?
International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms, 32nd International Workshop, IWOCA 2021, Ottawa, ON, Canada, July 5–7, 2021
The 32nd International Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms (IWOCA 2021) was
originally scheduled to take place at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Due to the
COVID-19 pandemic, it was decided, a few months before the paper submission
deadline, that the conference would move online. The conference took place during
July 5–7, 2021, organized and coordinated from Ottawa by the IWOCA 2021
Organizing Committee, with online logistics support by The Fields Institute for
Research in Mathematical Sciences.
IWOCA is an annual conference series that started in 1989 as AWOCA
(Australasian Workshop on Combinatorial Algorithms) and became an international
conference in 2007, having been held in Australia, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland,
France, Indonesia, India, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, UK, and USA. The
conference brings together researchers on diverse topics related to combinatorial
algorithms, such as algorithms and data structures; algorithmic game theory; approximation
algorithms; complexity theory; combinatorics and graph theory; combinatorial
generation and enumeration; combinatorial optimization; combinatorics of words and
strings; computational geometry; computational biology; cryptography and information
security; graph algorithms; graph drawing and labelling; decompositions and combinatorial
designs; distributed and network algorithms; dynamic and evolving networks;
mobile agents; new paradigms of computation; online algorithms; parallel algorithms;
parameterized and exact algorithms; probabilistic and randomized algorithms; and
streaming algorithms.
The Program Committee (PC) of IWOCA 2021 received 107 submissions. Each
submission was reviewed by at least three PC members and some trusted external
referees, and evaluated on its quality, originality, and relevance to the conference. The
PC selected 38 papers for presentation at the conference and inclusion in the
proceedings.
Four invited talks were given at IWOCA 2021, by Maria Chudnovsky (Princeton
University, USA), Anna Lubiw (University of Waterloo, Canada), David Peleg
(Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel), and Alfred Wassermann (University of
Bayreuth, Germany). This volume contains the abstracts of the four invited talks and
the paper versions of two of those invited talks.
The PC selected two contributions for the best paper and the best student paper
awards. The best paper award was given to Benjamin Merlin Bumpus and Kitty Meeks
for their paper “Edge Exploration of Temporal Graphs”. The best student paper award
was given to Stefan Lendl, Gerhard J. Woeginger, and Lasse Wulf for their paper
“Non-preemptive Tree Packing”.
IWOCA 2021 was held more than a year after a global pandemic was declared in
March 2020, a period that has been a trying time for everyone around the world.
During this period, computer scientists and mathematicians have quickly learned how
to teach, research, and collaborate remotely. In the midst of these uncertain times, the
response to our call for papers was a record number of submissions, for which we are
very grateful. While we long for a time when we will be sharing knowledge in the same
geographical location, we are also very thankful to many individuals and organizations
who worked together to build a successful online conference.
We would like to thank all the authors who responded to the call for papers, the
invited speakers, the members of the PC, the external referees, and the members of the
Organizing Committee.
We also thank Springer for publishing the proceedings of IWOCA 2021 in their
ARCoSS/LNCS series and for their financial support towards the best paper and the
best student paper awards.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial and logistics support from the following
institutions: The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, the Faculty of
Engineering at uOttawa, and the University of Ottawa.
Finally, we thank the Steering Committee for giving us the opportunity to serve as
program chairs of IWOCA 2021 and for their continuous support.
