CMSA E-Newsletter 44

=Introduction=

Thanks to all CMSA members who have sent information for this newsletter, CMSA E-Newsletter 44, issued October 2015. 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 45: 31 March 2016. (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.

39ACCMCC December 2015
The 39th Australasian Conference on Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing (39ACCMCC) will be held at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, Monday 7 to Friday 11 December 2015.

Registration is now open for 39ACCMCC. Please make sure that you register during the earlybird registration period, which ends on Sunday 1 November. All registration will close on Monday 16 November 2015.

Invited speakers

 * Peter Cameron (University of St Andrews and Queen Mary University of London, UK)
 * Saad El-Zanati (Illinois State University, USA)
 * Nevena Francetić (Monash University, Australia)
 * Catherine Greenhill (University of New South Wales, Australia)
 * Penny Haxell (University of Waterloo, Canada)
 * Jonathan Jedwab (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
 * Gordon Royle (University of Western Australia)
 * Charles Semple (University of Canterbury, NZ)

More Information
Attendees are invited to submit an abstract for a contributed talk of 25 minutes duration (including time for questions), covering some topic in discrete or combinatorial mathematics or a related area of computer science.

Conference website: http://39accmcc.smp.uq.edu.au Contact: Darryn Bryant, db at maths.uq.edu.au

Information on registration, submission of abstracts, and accommodation can all be found at the website. We look forward to seeing you in Brisbane.

StringMasters@Murdoch
A StringMasters workshop will be held at Murdoch University, Perth. WA, 26-29 October 2015.

StringMasters was established in 2007 with the aim of bringing together researchers in string algorithms at all levels to study current problems of particular theoretical and practical interest. It is informal, with no scheduled presentations, entirely devoted to new research resulting from the interactions among the participants.

Typically small impromptu groups form, of about 2 to 5 researchers, who share a common interest in a problem. Old collaborations are reinforced, and new collaborations are formed. The workshop is accommodated in several meeting rooms to allow space for the parallel working groups and for general milling around.

All interested participants are welcome!

There are no registration fees. Please register your intention to participate via the workshop website http://ccwaperth.wordpress.com/stringmasters.

More combinatorics conferences
15th IMA Conference on Cryptography and Coding, Oxford, UK, 15-17 December 2015. http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/J.Groth/IMACC.html

Combinatorics: Challenges and Applications (celebrating Noga Alon's 60th Birthday), Tel Aviv, Israel, 17-21 January 2016. http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~noga60/

Auburn Conference on Designs, Graphs, and Codes (coinciding with the 60th birthday of Chris Rodger), Auburn University, Auburn, USA, 29-31 January 2016. https://sites.google.com/site/auburnconferencedgc15/

Symmetries and Covers of Discrete Objects (honoring Marston Conder's 60th birthday and Steve Wilson's 70th birthday). Incorporating the 8th conference on Algebraic, Topological and Complexity Aspects of Graph Covers, and the 2nd conference on Symmetries of Discrete Objects. Queenstown, New Zealand, 14-19 February 2016. https://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/~dleemans/SCDO2016/

47th Southeastern International Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, USA, 7-11 March 2016. http://science.fau.edu/combinatorics/index.php

IMA Conference on Theoretical and Computational Discrete Mathematics, Derby, UK, 22-23 March 2016. http://www.ima.org.uk/conferences/conferences_calendar/discrete_mathematics_2015.html

Japanese Conference on Combinatorics and its Applications (JCCA 2016), Kyoto, Japan, 21-25 May 2016. http://infoshako.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/jcca/JCCA16/

=Recent news=

Appointment
Amin Sakzad was appointed to a postdoctoral position in the Faculty of IT, Monash University, at the beginning of this year. He is working with Ron Steinfeld on lattice-based cryptography.

New PhDs
Xiaogang Liu was awarded a PhD degree from the University of Melbourne in July 2015 for his thesis entitled 'Selected topics in spectral graph theory'. It was supervised by Sanming Zhou. Congratulations to both.

Jayama Mendis was awarded a PhD degree from Monash University in August 2015 for her thesis entitled 'Autoparatopisms of latin squares'. It was supervised by Ian Wanless. Congratulations to both.

Intercollegiate Programming Competition
Darcy Best, PhD student with Ian Wanless at Monash University, has been a coach for the Monash student teams entering the ACM Intercollegiate Programming Competition (ICPC).

This year, one of these teams, Monash Pi, won the Western Division and advanced to the South Pacific Regional Finals, where they placed 5th. The students in the team were Xin Wei Chow (Faculty of Engineering), Ryan Hechenberger (Faculty of IT) and Pete Whalan (Faculty of Science). This is one of the fruits of the Monash Programming Club, run by Darcy and Faculty of IT academic Aamir Cheema.

More details can be found at http://www.monash.edu.au/students/news/view.html?monash-team-crowned-icpc-western-division-champions

The Conversation
Some Discrete Mathematics Research Group members at Monash University have had articles published this year in The Conversation, explaining aspects of the field to the general public. Ron Steinfeld had an excellent introductory article on cryptography published on 23 March 2015, entitled 'Encryption today: how safe is it really?', https://theconversation.com/encryption-today-how-safe-is-it-really-37806 Graham Farr had an article on the film 'The Imitation Game', about Alan Turing, published on 9 January 2015, https://theconversation.com/the-imitation-game-is-it-history-drama-or-myth-35849'

=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. Parts 1 and 2 of Volume 63 are now online. Volume 63 part 3 will appear in October.

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 63, 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.

The Journal is now indexed by Scopus from Volume 13 (1996) onwards.

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

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