INTRODUCTION:
Many thanks to the members who have sent information for this newsletter.
CLOSING DATE for Issue 6: 31 May 2001. Email ejb@maths.uq.edu.au with all your news and information.
CMSA WEB PAGE: http://www.math.fsc.qut.edu.au/cmsa/
NEWSLETTER WEB VERSION: http://www.maths.uq.edu.au/~ejb/cmsa-newsletter5.html
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CONTENTS:
The 27th Australasian Conference in Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing, in 2002, will be held in Newcastle, NSW. Precise dates are yet to be determined.
If you have any information concerning international (or other)
visitors to Australasia in 2002, please could you pass this
on to Ljiljana Brankovic in Newcastle.
Ljiljana's email address is
lbrankov@cs.newcastle.edu.au .
So far, tentative speakers include Alex Rosa, Jozef Siran and Mirka Miller.
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The conference's Invited Speakers were
This year, we decided to have the ``pre-conference'' reception on the Monday evening (held at the University of Canterbury Staff Club). Holding the reception on Monday evening turned out to be one of our better ideas. The participants having had a day to recover from travel and to get into the swing of things, the atmosphere was relaxed, but noisy!
The conference excursion was to Arthurs Pass, which is one of the three passes through the Southern Alps linking the East and West Coasts of the South Island. Because of the distance (4 hour round trip), we made it a day trip.
Arthurs Pass is a treasure trove for local trampers and mountaineers. With this in mind, everyone set off on one of the many scenic walks in the area. One such walk was to the top of Avalanche Peak. We must have looked like a trail of ants as we grunted our way to the top. The views were spectacular although perhaps hard to see under the dripping of sweat. Some people may be pleased to hear that every summer there is an organised race from Arthurs Pass township to the top of Avalanche Peak and down the other side. From memory, the race record to the top is about an hour - scary really!!
Although we all went to Arthurs Pass in mini-buses, some of us went to extraordinary lengths to travel back to Christchurch via helicopter. Participants will be pleased to hear that Carol Moon is recovering well back home.
The conference dinner was held at Trents Winery, a small winery about 11 km from the university. Luckily the bad weather held off, so that pre-dinner drinks and chat could be done outside. Of course, it being summer and all, we had a barbeque which included venison sausages, chicken, steak, and mussels. The BBQ ended with the NEW ZEALAND invented dessert - pavlova.
Lastly, we'd like to thank all participants for the effort they made in getting to the conference, their excellent and varied talks, and their happy faces. We hope everyone enjoyed the conference as much as we enjoyed hosting it.
Charles Semple and Mike Steel
C.Semple@math.canterbury.ac.nz
M.Steel@math.canterbury.ac.nz
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The invited speakers were:
The social events included a Monday night reception in "Old Government House", on the University grounds, and an excursion (on a glorious sunny day) to the vineyards and beaches of Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf. (However, we understand that many theorems were proved during this excursion while sitting on Oneroa Beach, and therefore whether it qualifies as a "social" event is debatable.) The conference dinner was a very popular kiwi-style BBQ held at Dianne and Gaven Martin's home situated in an area of beautiful native bush (complete with glow-worms) north of Auckland.
A total of 50 people from New Zealand, Australia, Slovenia, Canada, United States, Iran, Mexico, South Africa, Slovakia, and the Sultanate of Oman registered for the conference. From all reports, the participants thoroughly enjoyed the conference, and had a stimulating week of mathematics!
The organisers wish to thank the Department of Mathematics (University of Auckland), the Marsden fund (administed by the Royal Society of New Zealand) and the Centre of Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (University of Auckland) for their generous financial support of the conference.
Paul Bonnington and Marston Conder
p.bonnington@auckland.ac.nz
conder@math.auckland.ac.nz
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A workshop on Emerging applications of combinatorial designs was held at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California from November 5-10, 2000. The workshop was well organised and many interesting talks describing a range of new applications of designs were presented. The message to come out of the workshop was undoubtedly that combinatorial design theory is alive and well. Special mention should be made of Peter Gibbons who received a prize for travelling the furthest distance to the workshop. He was visiting the University of Vermont prior to the workshop and flew from there via The Netherlands and New Zealand, thereby outdoing Peter Adams and Darryn Bryant who attended from Brisbane.
