Wednesday, August 10, 2022

CONCUR through time: A data- and graph-mining analysis

The 33rd edition of the International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR) will be held in Warsaw, Poland, in the period 16–19 September 2022. The first CONCUR conference dates back to 1990 and was one of the conferences organized as part of the two-year ESPRIT Basic  Research  Action  3006  with  the  same  name.   The  CONCUR  community  has  run  the conference ever since and established the IFIP WG 1.8 “Concurrency Theory” in 2005 under Technical Committee TC1 Foundations of Computer Science of IFIP1.

In light of the well-established nature of the CONCUR conference, and spurred by a data-and graph-mining comparative analysis carried out by Pierluigi Crescenzi and three of his students to celebrate the 50th anniversary of ICALP, Pierluigi and I undertook a similar study for the CONCUR conference using some, by now classic, tools from network science.  Our goal was to try and understand the evolution of the CONCUR conference throughout its history, the ebb and flow in the popularity of some research areas in concurrency theory, and the centrality of CONCUR authors, as measured by several metrics from network science, amongst other topics. 

Our article available here reports on our findings.  We hope that members of the CONCUR community will enjoy reading it and playing with the web-based resources that accompany this piece.  It goes without saying that the data analysis we present has to be taken with a huge pinch of salt and is only meant to provide an overview of the evolution of CONCUR and to be food for thought for the concurrency theory community.

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