THE first ANNOUNCEMENT, April 23, 2004
KNOTS IN WASHINGTON XVIII; Khovanov homology
 May 28-30, 2004
        The Eighteenth Conference on Knot Theory and its Ramifications
George Washington University, Washington, DC


You are cordially invited to attend and give a short talk at our Knots in Washington XVIII conference.
This regional conference is held every semester, in various locations in the Washington area
(see the main KIW page ).

The conference will take place at George Washington University.

We plan six plenary talks - 60 minutes long, and 20-30 minutes long research talks.

You are cordially invited to participate in this and future meetings. We will start on May 28, 10:30am (Rome Hall 801 22nd St. NW).
If you plan to attend please contact one of the organizers. No registration fee! 

We have limited partial NSF support for PhD students, fresh PhD's and mathematicians without a grant.

If you are interested please e-mail to: Fanny Jasso-Hernandez at knotsinwash@yahoo.com

If you would like to give a talk please submit your abstract: The viewing page is at http://at.yorku.ca/cgi-bin/abstract/canv-01
The submission (of abstracts) page is at http://at.yorku.ca/cgi-bin/abstract/submit/canv-01

Speakers include: Marta M. Asaeda, Dror Bar-Natan, Scott Carter, Abhijit Champanerkar, Sergei Chmutov, Mieczyslaw K.Dabkowski, Oliver Dasbach, Laure Helme-Guizon, Mikhail Khovanov, Ilya Kofman, Maciej Mroczkowski, Jozef H.Przytycki, Yongwu Rong, Lev Rozansky, Alexander Shumakovitch, Adam S.Sikora, Fernando Jose Oliveira de Souza, Oleg Viro.

Directions to George Washington University:
http://www.gwu.edu/~map/
The reasonable hotels in the neighborhood are
State Plaza Hotel (2117 E St)
http://www.washington-dc-hotel.us/state-plaza-hotel.php
or Holiday Inn Rosslyn:
http://www.basshotels.com/h/d/hi/hc/waswp
For the hotels around Washington see:
http://www.180096hotel.com/cgi-bin/pickinput?SID=YDL&LKF=YDL&Dest=WAS

For Hotels in Bethesda see:
http://travel.yahoo.com/p-hotel-476388-bethesda_hotels-i

Possibly we will be able to arrange GWU dormatory.
If you are interested please contact Yongwu (rong@gwu.edu).

Comments from Mike Veve:
The conference is scheduled during the Memorial Day weekend. This means two things
1) Traffic will be very heavy on Friday.
2) It will be impossible to drive into GW on Sunday. Sunday is the day of the big motorcycle festival called Rolling Thunder. It takes place on the Mall and cars will not be able to get in and out of Foggy Bottom unless you go through Georgetown. Everyone will be forced to do this so traffic will be at a standstill.
For Sunday, metro is the best option for getting to GW.

Preliminary Schedule:
Talks take place in Rome Hall (801 22nd St. NW), room 459
Friday, May 28:
10:30 - 11:00 Breakfast: coffee and refreshments
11:00 - 12:00 Mikhail Khovanov (UC Davis)
Categorifications of quantum group representations
12:15 - 12:45 Oliver Dasbach (LSU)
On the coefficients of the Jones polynomial
12:45 -- 1:00 Coffee and refreshments
1:00 - 2:00 Oleg Viro (MSRI and Uppsala)
What to categorify? Face models?
2:00 - 3:30 Lunch 3;30 - 6:00 afternoon talks
3:30 - 4:00 Marta M. Asaeda (Univ. Iowa)
Generalizations of Khovanov homology: links on surfaces and beyond
4:10 - 4:40 Adam S. Sikora (SUNY Buffalo)
Khovanov homology and skein modules
4:40 - 5:10 Coffee and refreshments
5:10 - 5:40 Jozef H. Przytycki (GWU)
Thickness of Khovanov homology of k-almost alternating links

7:00pm A small party at Yongwu's house

Saturday, May 29:
Talks take place in Rome building, room 459,
10:00 -- 10:30 Breakfast: coffee and refreshments
10:30 -- 11:30 Mikhail Khovanov (UC Davis)
Matrix factorizations and link homology I
11:40 - 12:10 Laure Helme-Guizon
An analog of Khovanov homology for Graphs
12:15 -- 1:00 Informal discussion on Khovanov homology; Coffee and refreshments
1:00 - 2:00 Lev Rozansky (UNC)
Matrix factorizations and link homology II
2:00 - 3:30 Lunch
3:30 - 7:00 afternoon talks
3:30 - 4:00 Yongwu Rong (GWU)
Experimenting with Exact Sequences
4:10 - 4:40 Ilya Kofman
Spanning trees and Khovanov homology
4:50 - 5:10 Maciej Mroczkowski (Uppsala)
Kauffman Skein Module of the Projective Space
5:10 - 5:40 Coffee and refreshments
5:40 - 6:00 Scott Carter (USAlabama)
Representing knotted surfaces
6:10 - 6:30 Abhijit Champanerkar (Columbia Univ.)
A-polynomial and Bloch invariants of hyperbolic 3-manifolds

7:30pm A small BBQ party at Jozef's house

Sunday, May 30
Talks take place in Rome Hall (801 22nd St. NW), room 459


10:00 -- 10:30 Breakfast: coffee and refreshments
10:30 -- 11:30 Dror Bar-Natan (Univ. Toronto),
4Tu
11:45 -- 12:45 Mikhail Khovanov (UC Davis)
sl(3) link homology
12:45 -- 1:00 Coffee and refreshments
1:00 - 2:00 Alexander Shumakovitch (Dartmouth College)
Torsion of the Khovanov Homology
2:00 - 3:00 Lunch at Rome Hall (Pizza sponsored by GWU)
3:30 - 5:00 afternoon talks
3:00 - 3:20 Mietek Dabkowski (UT Dallas)
Burnside groups in knot theory
3:30 - 3:50 Sergei Chmutov (Ohio State)
The Kauffman bracket and the Bollobas-Riordan polynomial of ribbon graph
4:00 - 4:20 Fernando Jose Oliveira de Souza (Univ. Iowa)
The completeness of the involutory Kuperberg invariant
4:20 - 5:00 Informal disscussion on Khovanov homology

5:00 pm Official end of the conference.

Conference Organizers:
Jozef H. Przytycki (GWU), przytyck@gwu.edu
Yongwu Rong (GWU), rong@gwu.edu

The next conference, Knots in Washington XIX: Topology in Biology II,
will take place in November 12-14, 2004,
see: abstracts