Friday, October 26, 2012

Call for nominations: Gödel Prize 2013

The Call for Nominations for the 2013 Gödel Prize has been posted (pdf). Nominations for the award should be submitted to the Chair of the Award Committee, Sanjeev Arora - goedelchair@gmail.com. The deadline for nominations is January 11, 2013.

Any research paper or series of papers by a single author or by a team of authors is deemed eligible if
  • the paper was published in a recognized refereed journal no later than December 31, 2012;
  • the main results were not published (in either preliminary or final form) in a journal or conference proceedings before January 1st, 2000.
The Award Committee consists of  Krzysztof R. Apt (CWI Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam), Sanjeev Arora, Chair (Princeton University), Josep Díaz (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), Giuseppe Italiano (Università di Roma Tor Vergata), Daniel Spielman (Yale University), and Éva Tardos (Cornell University). On behalf of the TCS community, I thank the committee members for their important service.

Let me close with a message to the "volume B community". Perhaps the logic/semantics/programming languages community should think strategically, look at the most prominent journal papers meeting the eligibility requirements and drum up the strongest possible support for those. Feel free to look at your crystal ball and suggest candidates for nomination using comments to this post.

As the new president of the EATCS until ICALP 2014, I am taking a sabbatical from issuing nominations in order to avoid any possible conflict of interest.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am a "STOC/FOCS style" theorist. I am always curious to learn more about track B through prize-winning papers. However, because these papers often involve exceptional/ingenious ideas, they're not always the best way to become acquainted with the bread-and-butter techniques and preoccupations of the area. I know it would be difficult to get up to speed with track A using Godel-prize winners as one's main point of reference.

Thus I request a list of orienting textbooks or main representative papers to understand how track B theorists think. For understanding my own neck of the woods, I offer a list of quality textbooks. These won't bring you all the way up to speed, but they are very good orienting devices and will give a solid overview of some main areas of recent activity:

-Approximation Algorithms, by Vazirani

-Computational Complexity: A Modern Approach, by Arora and Barak

-Algorithmic Game Theory, by Nisan et al. (Eds.)

-Foundations of Cryptography, Vols. 1/2, by Goldreich

-Quantum Information and Quantum Computation, by Nielsen and Chuang

Anonymous said...

Hello "STOC/FOCS style" theorist, I think that's a great and marvellously constructive idea. I'm
afraid Track B theorists (like myself) don't have a great tradition of writing textbooks, certainly there's nothing around at the moment giving a unified account in the great progress we've seen in the last decade in typing systems for concurrecy, pi-calculus, full abstraction or program logic. One nice, if somewhat basic, piece of work is:
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/index.html

although it has an unusual format. Familiarising yourself with an
interactive proof checker such as Coq or Isabelle/HOL may also
be of interest, or modern programming languages like Scala, Haskell or
Agda, which embody a lot of research in a form that is quite different from
a textbook.