LIPIcs: Affordable, high-quality and open-access proceedings of conferences in Computer Science

As I hope many members of the theoretical computer science community know, LIPIcs, Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics, is a series of high-quality conference proceedings covering the whole spectrum of research in informatics, which has been run since 2008 in cooperation with Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics. 

The founders of LIPIcs wanted to offer high-quality conferences in Computer Science a venue for publishing their proceedings open access in an affordable way. To date, LIPIcs has published 262 volumes (see DBLP and the LIPIcs web portal) that are free to read for everyone and whose publication costs are kept as low as possible (currently 60 € per paper) and are subsidised by the participants in the relevant conferences. By way of comparison, readers might want to peruse the cost of publishing open access in Springer conference proceedings (at least 30 € per page) or in an Elsevier journal. By way of example, publishing an open access article in Theoretical Computer Science costs 2,370 €, according to the price list dated 19 June 2023 that is available from the Elsevier site. The price for an open-access article in Information and Computation is 2,400 €. Information on the ACM open access pricing is here. If at least one of the authors is a member of the ACM or of one of its SIGs, the cost of publishing an article open access is 1000 USD for ACM journals and 700 USD for conference proceedings.

Conferences that publish their proceedings with LIPIcs include CONCUR, CSL, DISC, ECOOP, ESA, FSTTCS, ICALP, ICDT, IPEC, ITCS, MFCS, SoCG, STACS and many other events readers of this blog will recognise. Conferences such as FORC, ITC, SAT and Advances in Financial Technologies were recent additions to the LIPIcs portfolio. To the best of my knowledge, so far none of the conferences that have started publishing their proceedings with LIPIcs have left the series. I take this fact to mean that those conferences are happy with the service and visibility that LIPIcs provides.

To give you an idea of the growth of LIPIcs, as well as of Dagstuhl Publishing as a whole, I will limit myself to mentioning that, in 2016, the LIPIcs conference proceedings series had 27 annual and biennial conferences in its portfolio and published 16 conference proceedings volumes with a total of 555 articles. By 2022, the LIPIcs portfolio had grown to 40 conferences, 36 volumes and 1444 published articles. In addition, Dagstuhl Publishing (and LIPIcs) have become increasingly involved in open science and, amongst other initiatives, have developed a cooperation with the Software Heritage project to make sure that research-related software artifacts are archived and cited appropriately. 

The Dagstuhl Publishing team has done sterling work on developing specialized software, which has improved the automatic metadata extraction from documents or supporting the manual typesetting. It has also developed a new submission server that has been praised by authors and editors alike.

In my admittedly biased opinion, LIPIcs and Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz Center for Informatics are doing a great job for the computer science community. I strongly encourage high-quality conferences in any field of computer science to consider joining the LIPIcs family and to publish their proceedings in open-access form. 

Feel free to drop me a line if you are interested in applying. See here for information on how to apply and on the selection process.

Summer School on Formal Methods for Cyber-Physical Systems and Workshop on Synthesis, Monitoring and Learning in Udine

The third edition of the UniVr/UniUd Summer School on Formal Methods for Cyber-Physical Systems  will be held in Udine, Italy, in the period August 28-31. It will be followed by the Workshop on Synthesis, Monitoring and Learning on August 31 and September 1. The list of contributors to those events is top notch. 

The course is offered in a hybrid format giving the possibility to remotely attend the course (on the Microsoft Teams platform). On-site places are limited and assigned on first come first served basis. The registration fees are: 

• On-site participation, 250.00 Euro + VAT 22% 
• Online participation, 120.00 Euro + VAT 22% 

The deadline for online application is August 18, 2023. Participation application is available at https://www.cism.it/en/activities/courses/J2303/ 

Spread the news and encourage students and young researchers to attend!

TheoretiCS: Status update

Thomas Schwentick, Meena Mahajan and Pascal Weil (Chair, Secretary and Treasurer of the TheoretiCS Foundation, respectively) sent me the following information on TheoretiCS, which I am happy to share with our community with their permission. I encourage everyone to support the journal by submitting their best work to it!

TheoretiCS was officially launched in December 2021 and we wish to present you with the current status of the project. You can find more precise information on the journal's site, theoretics-journal.org.

The first papers were submitted right away in December 2021, and some were published in 2022: Volume 1 (2022) has two papers. Volume 2 (2023) already has five published papers, more are very near acceptance and there is a healthy list of papers under review, with more papers submitted every month.