Organizing Committee was: Esther Lamken (chair), Charlie Colbourn, Jeff Dinitz.
Report from Darryn Bryant and Peter Adams.
db@maths.uq.edu.au
pa@maths.uq.edu.au
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FUTURE WORKSHOP AND CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENTS:
GRACO 2001 is open to faculty members, researchers, specialists and graduate students from around the world, and will take place in conjunction with the Brazilian Summer School on Combinatorics and Algorithms (see http://www.lia.ufc.br/scho2001).
Submissions: Due date was 25 October 2000. See http://www.lia.ufc.br/symp2001.
Publication: Selected full papers from the symposium will appear as a special issue of a journal to be announced shortly. The submission of the full texts for the special issue is encouraged, but not compulsory. The deadline for submission is April 21, 2001.
For the Program Committee please see
http://www.lia.ufc.br/symp2001 .
Organizing Committee: Manoel Campelo Neto, Fortaleza (Co-Chair);
Ricardo Correa, Fortaleza (Chair);
Fernando Gomes, UFC, Fortaleza (Co-Chair).
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A Conference on Graph Theory, Combinatorics and Computing in conjunction with the 16th Annual Shanks Lectures honoring Baylis and Olivia Shanks will be held at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.A. Monday 21st May - Thursday 24th May, 2001
INVITED SPEAKERS:
IMPORTANT DATE: The deadline for both early registration and abstracts for contributed talks will be 5 p.m. on Friday, 20th April 2001.
REGISTRATION: The registration fee will be US$50 before the deadline above, and US$60 afterwards. Registration is free with proof of graduate student status.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Paul Edelman, Mark Ellingham, Jonathan Farley, Mike Plummer and Jerry Spinrad.
FURTHER INFORMATION: More details will be given in a second announcement. Information may also be obtained from the following sources.
| Email: | shanks@math.vanderbilt.edu |
| Web: | http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~shanks/16th/ |
| Regular mail: | Horizons in Combinatorics/Shanks 2001 Department of Mathematics, SC 1326 Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37240, U.S.A. |
| Phone: | +1 615 322 6672 (Department of Mathematics) |
| Fax: | +1 615 343 0215 |
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A WORKSHOP on COMBINATORIAL MATHEMATICS AND APPLICATIONS
will be held in the
Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Computing in
the Department of Mathematics at The University of Queensland,
from
JUNE 12-15, 2001.
This will provide an opportunity to discuss various aspects of
combinatorial mathematics and computing, with emphasis on
new applications. More details are available from Peter Adams,
email pa@maths.uq.edu.au
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The conference will be held at Ntshondwe Camp, Ithala Game Reserve, situated in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa and hosted by the University of Natal. The main goal of the conference is to explore the most recent research in graph theory. The Principal Talks will be scheduled for 25 minutes and contributed talks for 15 minutes.
Special functions during the week includes a night drive in open safari vehicles, breakfast at the Bird Hide, sundowners overlooking the beautiful Phongola River, a night bush braai (alias ''barbeque'') and a Zulu dancing exhibition.
The Principal Speakers are:
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James Hirschfeld
Richard Lewis
(Organisers)
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Registration forms and further information are now available at
http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/icms/current/graph/index.html
For other events (including the 18th British Combinatorial Conference in
the previous week and a Durham Symposium on Groups, Geometry and
Combinatorics in the following week) see
http://www.maths.qmw.ac.uk/~pjc/bcc/conf2001.html
From Peter Rowlinson p.rowlinson@maths.stir.ac.uk
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Professor Louis Caccetta
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
School of Applied Science
Curtin University of Technology
email :
caccetta@cs.curtin.edu.au
phone : (08) 9266 7672
fax : (08) 9266 7672
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The Second Lethbridge Workshop on
DESIGNS, CODES, CRYPTOGRAPHY and GRAPH THEORY
will be held
July 9 - 14, 2001
at University of Lethbridge, Lethbridge, Alberta.
