On the Differences between "Practical" and "Applied"

The terms “practical” and “applied” are often used synonymously in our community. For the purpose of this talk I will assign more precise, distinct meanings to both terms (which are not intended to be ultimate definitions). More specifically, I will reserve the word “applied” for work whose crucial, central goal is finding a feasible, reasonable (e.g. economical) solution to a concrete real-world problem, which is requested by someone outside theoretical computer science for his or her own work.

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