Helsinki Algorithms & Theory Days
27–28 Aug, 2026. Helsinki, Finland

About the event

Theory Days is an activity of HALT - Helsinki Algorithms and Theory that will bring together the theoretical computer science community in the Helsinki area.

The focus area of the event is theory and foundational research. Our main goal is to promote the sharing of ideas and potentially spark new collaborations. The event will include presentations by invited speakers from abroad as well as talks contributed by participating HALT research groups.

Invited Speakers

Noah Fleming (Lund University)

Helger Lipmaa (University of Tartu)

Ian Mertz (Charles University)

Attending the workshop

Registration

Every participant (speaker or not) must register by filling the
personal registration form.

If you would like to give a talk, please register your talk by filling also the
talk registration form.

The deadline for both personal and talk registration is August 7, 2026.

Registration is now closed.

Other Info

Attendance will be free of charge for all participants, including coffee breaks, social event, and dinner. Kindly note that lunch will not be provided.

We acknowledge the generous funding by the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), Aalto CS Algorithms and Theory research area as well as the support of Profs. Barbara Keller, Russell W. F. Lai, Sándor Kisfaludi-Bak (Aalto University) and Profs. Juha Kontinen, Mikko Koivisto (University of Helsinki).

Practical information

Dinner

The dinner will be served at Block by Dylan.

When: Thursday, August 27th, at 18:00.
Where: Eteläranta 18, 00130 Helsinki.

Social event

The social event will be a guided tour at the dismissed Hanasaari power plant.
We will leave from the workshop venue and head to the site right after the last session.

When: Friday, August 28th, at 17:00 lasting 1h30m.
Where: Parrukatu 1 - 3, 00540 Helsinki.

Organizers

  • Antonio Cruciani, Aalto University
  • Massimo Equi, Aalto University
  • Tuomas Hakoniemi, University of Helsinki
  • Juha Harviainen, University of Helsinki
  • Eliel Ingervo, Aalto University
  • Chandra Mohapatra, Aalto University
  • Christina Sirviö, University of Helsinki
  • Jiaheng Wang, University of Helsinki

Contact

For further questions please email Massimo Equi or Jiaheng Wang.

Massimo Equi: firstname.lastname@aalto.fi

Jiaheng Wang: firstname.lastname@helsinki.fi

Venue

The event will take place in Unioninkatu 40, Room B116 (Hall 1), in the Metsätalo building of the University of Helsinki downtown campus.
This is not the same venue as last year.

The room is located on the 1st floor of the building.


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Workshop schedule

Thursday, Aug 27th
09:30 Ian Mertz. Computing with a Full Hard Drive in 2026
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Chandra Mohapatra. Optimal Union Probability interval is NP-hard
11:30 Petteri Kaski. Partition Rank and Algebraic Circuit Lower Bounds
12:00 Christoph Jabs. Certifying Pareto Optimality in Multi-objective Maximum Satisfiability
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Jara Uitto. Maximum Matching Approximation in the Semi-Streaming Model
14:30 Maxime Flin. Sublogarithmic Distributed Vertex Coloring
15:00 Sándor Kisfaludi-Bak. Touring a sequence of orthogonal polygons
15:30 Coffee break
16:00 Helger Lipmaa. On Modern SNARKs: How to Verify Computation Efficiently
18:00 Dinner
Friday, Aug 28th
09:30 Corinna Coupette. The Curriculum Design Problem
10:00 Long Tran. A Two-Parameter Calculus for Gaussian Privacy Guarantees
10:30 Coffee break
11:00 Jukka Suomela. AI tools in TCS research
11:30 Jiaheng Wang. Proving NP-hardness when carbon dioxide becomes dry ice
12:00 Keijo Heljanko. Certificates for Hardware Model Checking
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Noah Fleming. Search Problems and Proofs
15:00 Short break
15:15 Open problems session
17:00 Social event