April 2018
Welcome to the new DIMACS website. We hope you like the new look and that it makes learning about DIMACS activities easier and more convenient. As you start to browse the new website, you’ll see that the transition is only partial and that the new site links to pages on the “legacy site” as needed. This will continue for the foreseeable future.
The old DIMACS website is archived as of 4/1/2018, and it will remain here, probably forever. It contains over 17,000 pages, the earliest of which date back to the early 1990’s and the dawn of the World Wide Web. All of these pages are written in raw html with no database-driven content. The new site is a step toward a more responsive and dynamic DIMACS website.
The transition to the new site will occur in stages. At a high level, the DIMACS website can be viewed as containing information about events (workshops, seminars, etc.), programs (special foci, education programs, research projects), people (members, visitors, staff), and materials (videos, educational modules, technical reports, and books). Most of the pages on the DIMACS site relate to events, so this first phase of website modernization focuses on events and building a database to support dynamic queries on events. The most obvious example of this is the new calendar feature on the homepage.
The database (and thus the new website) now contains all DIMACS workshops dating back to the beginning of 2014, as well as the complete set of events (some of which occur before 2014) for the following themed programs:
- Special Focus on Bridging Continuous and Discrete Optimization;
- Special Focus on Cryptography;
- Initiative for Privacy and Security of Big Data;
- Mathematics of Planet Earth;
- Special Focus on Information Sharing and Dynamic Data Analysis;
- Special Focus on Cybersecurity; and
- Special Focus on Energy and Algorithms.
We will continue to move older special focus events into the database so that they are accessible through calendar queries, but we do not expect to migrate all of them. There are just too many!
The next phase of website modernization will focus on making the new features more usable and convenient. We know that some things, particularly related to seminars, still need improvement, and we are eager to make them better. Once the event features are running smoothly, we will look to upgrade other areas of the website. Until then, we hope you like the new look.