UB Hosts Computational Complexity Conference

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The 1998 Conference on Computational Complexity sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) will be held June 15-18 in the Center for Tomorrow on the University at Buffalo North (Amherst) Campus.

Computational complexity -- the study of efficient computation using limited resources such as time and space -- is the field that is developing the foundations of modern cryptography and Internet security.

According to Kenneth Regan, Ph.D., associate professor in the UB Department of Computer Science and local arrangements chair, modern computer security is based on the premise that there are computational problems that require more than a reasonable amount of time and space to solve.

"Such computational intractability -- the very subject of computational complexity -- provides the foundation for all confidential information transactions on the Internet today, which is based on problems where you don't want anyone (other than the intended recipient) to solve them in a reasonable amount of time," said Regan, who organized the conference with Alan Selman and Jin-Yi Cai, professors of computer science.

The meeting is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee for Mathematical Foundations of Computing, in cooperation with the Association of Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. Additional support comes from the Department of Computer Science and the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at UB.

In addition to papers being presented by Cai and Regan, the conference has attracted researchers from institutions such as the University of Ulm, the University of Frankfurt, Montreal University, the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Science, Moscow State University, Harvard University, Weizmann Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, AT&T Labs and Los Alamos Laboratories.

Additional information is available at http://www.cs.buffalo.edu/~regan/ccc98.