2013 is coming to an end, and many papers have been published this year. My recommendations for the next holidays follow: deep, imaginative, mixing the practical and theoretical, and perfect to inspire hope for a better future.

1. A Simple Algorithm for the Graph Minor Decomposition. A quadratic time algorithm for computing graph minor decompositions is presented, improving from the previous cubic lower bound. It’s very intuitive and easy to understand, so I bet it will appear on future books on algorithms, turning it into a classic.

2. Dynamic graph connectivity in polylogarithmic worst case time. The classic problem of whether there is a path between two nodes on a dynamically changing graph has a poly-logarithmic algorithm: a theoretical advance with multiple nice applications in practice (routing, transportation, robotics…)

3. Ambient backscatter: wireless communication out of thin air. Imagine devices communicating wirelessly using ambient radio-frequency as the only source of power, by backscattering ambient RF signals: the Internet of Things (IoT) must surely run over this in the future.

4. Automatic patch generation learned from human-written patches: although the rate of successfully generated patches is still quite low, it’s interesting to learn that there are progresses on this frankly quite boring area of software maintenance.

5. F10, A Fault-Tolerant Engineered Network: a novel way to successfully attack the commonplace problem of network reliability and performance in datacenters by re-examining all the involved parts: network topology, routing algorithm and failure detection.

6. Pinocchio, Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation: amazing improvements in the generation of proofs of general computations and their verification, rendering into the practical this basic necessity of the next cloud computing landscape. Combine this with Pepper and you’re surely gaining knowledge of the most important advances of this year on the future of cloud computing.