Monday, July 06, 2015

ICALP/LICS 2015: Day 1

Despite my jet-lag induced drowsiness and the fact that the clock on my laptop kept reminding that I was chairing the first meeting of the EATCS Council at around 4am in the morning, I enjoyed the first day of the conference a lot.

According to the organizers, ICALP/LICS 2015 had 400 early registrations and there were 200 people who attended the pre-conference workshops.The plenary invited talks by Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi (NII, Japan) and Luke Ong (University of Oxford, UK) were delivered to a packed room and were both excellent.

Ken-ichi's talk was entitled Digraphs Structures: Minors and Algorithms and presented his joint work with Stephan Kreutzer on extending results on minors from graphs to digraphs. (See this paper in particular.)

Luke's talk was devoted to Higher-Order Model Checking: An Overview. Higher-order model checking is about checking whether trees generated by recursion schemes satisfy formulae that can be expressed in some kind of logic, such as Monadic Second Order logic. In his talk, Luke surveyed the considerable progress on this problem in both theory and practice that has been made over the past fifteen years or so.

There were lots interesting talks in the conference programs as well as two sessions devoted to the best paper award recipients.

The busy day ended socially on a high note with an excellent welcome reception.

Looking at the future, I am pleased to inform you that the invited speakers for ICALP 2016 will be
I will have more to say about future editions of the conference after the general assembly tomorrow.

2 comments:

Lance Fortnow said...

Be curious to see if there is any discussion of the strict submission requirements at the business meeting.

Luca Aceto said...

The PC chair for Track A mentioned the number of papers that were rejected without refereeing, but this raised no real discussion at the general assembly/business meeting.

The EATCS Council discussed the issue during its meeting in Kyoto and we will work together with the PC chairs for ICALP 2016 to draft some guidelines that are agreeable to their PCs and them. The move to LIPIcs may allow us to be a little more flexible.

The submission requirements for ICALP 2016 will be available in the autumn. .