SoCal Theory Day 2026

After a long hiatus, the South California Theory Day is returning!

The next meeting will take place on Friday, February 27, 2026 at UC San Diego.

Useful information:

Schedule:

Time Session Speaker Title
8:30-9:25 Breakfast
9:25-9:30 Welcoming remarks
9:30–10:30 Invited talk 1 Leonard Schulman, Caltech Irreversible Dynamics [slides]
10:30–10:45 Break
10:45–11:45 Short talks 1 Bingbing Hu, UCSD
Ajaykrishnan E S, UCSB
Xinyu Mao, USC
Hardness of Dynamic Tree Edit Distance and Friends [paper] [slides]
3-Coloring Circle Graphs in Quasi-Polynomial Time [paper]
Black-Box Separation Between Multi-Collision Resistance and Collision Resistance [paper]
11:45–1:00 Lunch
1:00–2:00 Invited talk 2 Eric Vigoda, UCSB MCMC Algorithms for Randomly Sampling Colorings [paper]
2:00–3:00 Short talks 2 Yogesh Dahiya, UCSD
Anthony Ostuni, UCSD
Guangxu Yang, USC
On Quantum–Classical Equivalence in the Communication Model [paper] [slides]
Corners and Communication Complexity [paper] [slides]
Deterministic Lifting Theorems for One-Way Number-on-Forehead Communication [paper] [slides]
3:00–3:30 Break
3:30–4:30 Invited talk 3 Shang-Hua Teng, USC Understanding and Characterizing Regularization
4:30–5:50 Short talks 3 Farzan Byramji, UCSD
Miryam Huang, USC
Yusuf Hakan Kalayci, USC
Zihan Zhang, OSU
Lower Bounds for Collision-Finding with Parity Queries [paper]
Obfuscation of Unitary Quantum Programs [paper1] [paper2]
Limitations of Stochastic Selection with Pairwise Independent Priors [paper]
Combinatorial Bounds for List Recovery via Discrete Brascamp-Lieb Inequalities [paper]

Organizers: Shachar Lovett and Barna Saha.
Questions? contact Zaray Aguilar.