From January 2nd to January 9th in 2009, 20 professors and students in the ITCS of Tsinghua University went to America to take part in the Symposium on Discrete Algorithms hosted by SIAM AND ACM SIGACT. SODA is the top conference of the Algorithms circle, and algorithm is also a main direction of study of ITCS. Therefore, this conference is very important and helpful in the improvement of our people’s theory knowledge. 

The scene of the Soda Conference

   This conference covers a variety of issues, with its emphasis on discrete algorithms and data structure, such as combination problem, optimization theory, probability, graph theory, number theory, topology, game theory, and financial problems. During the SODA conference which lasts for three days, the students acquainted themselves with a lot of frontier achievements in algorithms, learned many ingenious ways to solve problems, and got some insight into some important problems that are widely concerned about in algorithms currently.

The students discussing together and learning

from each other after the conference

After the conference, our people visited New York City, especially the prosperous Manhattan district. They also visited the goddess of liberty—the symbol of American dream, the bustling New York seaport, and the brightly-lit Wall Street. People also acquired some knowledge about American culture and legal ideology. All of these impressed the students deeply.

The goddess of liberty which stands for American dream

The journey is trying but fun

The Chinese food dinner party in America

In a word, this conference enlarges students’ vision greatly and enables them to learn knowledge of all fields. During this conference the students also studied with emphasis the subjects that they are interested in or the subjects on which they used to have some basic study. This is in conformity with the aim with which Professor Yao founded ITCS. Mr. Yao hoped that the students could be raised to the same level as the students from MIT and Stanford University and become top computer talents in the world. Therefore he strives to build an international platform that facilitates the communication of academic ideas and practice, organizes the students to go abroad to take part in the international conference, in order that the students could reach the first-class level gradually. The students not only learned knowledge from the lecture, they also acquired the right attitude and spirit to conduct scientific research, the skills for making speeches and presentations, and they also learned how to discover problems, model problems, study problems, solve problems and write thesis, in other words, they learned the process of the scientific research of computer theory. The students did benefit a lot from this journey in America.