Greetings from the exciting Workshop on Sublinear Algorithms at John Hopkins University! As this workshop and the upcoming SODA and ITCS conferences get 2016 to a roaring start, let us take one last look back at property testing news from last year. In December, one work in particular caught my eye:

 Non-Local Probes Do Not Help with Graph Problems by Mika Göös, Juho Hirvonen, Reut Levi, Moti Medina, and Jukka Suomela (arXiv). A generalization of property testing that has recently seen some fascinating developments in the past few years is the local computation algorithms (LCA) model, in which the algorithm is asked to answer some local query (such as “what is the color of this vertex in some fixed, legal coloring of the graph?”) in sublinear-time. This paper relates the LCA model to message-passing models and in the process gives a powerful new tool for establishing lower bounds in LCAs.