Young Researchers Forum 2026

Young Researchers Forum 2026 is an online event where young researchers (Masters students, PhDs, postdocs) working on PODC/DISC topics stand to benefit in multiple ways including giving talks, interacting with each other, and interacting with more senior researchers. The motivation is that there aren’t many opportunities for young researchers to advertise themselves & their work, especially for the ones who have little funding, have difficulties with visas, or got unlucky with submissions to the standard conferences.

September 9th, 2026
(Some junior-senior meetings will probably be scheduled on the 8th or the 10th, but the main event happens on the 9th.) 

Times are in British Summer Time (UTC +1)

9:00 – 9:05 - Opening remarks

9:05 – 10:00 - Senior talk: Jukka Suomela: "A problem that has kept me entertained for nearly twenty years" [Chair: Laurent]

10:00 – 11:00 - Junior talks [Chair: Laurent]

• 10:00 - Ashish Saxena: "A survey of exploration in dynamic graphs"

• 10:20 - Maxime Flin: "Quantum Coloring of Directed Cycles"

• 10:40 - Rajashree Bar: "Monotone Decontamination of Arbitrary Dynamic Graphs with Mobile Agents"

11:00 – 12:00 - Break

12:00 – 13:00 - Senior talk: Sriram Pemmaraju: "Can a little extra knowledge initially can save a lot of communication later?" [Chair: Billy]

13:00 – 14:40 - Junior talks [Chair: Gustav]

• 13:00 - Guillermo Toyos-Marfurt: "Generalized Commit-Adopt"

• 13:20 - Yaseen Abd-Elhaleem: "On distributed techniques for planar graphs (maximum flow and others)"

• 13:40 - Marc Dufay: "Byzantine Stable Matching"

• 14:00 - Pritam Goswami: "Mobile Agents in Adversarial Networks: Perpetual Exploration in Presence of Malicious Host"

14:20 – 15:00 - Break

15:00 – 15:40 - Talk "How does a PC work?"

15:40 – 17:00 - Junior talks [Chair: Billy]

• 15:40 - Umesh Biswas: "A Gentle Wakeup Call: Symmetry Breaking with Less Collision Cost"

• 16:00 - Gustav Schmid: "LCLs in unbounded degree trees"

• 16:20 - Georgii Semenov: "Ensuring strong eventual consistency in local-first applications: challenges, methods and ideas"

• 16:40 - Gilde Valeria Rodríguez: "On the Limits of Causal Observation in Shared-Memory Systems"

17:00 – 18:00 - Junior-senior meetings

Most junior-senior meetings will happen on the 9th in the 17:00-18:00 time slot, but some may happen outside this time slot. You should have already been contacted regarding this.

Speaker: Jukka Suomela

Talk Title: A problem that has kept me entertained for nearly twenty years

Abstract: I think it was around 2008 when I started to get obsessed with a seemingly trivial problem: finding a maximal matching in 2-colored graphs. Back then we needed it as a subroutine for finding vertex covers.

There is a trivial "proposal algorithm" where black nodes send proposals one by one to their white neighbors and white nodes accept the first proposal that they get. In graphs of maximum degree Δ this is O(Δ) rounds. Can we do better?

Around 2011 we figured out that the answer is "sort of no".

Around 2014 I gave a talk at ADGA where I tried to get everyone else excited about this question, with little success.

Only in late 2018 did we finally prove that the answer is a really solid "no", and this led to a Best Paper Award at FOCS 2019.

And in 2026 this problem still keeps giving, in unexpected contexts, such as quantum computing. In this talk I will discuss this journey with a single problem that has lasted for at least 18 years so far. 

Speaker: Sriram Pemmaraju

Talk Title: Can a little extra knowledge initially can save a lot of communication later?

Abstract: There are fairly old matching lower and upper bounds on the message complexity of the minimum spanning tree (MST) problem in the CONGEST model, establishing Theta(m), where m = number of edges, as the message complexity of MST. This seemed to be the final word on the matter until it was shown that if nodes know the IDs of their neighbors initially, then it is possible to compute an MST using far fewer messages.

Can this extra initial knowledge help with other problems, e.g., the maximal independent set (MIS) problem? This was the question that started me on a journey over the last 10 years that has taken many detours.

I will describe some stops on this journey, including results that appeared in PODC 2021 and ITCS 2024.

It is too late for this year to actively participate but you can attend the talks!

Just for reference, here is the call:

If you're a young researcher (masters students, PhDs, & postdocs), you can participate in one of the following ways: (i) give a talk, (ii) present an open problem for discussion, (iii) meet others. Please fill out the following form by July 31st, 2026 if you would like to participate: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc4TJa7VTNDkpqOw3x0L2v8t6FV0V9Qt30EzhW-RwpqNLSDTg/viewform?usp=publish-editor

If you're a senior researcher, you can participate in one of the following ways: (i) give a talk, particularly one where you talk about the journey you’ve undergone as a researcher (especially overcoming research failures) or perhaps how you came to finally solve an interesting problem, (ii) present an open problem for discussion, (iii) hold a career advice session for interested junior researchers (either as a talk or a more interactive smaller session). Please email us by July 31st, 2026 if you'd like to participate in one of those three ways. We are particularly interested in talks of the first type. If you'd like to participate in some different manner, please let us know as we're open to suggestions.

YRF 2025 - https://sites.google.com/view/youngresearchersforum2025/

Laurent Feuilloley - CNRS, LIRIS, University of Lyon, France

William K. Moses Jr. - Durham University, UK

Gustav Schmid - University of Freiburg, Germany