20th CPM

In Algorithms Research, specialized conferences (SPAA, SoCG, APPROX/RANDOM, COLT, PODC, and others) find a way to survive and thrive -- some more robustly than others -- because, even if they don't hold the attention of the entire CS community, there are hard problems, interesting structures, breakthrough techniques, and new applications in each of these areas. CPM (combinatorial pattern matching) is an example. Many algorithmii have sharpened their technical teeth on pattern matching problems; there are some truly hard problems (subquadratic regular expression matching), interesting structures (beautiful periodicity properties that you have to ultimately tap), breakthrough techniques (sparse convolutions, burrows-wheeler transforms, suffix sorting), and new applications (genomics to XML processing and web documents clustering). CPM, perhaps less centrally than many other specialized conferences, has survived and thrived: the 2009 edition (deadline is Jan 12) is its 20th!