WINE 2008 papers

As a member of the WINE 2008 program committee, I hereby exercise my right to advertise on my blog, the list of accepted papers. If I appear to be "late with the news", my excuse is that I was waiting for the list of short papers to appear, not just the list of long papers. For your inconvenience, both lists seem to appear as Excel spreadsheets, doubly annoying if, like me, you previously made the mistake of installing the odious Office 2007 in place of the slightly more benign Office 2003.

Moving from presentation to content, I see an continued emphasis on non-cooperative games, and in particular, congestion games on networks is still going strong. There's a bit of social choice theory, like "Anonymity-Proof Voting Rules" by Vincent Conitzer, and "Frequent manipulability of Elections: The Case of Two Voters" by Shahar Dobzinski and Ariel Procaccia. I do not count "Biased Voting and the Democratic Primary Problem" (by Kearns and Tan) in this set, since there the emphasis is more on information diffusion in networks, than on properties of voting rules. There are one of two papers on cooperative games, but not many. (e.g. "Overlapping Coalition Formation" by Chalkiadakis, Elkind, Markakis and Jennings.)

On a completely different topic, it nice to read about Richard Stallman having a go at "cloud computing". His complaint, that it's a mechanism to suck users into locked, proprietary systems, looks entirely valid. Also from the article: His comments echo those made last week by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who criticised the rash of cloud computing announcements as "fashion-driven" and "complete gibberish". Indeed. I would personally criticise the phrase "cloud computing" itself; and note that any intended metaphor is misleading.