The workshop builds on the success of the Workshop on Coding Theory,
Cryptography and Computer Security held at the University of Lethbridge,
August 3 - 7, 1998. Sponsors are the Pacific Institute for the
Mathematical Sciences, MITACs, the University of Lethbridge and
VeriSign Inc.
The workshop web site is http://www.cs.uleth.ca/dccg .
INVITED SPEAKERS INCLUDE:
INTENDED AUDIENCE
Researchers in designs, codes, cryptography and graph theory,
mathematicians and computer scientists in related areas who wish
to explore connections to these areas, research scientists and
others from industry primarily from Canada, graduate students
primarily but not restricted to Western Canada, and undergraduate
students from southern Alberta including Lethbridge and Calgary.
Everyone is welcome.
PROGRAM
We anticipate a combination of instructional lectures and research
sessions. Morning sessions will be for instructional talks and
afternoon sessions for research talks. Selected refereed papers
presented to the last workshop were published in a proceedings
issue of Discrete Applied Math. We anticipate similar plans
being made for this workshop.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Participants who wish to contribute 20-30 minute talks are invited to
submit an abstract of at most 300 words. The abstracts should preferably
be
written in LaTeX or TeX and should be sent to
hadi@cs.uleth.ca .
Deadlines for submission have not been set but are anticipated to be a
few weeks before the workshop starts.
SUPPORT:
There is some financial support available for graduate students and
postdocs. Those working in any area of combinatorics are encouraged to
apply as soon as possible to be considered for financial support.
Further information about the workshop including accommodation information is available at the web site http://www.cs.uleth.ca/dccg .
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Wolf Holzmann, University of Lethbridge
Hadi Kharaghani, University of Lethbridge
Jim Liu, University of Lethbridge
If you have questions or wish to be put on our mailing list, please send
e-mail to Hadi Kharaghani at
hadi@cs.uleth.ca or write to:
DCCG Workshop,
Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science,
University of Lethbridge,
Lethbridge, Alberta T1K 3M4
CANADA
FAX: (403) 329-2519
email: hadi@cs.uleth.ca
Dept. Phone: (403) 329-2470
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Contact Ian Roberts at
iroberts@darwin.ntu.edu.au
or Lynn Batten at
lmbatten@deakin.edu.au
for details on the special session.
More information about the meeting will soon be available on the
Australian Mathematical Society website; see
http://www.austms.org.au/People/Conf/AustMS45/ or else
http://room.anu.edu.au/conferences/AustMS2001/ .
Some financial support is available for students presenting a paper
who are members of the Australian Mathematical Society.
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Contact: Kathy Horadam or Serdar Boztas;
email: horadam@rmit.edu.au
or serdar@rmit.edu.au .
Web:
http://www.irit.fr/ACTIVITES/AAECC/A14.shtml
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A very useful website giving upcoming conferences in Coding,
Cryptography and Effective Algebra AND their deadlines is
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/codes/Anne.Canteaut/annonces.html .
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Congratulations to
Professor JENNIFER SEBERRY
who is one of
five program leaders of the
Smart Internet Technology CRC,
which has been successful in receiving funding of $22,000,000
over 7 years.
Jennie is also the leader of the "Intelligent Environments Program".
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News from
BRENDAN McKAY
at ANU, who sent email saying:
> Our PC cluster just won some prize in America for the first
> built for less than US$1 per megaflop.
>
> Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 07:08:00 +1100
> From: Robert Edwards
Monday 13 November 2000 - The Australian Computer Society (ACS) has
congratulated Australian National University (ANU) on winning a
prestigious international supercomputing award.
ANU's Australian-designed and built Bunyip Beowulf-style supercomputer
won the Gordon Bell Prize for best price/performance at the
Supercomputing 2000 Conference in Texas late last week.
ACS President John Ridge said the award was yet another example of
Australian research leading the world.
"It's very exciting to see Australian innovation being recognised at a
global level," said Mr Ridge.
