Monday, May 30, 2011

Accepted Papers for CONCUR 2011

I noticed that the list of accepted papers for CONCUR 2011 is available here. As usual, there are several interesting papers to look at. I just hope to have the time to do so. As someone said once: "Fermate il mondo! Voglio scendere!" ("Stop the world! I want to get off!")

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Hubert Garavel received the Gay-Lussac Humboldt Research Award

These are good days for concurrency theory and computer-aided verification, at least judging by the awards bestowed on members of our community.

Yesterday I mentioned that the Presburger Award 2011will go to Patricia Bouyer. Holger Hermanns has now made me aware of the fact that Hubert Garavel recently received the Gay-Lussac Humboldt Research Award. (Thanks Holger!) Hubert is the fourth French scientist in the field of computer science to be awarded this prize. You can read more about the award to Hubert here. For the few readers who might not know his work, here I just limit myself to mentioning that Hubert is a pioneer in formal methods and verification tools for critical industrial systems. He is perhaps best known for being the prime mover behind the development of CADP, which is a popular toolbox for the design of communication protocols and distributed systems. CADP has been developed now for over twenty years, reflecting the very strong commitment to tool development based on elegant and useful theory that underlies Hubert's work.

Congratulations to Hubert and to Holger, who will be his host in Germany.

I note in passing that the awards to Hubert and Patricia offer further, albeit circumstantial, support on the strength of French TCS research.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Presburger Award 2011 to Patricia Bouyer-Decitre

The Presburger Award 2011 will go to Patricia Bouyer-Decitre.  See here for the details.

Patricia has contributed important results to the theory and applications of timed automata, a fundamental model of real-time systems.  In 2007 she received CNRS Bronze medal, awarded for outstanding achievements by a junior researcher.

I am very happy that this award went to Patricia. I had the pleasure of doing some work together with her at the very beginning of her career, and she has gone from strength to strength.

Congratulations to Patricia!

Friday, May 06, 2011

ERC Advanced Grant to Glynn Winskel

I just saw that Glynn Winskel has been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for the period 1/05/2011-30/4/2016. The grant is for the project Events, Causality and Symmetry---the next generation semantics. (Extended Synopsis.)

This grant recognized one of the key players in the theory of concurrency over the last 20 years. Glynn's work on event structures, amongst other things, has had a lot of influence within my research community and it is good to see that this model plays a key role in the funded proposal. Glynn was also the director of BRICS, a research centre that had an enormous influence on TCS research in Europe and beyond.

Congratulations to Glynn!

Tuesday, May 03, 2011