Most Influential POPL Paper Award 2018: "Multiparty asynchronous session types" by Kohei Honda, Nobuko Yoshida and Marco Carbone

I heard the great news that the paper Multiparty asynchronous session types by the late Kohei Honda, Nobuko Yoshida and Marco Carbone has received the Most Influential POPL Paper Award 2018. See

http://www.sigplan.org/Awards/POPL/.

This award is given annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) held 10 years prior to the award year. The papers are judged by their influence over the past decade.

The citation for the award is available from the above-mentioned web page, but I repeat it here for ease of reference:

Session types are a type-based framework for codifying communication structures and verifying protocols in concurrent, message-passing programs. Previously, session types could only model binary (two-party) protocols. This paper generalizes the theory to the multiparty case with asynchronous communications, preventing deadlock and communication errors in more sophisticated communication protocols involving any number (two or more) of participants. The central idea was to introduce global types, which describe multiparty conversations from a global perspective and provide a means to check protocol compliance. This work has inspired numerous authors to build on its pioneering foundations in the session types community and has initiated many applications of multiparty session types in programming languages and tools. It has also influenced other areas of research, such as software contracts, runtime verification and hardware specifications.

Congratulations to the authors of the paper and to the concurrency community at large, whose work over the last ten years contributed to this award and, most importantly, to significant scientific advances that are now embodied in programming languages and tools that are already having practical impact (see the work with Cognizant, Red Hat, and VMWare on Scribble, and with the OOI), and that I believe will find increasing application in years to come. 

Five Postdoctoral positions in Computer Science at Gran Sasso Science Institute

Five Postdoctoral positions in Computer Science at
Gran Sasso Science Institute in L'Aquila (Italy)
http://www.gssi.it/
Deadline:  2 March 2018 at 6 p.m. (Italian time zone)

The Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI, http://www.gssi.it/), a recently established international PhD school and a centre for advanced studies in computer science, mathematics, physics and social sciences offers 18 postdoctoral research positions, five of which are dedicated to computer science and more specifically to themes that are strongly connected to the pillars of the PhD program in computer science:

- Algorithmic foundations of social and computer networks.
- Software systems and services.
- Specifications and analysis of concurrent reactive systems

The research grants are awarded for two years and their yearly amount is € 36.000,00 gross.

Candidates who are preparing their doctoral thesis are eligible to apply; however, they must have obtained their PhD degree before taking up their appointment with GSSI. Selected candidates are expected to start their appointments no later than 1 November 2018.

The application must be submitted through the online form available at www.gssi.it/postdoc/ by 2 March 2018 at 6 p.m. (Italian time zone).

Each application should include the following material:

- the CV of the applicant,

- a research statement,

- up to 3 publications and

- the name and email of two references.

For more information, please consult the Call for Applications at www.gssi.it/postdoc/ or write an email to info@gssi.it.

Prospective candidates are also welcome to contact Luca Aceto (luca.aceto AT gssi.it) or Michele Flammini (michele.flammini AT gssi.it). 

PhD positions at the School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University

The School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University is advertising PhD scholarships. See https://en.ru.is/scs/ph.d-studies/ for details.

The Icelandic Centre of Excellence in Theoretical Computer Science is one of the research centres within the school and is seeking PhD candidates in the following fields: logic and concurrency (contacts: Anna Ingolfsdottir and Luca Aceto), algorithms and distributed computing (contacts: Eyjólfur Ingi Ásgeirsson and Magnús Már Halldórsson), combinatorics and automated proofs (contact: Henning Ulfarsson), types and programming-language semantics (contact: Tarmo Uustalu).

Call for nominations for the 2018 Alonzo Church Award

Catuscia Palamidessi asked me to post the call for nominations for this year's Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation. I encourage all members of the community to nominate their favourite paper or small group of papers in logic and computation published within the past 25 years.


The 2018 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation
Call for Nominations
Introduction
An annual award, called the Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation, was established in 2015 by the ACM Special Interest Group for Logic and Computation (SIGLOG), the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), the European Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL), and the Kurt Gödel Society (KGS). The award is for an outstanding contribution represented by a paper or by a small group of papers published within the past 25 years. This time span allows the lasting impact and depth of the contribution to have been established. The award can be given to an individual, or to a group of individuals who have collaborated on the research. For the rules governing this award, see: http://siglog.org/awards/alonzo-church-award/.
The 2017 Alonzo Church Award was given jointly to Samson Abramsky, Radha Jagadeesan, Pasquale Malacaria, Martin Hyland, Luke Ong, and Hanno Nickau for providing a fully-abstract semantics for higher-order computation through the introduction of game models, see: http://siglog.org/winners-of-the-2017-alonzo-church-award/.
Eligibility and Nominations
The contribution must have appeared in a paper or papers published within the past 25 years. Thus, for the 2018 award, the cut-off date is January 1, 1993. When a paper has appeared in a conference and then in a journal, the date of the journal publication will determine the cut-off date. In addition, the contribution must not yet have received recognition via a major award, such as the Turing Award, the Kanellakis Award, or the Gödel Prize. (The nominee(s) may have received such awards for other contributions.) While the contribution can consist of conference or journal papers, journal papers will be given a preference.
Nominations for the 2018 award are now being solicited. The nominating letter must summarise the contribution and make the case that it is fundamental and outstanding. The nominating letter can have multiple co-signers. Self-nominations are excluded. Nominations must include: a proposed citation (up to 25 words); a succinct (100-250 words) description of the contribution; and a detailed statement (not exceeding four pages) to justify the nomination. Nominations may also be accompanied by supporting letters and other evidence of worthiness.
Nominations should be submitted to catuscia@lix.polytechnique.fr by March 1, 2018. 
Presentation of the Award
The 2018 award will be presented at ICALP 2018, the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming. The award will be accompanied by an invited lecture by the award winner, or by one of the award winners. The awardee(s) will receive a certificate and a cash prize of USD 2,000. If there are multiple awardees, this amount will be shared.
Award Committee
The 2018 Alonzo Church Award Committee consists of the following five members: Thomas Eiter, Javier Esparza, Catuscia Palamidessi (chair), Gordon Plotkin, and Natarajan Shankar.