"Not only has ANU created a supercomputer that is superior to all
others in terms of its price/performance, but they have demonstrated
that Australians can achieve extraordinary results in a field which has
considerable commercial potential.
"Once again, this result highlights the need for both the public and
private sectors to invest more heavily in Australian R&D and
innovation," he continued.
"The Bunyip project was only made possible through a research grant
from ANU, but consider what other breakthroughs might be made if more
funding was available for our researchers and academics, and the
benefits these might have for our nation's economy."
Mr Ridge repeated his earlier call, made during his speech to the
IO2000 2000 Information Outlook Conference in Canberra, for Australian
Governments to lead the way in innovation investment, providing
stronger leadership for the private sector to emulate.
"The ANU's Gordon Bell Award is but one example of Australian
innovation at work. We must provide more opportunities to enable
our knowledge workers - our thinkers and innovators - to push the
boundaries of technology and create new products and services that can
then be commercialised for the domestic and export markets.
"The benefits for Australia will be considerable," he said.
Details of the ANU Bunyip Project are on-line at:
http://tux.anu.edu.au/Projects/Bunyip
This media release is located on the ACS Web site at
http://www.acs.org.au/131100.htm
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OVERSEAS VISITORS
(Please send in details of future visitors and dates in time for contacts to be made with the visitors.)
The following people will be visiting the Department of Mathematics at the University of Queensland in the first half of 2001:
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MEMBERS' (OR STUDENTS OF MEMBERS) RECENT RESEARCH DEGREES :
Congratulations to two of
Professor Jennie Seberry's students
at the University of Wollongong, on obtaining their PhDs:
DR JEFFREY HORTON,
"Malicious Software and Distributed Computing"
and
DR CHENGXIN QU,
"Boolean Functions in Cryptography".
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PREPRINTS/RECENT PUBLICATIONS BY MEMBERS:
[Note from Ed: In CMSA E-News3 it was decided to shelve this section, as no one was sending in details. So there was no such section in CMSA E-News4. However, the following have been sent in for this issue, so it looks as if this section is restarted! So send in your preprint and recent publication details!]
From Anne Street:
* C.C. Lindner and A.P. Street,
The metamorphosis of lambda-fold block designs with block size four
into lambda-fold 4-cycle systems, Bull. Inst. Combin. Applicns 28 (2000),
7-18; corrigendum, ibid 29, p.88.
* J. Seberry and A.P. Street, Stongbox secured secret sharing schemes,
Utilitas Mathematica 57 (2000), 147-163.
From Graham Norton:
* T.D. Blackmore and G.H. Norton, On trellis structures for Reed-Muller
codes, Finite Fields and their Applications 6 (2000), 39-70.
* T.D. Blackmore and G.H. Norton, On a family of abelian codes and their
state complexities, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory (2001), to appear.
* G.H. Norton and A. Salagean, On the Hamming distance of linear codes
over finite chain rings, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory 46 (2000), 1060-1067.
* G.H. Norton and A. Salagean, On the key equation over a commutative ring,
Designs, Codes and Cryptography 20 (2000), 125-141.
* G.H. Norton and A. Salagean, On the structure of linear and cyclic codes
over finite chain rings, Applicable algebra in engineering, communication
and computing 10 (2000), 489-506.
From Jennifer Seberry:
EDITED BOOK
* Josef Pieprzyk, Eiji Okamoto and Jennifer Seberry, (Eds),
Information Security, ISW'2000}, Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
Vol. 1975, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000.
REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES
* C. Koukouvinos, M. Mitrouli and Jennifer Seberry,
Growth in Gaussian elimination for weighing matrices W(n,n-1),
Linear and Multilinear Algebra, 306 (2000), 189-202.
* Ghulam Chaudhry and Jennifer Seberry,
On the influence of entries in critical sets of Room squares,
Bull ICA, 28 (2000), 67-74.
* C. Koukouvinos and Jennifer Seberry,
New orthogonal designs and sequences with two and three variables
in order 28, Ars Combinatoria, 54, (2000), 97-108.
* Chengxin Qu, Jennifer Seberry and Josef Pieprzyk,
Homogeneous bent functions, Applied Discrete Mathematics,
Volume 102, Numbers 1-2, (2000) 133-139.
