PODC 2019 Review

The 38th ACM SIGACT-SIGOPS Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2019) was held on July 29-August 2, 2019 at the Double Tree Hilton hotel in Toronto, Canada. With three keynotes, over 40 accepted papers, over 20 accepted brief announcements, two workshops, and roughly 150 attendants, PODC 2019 constituted a composition of fascinating improvements in many areas of distributed and parallel computing. On the evening of the 31st of July, the conference banquet was held on a cruise over beautiful Lake Ontario and included the best papers award ceremony. The best paper award went to Yi-Jun Chang, and Thatchaphol Saranurak for their work titled, \Improved Distributed Expander Decomposition and Nearly Optimal Triangle Enumeration" [19]; two best student paper awards were given to Yi-Jun Chang, Manuela Fischer, and Yufan Zheng for their work titled, \The Complexity of (Δ + 1) Coloring in Congested Clique, Massively Parallel Computation, and Centralized Local Computation" [17] which was co-authored with Mohsen Gha ari, and Jara Uitto, and to Michal Dory and Dean Leitersdorf for the work on \Fast Approximate Shortest Paths in the Congested Clique" [16] which was co-authored with Keren Censor-Hillel, and Janne H. Korhonen. Congratulations to all the awardees and a special congratulations to Yi-Jun Chang for having received both awards! This review would be incomplete without mentioning perhaps one of the most notable results in the eld in recent years which was uploaded to the online archive just days before the conference gathered, and which was not presented at PODC 2019 but a ected many works presented at the conference: the work titled, ¶olylogarithmic-Time Deterministic Network Decomposition and Distributed Derandomization" [48] by Vaclav Rozhon, and Mohsen Gha ari. Throughout the entire conference there was talk regarding the implications of this work, culminating with perhaps one of the more memorable moments of PODC 2019, where Mohsen described this result during his talk on a di erent paper which he co-authored with Fabian Kuhn - Mohsen quoted from his and Kuhn's paper [31]: \we provide results that are in some sense the strongest that one can achieve, barring a major breakthrough", and on the next slide was that major breakthrough - a picture of Vaclav Rozhon along with the rst page of [48]. Congratulations to the authors on this work! We hope that this review will give readers the opportunity to experience some of PODC 2019 and potentially attend the conference in future years. Thank you to the organizers and authors for a captivating and though-provoking conference!