Our intention was to have a journal that covers the whole of Theoretical Computer Science, and this is reflected in the list of published papers. We also wanted to have an open-access journal (it operates under the so-called diamond open access paradigm, which means that no charges are levied to read it, nor to publish in it), and one that involves the theoretical computer science community as much as possible. This was done by first establishing an Advisory Board, where the majority of the members are representatives of many of the most prominent conferences of the domain. The Advisory Board selected a pair of remarkable Editors-in-Chief (Javier Esparza, TU München, and Uri Zwick, Tel-Aviv University) and then worked with the EiCs to assemble a prestigious Editorial Board. The Advisory Board continues to meet regularly, with the EiCs, to help steer the journal.

We also wanted to innovate in the reviewing process, streamlining it without compromising in any way the quality of the papers — as we are aiming to become one of the very top journals in the field. The Editorial Board has a so-called Phase 1 process which typically lasts between 2 and 3 months, which determines whether the paper is of the caliber expected for the journal (quality of the results and quality of the exposition, relatively wide interest), under the assumption that the proofs are correct. When this Phase 1 concludes positively, Phase 2 starts, with the objective of verifying the proofs and, possibly, making constructive suggestions to the authors as to how to better present their results. The result, we hope, is a higher quality for the papers published, and also a shorter response time for most of the papers which will end up being rejected. As of early 2023, on average, a decision for Phase 1 was reached 64 days after submission, within the three-month commitment the Editorial Board made. 85% of the papers got a Phase 1 decision within 94 days.

TheoretiCS remains a work in progress, though we now have something to show for our efforts. The long-term success of the journal will however continue to depend on the support of the scientific community it wants to serve. Your support is precious in this context, and we hope you will spread the word and encourage people around you to submit their best papers to TheoretiCS.

With best regards,

Thomas Schwentick, Meena Mahajan and Pascal Weil,
respectively Chair, Secretary and Treasurer of the TheoretiCS Foundation

Ten fully-funded PhD positions in Computer Science at the Gran Sasso Science Institute

The Computer Science group at the GSSI has ten fully-funded PhD positions. See the call for applications for details. The deadline for applications is 30 May 2023.

The Computer Science group at the GSSI provides an excellent environment for PhD students and its group has been ranked as "excellent" by a recent national research assessment exercise. In my, admittedly biased, opinion, it is one of the places to be for research in Computer Science in Italy.

Spread the news!

 

Call for papers for the Fourteenth International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification (GandALF 23)

 

The Fourteenth International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification (GandALF 23) will be held in Udine (Italy) on September 18-20, 2023.

The aim of GandALF 2023 is to bring together researchers from academia and industry who are actively working in the fields of Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification. The idea is to cover an ample spectrum of themes, ranging from theory to applications, and stimulate cross-fertilization. Papers focused on formal methods are especially welcome. Authors are invited to submit original research or tool papers on all relevant topics in these areas. Papers discussing new ideas that are at an early stage of development are also welcome. The topics covered by the conference include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Automata Theory
• Automated Deduction
• Computational aspects of Game Theory
• Concurrency and Distributed computation
• Decision Procedures
• Deductive, Compositional, and Abstraction Techniques for Verification
• Finite Model Theory
• First-order and Higher-order Logics
• Formal Languages
• Formal Methods for Systems Biology, Hybrid, Embedded, and Mobile Systems
• Game Semantics
• Games and Automata for Verification
• Logical aspects of Computational Complexity
• Logics of Programs
• Modal and Temporal Logics
• Model Checking
• Models of Reactive and Real-Time Systems
• Probabilistic Models (Markov Decision processes)
• Program Analysis and Software Verification
• Reinforcement Learning
• Run-time Verification and Testing
• Specification and Verification of Finite and Infinite-state Systems
• Synthesis

Important Dates

• Abstract submission deadline: 23 June 2023
• Paper submission deadline: 30 June 2023
• Acceptance notification: 7 August 2023
• Camera-ready deadline: 6 September 2023
• Conference dates: 18-20 September 2023

all deadlines are AoE

Publication

The proceedings will be published by Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit a revised version of their work to a special issue of Logical Methods in Computer Science.

The previous editions of GandALF already led to special issues of the International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science (GandALF 2010), Theoretical Computer Science (GandALF 2011 and 2012), Information and Computation (GandALF 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020), Acta Informatica (GandALF 2015) and Logical Methods in Computer Science (GandALF 2021 and 2022).

