A review of SIROCCO 2012 Heger

Who would have thought that Sirocco winds could one day blow over Iceland? The distributed computing community made it happen by holding the 19th International Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity (sirocco) in Reykjavik1. With its 120,000 inhabitants, its harbor, small town houses, but crowded bars and many cultural venues, Reykjavik has an air of a village and one of a European metropolis at the same time. In July, the days last forever and so does the hustle and bustle in Reykjavik streets. Reykjavik University, where the conference took place, is located in the southern part of the city, in a newly built campus on the shore, just next to a naturally heated sand beach, and is equipped with modern and pleasant facilities. The fifty or so participants had there the perfect environment to discuss advances in sirocco’s areas of interest. sirocco is devoted to the study of communication and knowledge in distributed systems from both qualitative and quantitative viewpoints. It has been indeed the aim of sirocco, since its 1994 first edition, to comprehend trade-offs and interplay between information that entities are provided in a distributed system and their computational and communication power. Aside from rather traditional problems such as agreement, local decision or graph exploration, new and innovative ones were also given special attention such as problems involving game theoretic aspects and quantum computations. And it is in reflection of this innovative spirit that each year, a Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing is awarded to individuals whose contribution introduced new approaches or research areas. This year, 28 talks were selected among 54 submitted papers, with Roger Wattenhofer and Boaz Patt-Shamir as invited speakers.