* C. Koukouvinos, M. Mitrouli and Jennifer Seberry,
Bounds on the maximum determinant for (1,-1) matrices.
Bull ICA, 29, (2000), 39-48.
* Jennifer Seberry and Anne Penfold Street, Strongbox secured secret
sharing schemes, Utilitas Mathematica, 57, (2000), 147-163.
* S. Georgiou, C. Koukouvinos, M. Mitrouli and Jennifer Seberry,
Necessary and sufficient conditions for two variable orthogonal
designs in order 44: Addendum, JCMCC 34 (2000), 59-64.
* L.F. Fitina and Jennifer Seberry, On the spectrum of an F-square,
Australas. J. Combin., 22 (2000) 81-90.
* Tianbing Xia, Jennifer Seberry and Josef Pieprzyk,
Construction of cubic homogeneous boolean bent functions,
Australas. J. Combin. 22 (2000) 233-246.
* Roderick J Fletcher and Jennifer Seberry, New D-optimal designs
of order 110, Australas. J. Combin., 23 (2001) 49-52.
* Roderick J Fletcher, Marc Gysin and Jennifer Seberry,
Application of the discrete Fourier transform to the search for
generalised Legendre pairs and Hadamard matrices, Australas. J. Combin.,
23 (2001) 75-86.
* Marc Gysin and Jennifer Seberry, On infinite families of sequences
with one and two valued autocorrelation and two valued crosscorrelation
function, Australas. J. Combin., 23 (2001) 197-209.
* Marc Gysin and Jennifer Seberry, On ternary complementary pairs,
Australas. J. Combin., 23 (2001) 153-170.
REFEREED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
* Jaroslaw Pastuszak, Dariusz Michalek, Josef Pieprzyk, Jennifer Seberry,
Identification of bad signatures in batches, ACISP'00, Lecture Notes
in Computer Science, Vol. 1751, H. Imai and Y. Zheng (Eds),
Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Vol. 1751, 28--45, 2000.
* Jaroslaw Pastuszak, Dariusz Michalek, Josef Pieprzyk, Jennifer Seberry,
Codes identifying Bad Signatures in Batches, INDOCRYPT'2000, Lecture
Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1977, B. Roy and C Ding,
Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000, 143-154.
* C.X. Qu and J. Seberry and J. Pieprzyk, Relationships between
boolean functions and symmetric groups, International Computer
Symposium 2000, Taiwan, 2000.
RADIO/TV/MEDIA PRESENTATIONS
* Jennifer Seberry, bo2k software from oxblood@cultdeadcow.com,
Interview with Andrew West, Sun Herald, 2 Feb 2000.
* Jennifer Seberry, St George Bank, Denial of Service Attack,
Interview with Katy Cronin, ABC "Lateline", Andrew West, 1 Sept 2000.
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The AUSTRALASIAN JOURNAL OF COMBINATORICS :
There is now a web page for the Australasian Journal of
Combinatorics, and it has a search facility for past authors and
for keywords in paper titles. See
http://ajc.math.auckland.ac.nz/ .
Instructions to authors are also available from this web site.
From now on, submissions to the AJC may be sent to either of the addresses below. Paul Bonnington will mainly deal with papers in graph theory, and Elizabeth Billington will deal with all other areas of combinatorics. However, a paper may be submitted to either address below, or indeed (as in the past) to any member of the Editorial Board, or emailed to ajc@maths.uq.edu.au .
Dr E.J. Billington,
Editor-in-Chief,
Australasian Journal of Combinatorics,
Department of Mathematics,
The University of Queensland,
Qld 4072
Australia
Dr C.P. Bonnington,
Managing Editor,
Australasian Journal of Combinatorics,
Department of Mathematics,
The University of Auckland,
Private Bag 92019,
Auckland,
New Zealand.
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REMINDER:
Deadline for next issue 31 May 2001.
Elizabeth Billington, Dept Maths, University of Queensland, Qld 4072.
ejb@maths.uq.edu.au
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