Submission

Submitted papers should not exceed 14 pages (excluding references and clearly marked appendices) using EPTCS format (please use the LaTeX style provided here), be unpublished, and contain original research. For papers reporting experimental results, authors are encouraged to make their data available with their submission. Submissions must be in PDF format and will be handled via easychair at the following address:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gandalf23 

Invited Speakers

• Laure Daviaud  – City, University of London (UK)
• Juha Kontinen – University of Helsinki (Finland)
• Sophie Pinchinat – IRISA/University of Rennes (France)
• Alexander Rabinovich – Tel Aviv University (Israel)

Program Committee

• Dario Della Monica (co-chair) – University of Udine (Italy)
• Antonis Achilleos (co-chair) – Reykjavik University (Iceland)

• Parosh Aziz Abdulla – Uppsala University (Sweden)
• Christel Baier –  Technische Universität Dresden (Germany)
• Valentina Castiglioni – Reykjavik University (Iceland)
• Giorgio Delzanno – University of Genova (Italy)
• Léo Exibard – Université Gustave Eiffel (France)
• Gabriele Fici – University of Palermo (Italy)
• Dana Fisman – Ben-Gurion University (Israel)
• Nicola Gigante – Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy)
• Miika Hannula – University of Helsinki (Finland)
• Naoki Kobayashi – The University of Tokyo (Japan)
• Orna Kupferman – Hebrew University (Israel)
• Martin Leucker – University of Lübeck (Germany)
• Fabio Mogavero – University of Napoli (Italy)
• Shankara Narayanan Krishna – Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (India)
• Pawel Parys – University of Warsaw (Poland)
• Guillermo Pérez – University of Antwerp (Belgium)
• Giovanni Pighizzini – University of Milano (Italy)
• Gabriele Puppis – University of Udine (Italy)
• Joshua Sack – California State University Long Beach (USA)
• Ocan Sankur – CNRS/Irisa (France)
• Patrick Totzke – University of Liverpool (UK)
• Jana Wagemaker –  Radboud University (Netherlands)
• Martin Zimmermann – Aalborg University (Denmark)
• (to be completed)

Steering Committee

• Luca Aceto – Reykjavik University (Iceland)
• Javier Esparza – University of Munich (Germany)
• Salvatore La Torre – University of Salerno (Italy)
• Angelo Montanari – University of Udine (Italy)
• Mimmo Parente – University of Salerno (Italy)
• Jean-François Raskin – Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)
• Martin Zimmermann – Aalborg University (Denmark)

Website

https://gandalf23.uniud.it/

Resources on how to apply for a CS job in academia/industry

The PhD students in my department asked for advice on how to apply for jobs in academia and industry. I'll share whatever I might have to say with them this coming Tuesday and I am going through some material I collected. 

Do you have any favourite resources on how to apply for a CS job in academia or industry such as this advice by Matt Might? If so, I'd be grateful if you could share it with me as comments to this post. I'll collect the material and make it available somewhere. 

Thanks in advance!

Computer Science and Mathematics at the GSSI named "Excellent Department"

The Computer Science and the Mathematics groups at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) have been selected amongst the "excellent departments" in Italy, based on the outcome of the latest Italian research evaluation exercise and on a proposal submitted by those two groups. The proposal by the GSSI in Computer Science and Mathematics received a score of 29/30, which was the highest grade in those fields together with those of the Normale di Pisa, a scientific powerhouse, and the University of Pisa (Mathematics). The groups at the GSSI will receive approximately 7.3 million euros to support permanent faculty positions and to open new research laboratories.  

This is fantastic news for Computer Science and Mathematics at the GSSI. I congratulate my GSSI colleagues for this achievement! Since the establishment of the GSSI and its international PhD school, our computer science colleagues there have been building a group with a flat hierarchy, which has collegiality as one of its core values and where everyone is a principal investigator and a "leader" from day one.

As my colleagues at the GSSI know well, hiring and promotion decisions are two of the key factors in improving the quality of any department or research group. I trust they will use this funding to hire the best people they can get their hands on and to let them work in a nurturing and hierarchy-free research environment. Hire the best people you can attract and support them in doing the best work they can!

I look forward to seeing the developments in the computer science group at the GSSI and hope to give a small contribution, if I can. If you are considering a relocation to Italy, I encourage you to consider the GSSI. On a purely personal note, I would love to see the group there become as successful as the Department of Computing Sciences at Bocconi University in attracting foreign academics.