The 25th Annual Cumberland Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing will be held May 10--12, 2012 on the campus of East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, TN. This annual conference on discrete mathematics provides a regional forum for the exchange of the latest research results and new directions of interests to researchers in the field. It also provides a stimulating and informative venue for new investigators; including undergraduate students, graduate students and recent PhDs. Over the past twenty-four years, the Cumberland Conference has developed a reputation for having high quality speakers and for providing a setting conducive to collaboration among the participants.
The goal of the 2012 Cumberland Conference is reflected by its theme: Open Problems and Contemporary Conjectures. This conference plays a unique role as a regional exchange for researchers of all levels and has always actively promoted the initiation of new research collaborations. This year the conference topics include design theory, networks and their applications, hypergraphs, domination in graphs, graph coloring, extremal and probabilistic combinatorics, and degree distribution models. Four internationally-renown researchers have accepted invitations to be principal speakers: Jozsef Balogh (University of Illinois), Fan Chung (University of California, San Diego), Michael Henning (University of Johannesburg, South Africa), and Curt Lindner (Auburn University). The invited speakers and the conference participants are encouraged to give talks within the theme of the conference by including open problems and recently posed conjectures. The contemporary nature of the conference also encourages graph-theoretic models that are applicable in areas such as computer science, data mining, image capturing, and biological networks.
More details are available at www.etsu.edu/cas/math/cumberland
was held May 10-12, 2012 at East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee. This regional conference has been held annually since 1988 and has been hosted by various universities in the Southeast. It was designed to bring together discrete mathematicians and computer scientists to discuss the most recent research in the field. It provides a regional forum for the presentation and exchange of ideas and discussions of problems of mutual interest. The theme of this 25th anniversary of the conference was ''Favorite Conjectures and Open Problems''; a theme that reflects the original design of the conference. A special emphasis was directed towards collaboration opportunities for young researchers, both new faculty and students. Thus this conference plays a unique role as a regional exchange for researchers of all levels. It promotes applications of discrete mathematics, especially theoretical computer science. The conference topics included Design Theory, Networks, Domination, Coloring, and Applications. There were over 100 attendees at the conference with more than half of these giving contributed talks. There were approximately 60 total contributed talks, each running 15-20 minutes, given in two parallel sessions beginning Thursday, May 10, at 1:00 pm and continuing through Saturday, May 12, 1:30 pm. There was scheduled time in between talks for questions and discussions. There was also scheduled morning and afternoon breaks that allowed for exchange of ideas, discussion, and collaboration among participants. Over the past twenty-four years, the Cumberland Conference has developed a reputation for having high quality speakers. We continued this tradition for the Twenty-Fifth Annual Cumberland Conference. The four internationally-renown plenary speakers were: Jozsef Balogh (University of Illinois), Fan Chung (University of California, San Diego), Michael Henning (University of Johannesburg, South Africa), and Curt Lindner (Auburn University). Many of the contributed talks were related to one of the four areas captured by the four principle speakers. An evening session was held in the Teddy Roosevelt Room, a unique and informal meeting space on the first floor of the Carnegie Hotel. An even mix of faculty and students met and exchanged research ideas and worked on unsolved problems. To commemorate this special anniversary of the conference, an after dinner talk was given by Ron Gould (Emory University) who gave a summary of the history of the conferences and highlighted special memories of the conference events. In addition, the Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing is scheduled to publish a special issue containing the proceedings from this conference. Thirteen papers were accepted to be included in the proceedings, and the special issue is expected to be published July, 2013. The financial support provided by the National Science Foundation was instrumental in the success of the conference.
