Joan Boyar, Lene Favrholdt, and Kim S. Larsen all decided to participate in HAlg - Highlights of Algorithms - that was held in Copenhagen this year. It is a relatively new meeting; only held for the fourth time this year. We were excited about the - for Computer Science - unusual format with 6 hour-long survey talks, a large number of invited talks, and a huge number of 4 minute talks that were combined with poster presentations. Among the many good talks, the online algorithms group was particularly fascinated with the survey talk on Learning in Algorithms, given by Sergei Vassilvitskii, where he discussed the combination of online algorithms and the use of machine learning in a setting similar to our recent work on advice complexity.

From May 25 through June 9, 2019, Professor Faith Ellen from the University of Toronto visited the group to work with Joan Boyar and Kim S. Larsen on competitive analysis in distributed algorithms. During her visit, she gave a wonderful survey talk on The Complexity of Consensus and Set Agreement.

TalentCampDK runs talent arrangements for selected elementary and high school students. Joan Boyar was invited to give the final address on Cryptology.

In front of an audience of mathematicians and computer scientist in the Robert Schultz Lecture Theatre at the University of Manitoba, Joan Boyar gave a Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences Distinguished Lecture with the title Multiplicative Complexity of Cryptographic Functions.

Two days earlier, she gave a colloquium talk in the Department of Computer Science on Complexity Classes for Online Algorithms via Advice Complexity.

The Online Algorithms Group also likes meeting under less formal circumstances - here we are together with the larger Algorithms Group, enjoying street food at Storms Pakhus.

Joan Boyar and Kim S. Larsen attended WAOA - Workshop on Approximation and Online Algorithms at Aalto University School of Business. The workshop was a satellite workshop of ALGO. Joan gave a talk on joint work with Kim, Allan Borodin (University of Toronto), and Denis Pankratov (Concordia University) with the title Advice Complexity of Priority Algorithms. Kim contributed as session chair at the conference.

Joan Boyar, Lene Favrholdt, and Kim S. Larsen attended MOLI - Modern Online Algorithms in the picturesque old Charles University in Prague. The workshop was a satellite workshop of ICALP. Joan gave a talk on joint work with Kim and Faith Ellen (University of Toronto) with the title The Scheduler is Very Powerful in Competitive Analysis of Distributed List Accessing and Lene gave the talk Upper and Lower Bound Techniques for Advice Complexity based on joint work with Joan and Kim, as well as former students Christian Kudahl and Jesper W. Mikkelsen. Several talks at the workshop cited results by our online algorithms group.

Joan Boyar, Rolf Fagerberg, and Kim S. Larsen participated in SWAT - the Scandinavian Symposium and Workshops on Algorithm Theory in Malmö, June 18-20. Though this biannual conference is traditionally held in Scandinavia, it always presents a strong, international program. The conference is held in even-numbered years, whereas its sister conference, WADS is held in North America in odd-numbered year.

Joan and Kim were session chairs at the conference and Joan was on the program committee.

Joan Boyar, Rolf Fagerberg, Lene Favrholdt, David Hammer, and Daniel Merkle attended ARCO - the Algorithmic Research Cooperation around Oresund. Daniel talked about Graph Canonicalization Algorithms and their Application in Cheminformatics and David about Multi-way search trees of low height.

According to the ministerial order, a new corp of external examiners ("censor", in Danish) must be established every 4 years. After an application and screening process in cooperation with all Danish universities, the head of the national corp of external examiners, Kim S. Larsen announced the new corp today. In an international setting, using external examiners is quite unusual, but Kim thinks this adds to the quality of Danish university educations. In addition to preventing errors, it gives researchers a chance to exchange ideas and developments related to teaching across institutions, improving on topic selection in courses, and increasing the quality of teaching in general.

The last two days, 32 high school girls from all over Denmark spent the first two days of their Easter holidays learning about the two educations Computer Science and Software Engineering at SDU. The camp was organized in cooperation between the Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Science, in an effort to attract more women. Rolf Fagerberg was a driving force in the planning of the camp, and Lene Favrholdt held a workshop on Algorithms and Big Data. It was a great pleasure working with more than 30 enthusiastic girls, and the plan is to hold a similar camp again next year.

Kim S. Larsen enjoyed giving a talk on generally-applicable analysis techniques in online algorithms for the Theory Group in the Computer Science Department at the University of Toronto. It was an exquisite audience, including Allan Borodin, Joan Boyar, Stephen Cook, Faith Ellen, and Charles Rackoff, as well as a number of brilliant students. The overview part was based on joint work with many different coauthors over the years, while the core technical content was based on work with Joan Boyar, Lene M. Favrholdt, and Michal Kotrbčík, recently presented at WADS in St. John's, NL, Canada.

FNU granted the Online Algorithms group and Cheminformatics group, along with Fabrizio Montesi in Concurrency, 1,382,962 DKK to cover conference travel, research visits, and guests for the coming three years. Joan Boyar is PI of Online Algorithms and Cheminformatics Meet Concurrency. This time the success rate was around 12%.

On April 4, 2016, the algorithms group arranged the ARCO workshop — a small, informal, biannual meeting for algorithms researchers in the nearby geographic area, which includes parts of Denmark and Sweden.