla Hollanti (Aalto University).

LaTrobe University News
LaTrobe University in Melbourne is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2017. Part of the celebrations is its Living History Project (https://50years.latrobe/galleries/livinghistory/) featuring videos of past students and staff including the generously paid ex CEO of Australia post Ahmed Fahour, the famous unionist Bill Kelty, and CMSA's very own Jennifer Seberry. Latrobe is awarding Jennie a DSc (honoris causa) later this year (for her mathematics, not the video).

New CMSA website
CMSA now has a new website together with a new address (http://combinatorics-australasia.org/) and new logo (see above). CMSA Council extends special thanks to David Wood for the website reconstruction and Brendan McKay for the logo.

=The Australasian Journal of Combinatorics= The website for the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics is http://ajc.maths.uq.edu.au/.

The Journal is now online only, free for readers and authors (so it is a 'diamond open access' journal). There are three volumes per year, with each volume closing in February, June and October, matching the time of publication of the old paper volumes. Volumes are currently being uploaded in three batches. Part 1 of Volume 68 (2017) has just been uploaded.

Visit http://ajc.maths.uq.edu.au/ and sign up to subscribe to email notices whenever new papers are published. The contents of all volumes, 1 to 68 (Part 1), are listed at the above web page.

Submissions to the Australasian Journal of Combinatorics may be sent to ajc@maths.uq.edu.au. Only pdf files are required at submission stage. There will be a special issue in honour of Anne Penfold Street appearing in 2018. Please contact the journal, at ajc@maths.uq.edu.au, regarding deadlines for submissions to this special issue.

The Journal is now indexed by Scopus from Volume 13 (1996) onwards, and by Thomson Reuters "Emerging Sources Citation Index" from 2015 on.

ISSN: 2202-3518 (online only, after 2013); 1034-4942 (paper, before 2014).

=Editor= Kevin McAvaney, Australia. Email: kevin.mcavaney at ozemail.com.au