The fifth WOLA (Workshop on Local Algorithms) will be virtual, and take place June 14-15. Registration is free, but required: please fill this form by June 10th to attend.

Local algorithms — that is, algorithms that compute and make decisions on parts of the output considering only a portion of the input — have been studied in a number of areas in theoretical computer science and mathematics. Some of the related areas include sublinear-time algorithms, distributed algorithms, streaming algorithms, (massively) parallel algorithms, inference in large networks, and graphical models. These communities have similar goals but a variety of approaches, techniques, and methods. This workshop is aimed at fostering dialogue and cross-pollination of ideas between the various communities.

This year, the workshop will include:

• A poster session: Please submit your poster proposal (title and abstract) at by May 26th. Everyone is invited to contribute. This session will take place on gather.town.
• Invited long talks: the tentative schedule is available, and features talks by James Aspnes, Jelani Nelson, Elaine Shi, Christian Sohler, Uri Stemmer, and Mary Wootters.
• Junior-Senior social meetings
• An AMA (Ask Me Anything) session, moderated by Merav Parter
• A Slack channel
• An Open Problems session

The Program Committee of WOLA 2021 is comprised of:

• Venkatesan Guruswami (CMU)
• Elchanan Mossel (MIT)
• Merav Parter (Weizmann Institute of Science)
• Sofya Raskhodnikova (chair) (Boston University)
• Gregory Valiant (Stanford)

and the organizing committee:

• Sebastian Brandt (ETH)
• Yannic Maus (Technion)
• Slobodan Mitrović (MIT)

For more detail, see the website; to stay up to date with the latest announcements concerning WOLA, join our mailing list!