Doctoral seminar / Graduate students' reading seminar¶
Thursday 9:50-12:10, S8 S11
About the seminar¶
During the Winter Semester 2025/2026, the seminar is organized by Pavel Valtr and Robert Šámal. Contact us (at valtr@kam... or samal@iuuk...) if you have any question.
The participants of the seminar present papers of general interest from (discrete) mathematics and theoretical cs. The articles are selected by the seminar organizers in cooperation with the advisors of participating PhD students. Keep in mind that for preparing your presentation you may also need to take a look at a related paper (or papers).
Instructions for presentations -- Read carefully before your presentation¶
Mentor
For each paper there is a "mentor" available who will be glad to help you with understanding the paper and preparation of the talk. In particular, the mentor will meet with you one week before your presentation (typically on Thursday) to discuss the structure of your presentation with you, to tell you his/her comments on your handout (one- to two-page summary) and your slides (if applicable), and to answer any questions you may have.
Before meeting the mentor, please send the draft of your handout by email to samal@iuuk... and valtr@kam... (and to the mentor, if it is none of the seminar organizers). The final version of your handout should be sent to valtr@kam... and samal@iuuk... the day before your presentation (on Wednesday). We will bring a physical copy for everyone.
As explained on the first two seminars, the default is to have two presentations during this academic year (one per semester) - for instance one long presentation and one short presentation.
Handout
TODO
Long presentation
- The speaker's task is to read and understand the whole paper, then present the main/most interesting parts of it.
- Please do explain a motivation and "big picture" -- but don't stop there, we want to see the proof, or at least part of it (and overview of the other parts).
- The motivation and "big picture" should be explained in the first cca 30-40 minutes of the presentation. You may (but do not have to) use slides for this initial part of the presentation.
- During the meeting with the mentor, the speaker presents the first cca 15 minutes of the long presentation to the mentor.
- There is a 10-15 minute break during the talk (the speaker chooses the optimal timing of it).
Short presentation
- The speaker's task is to understand the results of the paper as well as their connection to the previous related results, conjectures etc., and also to get a rough idea how the proofs of the main results go.
- A short presentation is with slides and of duration about 30-45 minutes. You may use blackboard to complement the slides. The idea is to prepare a conference/workshop-type presentation.
- Please explain the results of the paper, related previous results, their motivation and a "big picture".
- It may be also suitable to include a quick outline of some of the proofs.
- After the presentation there will be a discussion of "unlimited" length, definitely longer than is usual at conferences. We may use that to finally understand the basic definition :-) or to learn details of some proofs, etc. It would be great if you have prepared a cca 15 minute presentation of some of the proofs for the case when other things are clear.
- The total time we reserve for the short presentation is 60 minutes.
Papers¶
A summary of (some of) the proposed articles More papers will be added soon. However, most papers will be presented in the first week of the seminar. Articles from other sources are welcome, but consult them please with the seminar organizers.
Mailing-list¶
Announcements are sent out via mailing list dokt-seminar-l@kam. If you wish to subscribe, visit the archive or change your options, see the mailing list webpage.
Schedule¶
Past years¶
Seminar web-page from 2001/2002, 2002/2003, 2003/2004, 2004/2005, 2005/2006, 2006/2007, 2007/2008, 2008/2009, 2009/2010, 2010/2011, 2011/2012, 2012/2013, 2013/2014, 2014/2015, 2015/2016, 2016/2017, 2017/2018, 2018/2019, 2019/2020, 2020/2021, 2021/2022, 2022/2023, 2023/2024, 2024/2025,