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DIMACS Director of Education Midge Cozzens pens her "Henry Pollak Memories", speaking to Henry's influence on DIMACS and COMAP, especially his impact on education while at Bell Labs and later at Teachers College Columbia. He always put teachers centerstage, both teaching them and learning from them.

With deep gratitude, DIMACS announces the Endowed DIMACS Support Fund created by Dr. A. David Mangelsdorff and Dr. Linda A. Smith.

DIMACS is soon to have its first art installation. “Domino Fred” is a mosaic portrait of DIMACS Director Emeritus Fred Roberts created with 23 sets of double-nine dominos. Domino Fred is like many things coming out of DIMACS—it is an application of discrete mathematics, it is connected with a DIMACS program, and it is the result of a collaborative effort to construct a solution. Here, we recount the making of Domino Fred in words, pictures, and a time-lapse video!

DIMACS/IAS postdoctoral associate Shashank Srivastava received both the Best Paper Award and the Best Student Paper Award at the 36th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), held January 12–15, 2025, in New Orleans, Louisiana. The awards were for the paper “Improved List Size for Folded Reed–Solomon Codes.”

The Special Focus on Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity cruised to a close late this summer. The special focus was part of the DIMACS/Simons Collaboration on Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity, a formal partnership between DIMACS and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF-sponsored Collaboration supported activities at both DIMACS and the Simons Institute that were devoted to the study of complexity lower bounds and their implications for determining what is (and is not) efficiently computable.

The Special Focus on Bridging Continuous and Discrete Optimization bridged not only the two large communities within computational and mathematical optimization, but also the two shores of the COVID-19 shutdown that canceled events around the world in 2020.

The DIMACS Workshop on Foundation Models, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Game Theory, held at DIMACS on October 19 - 20, 2023, marked the first of many foreseeable steps towards advancing a research initiative at the intersection of these topics. With a notable shift towards generative AI—models trained on extensive data to generate content adaptable to a myriad of downstream tasks—the workshop aimed to delve into the role that game theory, a mathematical subfield of economics, could play in contributing to these developments and pondered the reverse impact that generative AI can have on game theory.

Despite COVID-related delays that kept us idling at the depot for over a year, the 12^th DIMACS Implementation Challenge on Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) launched in the fall of 2021 and concluded in April 2022 with a highly interactive online workshop. The workshop drew to a close with a festive awards ceremony that highlighted a sizable list of contributions. This article recaps some of these contributions, recognizes top-performing teams, and outlines related future plans.

Mathematics is extremely relevant to increasing the resilience and sustainability of our planet and better understanding the challenges it faces. To that end, the global mathematics community collaborated to produce a toolkit (an e-book) titled Mathematics for Action: Supporting Science-Based Decision Making. The toolkit is an outgrowth of a worldwide effort called Mathematics of Planet Earth, including the 5-year program called Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013+ organized by DIMACS. The toolkit, published as an open-access book by UNESCO, is closely connected to the United Nations Member States’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. This agenda includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that represent an urgent call to action for all countries to collectively tackle societal and planetary challenges.

Rutgers University is part of a new Center of Excellence (COE) selected by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Engineering Secure Environments from Targeted Attacks. The new COE is led by Northeastern University, and its Rutgers team is guided by CCICADA Director Fred Roberts and Midge Cozzens, Education Director of both CCICADA and DIMACS.

In celebration of National Postdoc Appreciation Week (September 20-24), we are delighted to introduce Roei Tell, Cameron Thieme, and Nicole Wein as new postdocs at DIMACS. They join continuing postdocs Troy McMahon, Ariel Schvartzman Cohenca, and Ewerton Rocha Vieira, as the entire Rutgers community returns to campus after a year online.

The coronavirus pandemic disrupted supply chains worldwide and revealed vulnerabilities on a scale never before witnessed. From shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) to empty grocery store shelves, we saw firsthand the fragility of global supply chains. Establishing coherent national policies for acquiring, stockpiling, and distributing vaccines, PPE, medicines, food, and other critical supplies remains a challenge to surmount as we combat the current pandemic and prepare for future pandemics and other disasters.

Forecasting is a fundamental building block in science and engineering whose study draws scholars from statistics, computer science, math, operations research, and business, among other areas. Against the recent backdrop of a contested presidential election and a deadly pandemic, research in forecasting is especially timely as scientists make projections about the pandemic, pollsters analyze predictions, and citizens grapple with the concepts of uncertainty, dynamics, correlations, and distributions.

We are pleased to announce that DIMACS has been selected to receive an award from the Simons Foundation to establish a new Simons Postdoctoral Leadership Initiative at DIMACS. The initiative will fund four Postdoctoral Leaders over the next three years and provide budget to enhance their research through workshops, working groups, and visits that catalyze collaborations aligned with their research visions.

Two of DIMACS Director David Pennock’s papers were honored with Test of Time awards this year. Both papers, published in the early to mid-2000’s, helped shape today’s online search experience. The first made progress in web search algorithms and the second in monetizing search through advertisement auctions.

Please join us in welcoming Troy McMahon, who began his DIMACS postdoc on November 1. He will work with DIMACS Associate Director Lazaros Gallos on algorithms and methods for predicting the spread of diseases such as Covid-19. In particular, they will be looking at the effect of distance, time, and public restriction measures on geographical spreading.

With everyone working remotely the arrival of the 2020 postdocs at DIMACS is less obvious but no less welcome. We are delighted to introduce Ariel Schvartzman Cohenca and Ewerton Rocha Vieira as DIMACS postdocs!

Earlier this year, the DIMACS Special Focus on Cryptography said goodbye to its final visitor to conclude both the special focus and the larger DIMACS/Simons Collaboration in Cryptography that contained it. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a research coordination network (RCN), the DIMACS/Simons Collaboration was the first formal partnership between DIMACS and the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

When disaster strikes, supply chains can be disrupted, placing vulnerable populations at risk. But, the coronavirus pandemic is disrupting supply chains worldwide and revealing vulnerabilities on a scale never before witnessed.