Call for editor in chief of the Bulletin of the EATCS

The leadership of the EATCS has decided to decouple the production of the Bulletin of the EATCS (BEATCS) from its editorship. Starting from the October 2013 issue, the BEATCS will be produced, printed and shipped by our Secretary Office in Greece. We think that this change was overdue, and that it will help us improve both the production and the scientific quality of the BEATCS. From the October 2013 issue, the editor in chief of the BEATCS will focus solely on the scientific content of the Bulletin.

Our colleague Maria Serna has served as editor in chief of the BEATCS for a long time and has many other commitments. Therefore, we feel that the time has come to appoint a new editor, whose job will be to continue improving the quality and the impact of the Bulletin, in cooperation with the Council of the EATCS and following on Maria's footsteps.

We hereby ask you for expressions of interest to the role of editor in chief of the BEATCS. Each expression of interest for the position should be accompanied by a couple of paragraphs describing your vision for the future of the BEATCS. You are also most welcome to propose suitable candidates for the position other than yourselves.

Please send your nominations to me via email by the 30th of April at the latest.

I take this opportunity to offer Maria Serna our heartfelt thanks, on behalf of the EATCS, for all the work that she has done over the years as editor in chief of the Bulletin. We really appreciate the effort she has put into this important service to the EATCS and the TCS community as a whole.

All the best,

Luca Aceto
President of the EATCS

Two Pearls of Computation Talks at Reykjavík University

Season one of the new Pearls of Computation seminar series at Reykjavik University is in full swing.

On Friday, 15 February 2013, my ICE-TCS colleague Eyjólfur Ingi Ásgeirsson (School of Science and Engineering, Reykjavik University) delivered a talk on E.W. Dijkstra entitled The shortest path to beautiful code ( - DEATH TO GOTO - ).

• Recording of the talk (slides and audio) in .avi format.
• Slides with the three "silly games" mentioned in the talk. [Solutions]
• An Interview With Edsger W. Dijkstra by Thomas J. Misa, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 53 No. 8, Pages 41-47.
• E. W. Dijkstra Archive.
• K.R. Apt, Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930 -- 2002): A Portrait of a Genius. Formal Aspects of Computing, 14, pp. 92-98, 2002.

The following talk was held on Friday, 5 April 2013, when Kristinn R. Thorisson (School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University) delivered a presentation on the work of Marvin Minsky entitled Marvin Minsky: Pioneer, Critic, Optimist.

• Recording of the talk (slides and audio) in .mp4 format.
• Human Interface video played by Kristinn during the talk.
• NOVA Interview with Marvin Minsky. 

Enjoy!

Best paper awards at ICALP 2013

The best paper awards at ICALP 2013 will go to the following papers:

• Track A: Mark Bun and Justin Thaler. Dual Lower Bounds for Approximate Degree and Markov-Bernstein Inequalities.
• Track B: John Fearnley and Marcin Jurdziński. Reachability in Two-Clock Timed Automata is PSPACE-complete.
  
• Track C: Dariusz Dereniowski, Yann Disser, Adrian Kosowski, Dominik Pajak and Przemysław Uznański. Fast Collaborative Graph Exploration. 

The best student paper awards will instead go to:

• Track A: Radu Curticapean. Counting matchings of size k is #W[1]-hard.
• Track B: Nicolas Basset. A maximal entropy stochastic process for a timed automaton. 

None of the accepted papers for Track C was a student paper.

Congratulations to all the recipients of the best paper awards! I look forward to listening to their talks at ICALP 2013. 

Accepted papers at ICALP 2013

The list of accepted papers for ICALP 2013 is now available (with and without abstracts). ICALP 2013 is the 40th  ICALP conference. I hope to see many of you in Riga to celebrate this event.

Faculty Position in Interactive Storytelling and Game Design at Reykjavik University

The School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University seeks to hire a faculty member for a new academic position in the field of interactive narrative and game design. We are interested in an ambitious, highly qualified academic who can combine innovative teaching and cutting-­edge research in the rapidly evolving area of interactive digital entertainment within our school.

The faculty position is funded through a collaboration with massively multiplayer game developer CCP Games Inc.  We are particularly interested in active researchers who see opportunities in breaking new ground with CCP and with existing faculty within Reykjavík University, in particular within CADIA, the school's artificial intelligence research center. CCP will fund the faculty position for a minimum of 5 years; following that period, CCP and Reykjavík University will seek continued funding for the position. Full academic freedom is respected, however, by both CCP and Reykjavík University.

See here for more information. The application deadline is 30 April 2013 and interviews will be held in May 2013.

LICS 2013 Accepted Papers

This is not news anymore, but the list of accepted papers for LICS 2013 is available here.

As usual, the accepted papers look very interesting and I hope to find the time to read several of them when they become available. (This might be wishful thinking. It seems that finding time to read papers is getting harder by the day, alas.)

For what it is worth, here are two papers that immediately caught my attention browsing through the list of accepted papers and that are available on line.

• Dexter Kozen, Kim Guldstrand Larsen, Radu Mardare and Prakash Panangaden. Stone Duality for Markov Processes.
• Mikołaj Bojańczyk, Bartek Klin, Sławomir Lasota and Szymon Toruńczyk. Turing Machines with Atoms. 

To whet your appetite, here is what is probably the main result in the latter paper.

Theorem: In sets with equality atoms, there is a language that is decidable in nondeterministic polynomial time, but not deterministically semi-decidable.

Before you get carried away, here is what the authors write below the statement of this theorem.

A consequence of the theorem is that, with atoms, P is not equal to NP. It is not our intention to play up the significance of this result. In a sense, the theorem is too strong for its own good: it shows that computation with atoms is so different from computation without atoms, that results on the power of nondeterminism in the presence of atoms are unlikely to shed new light on the power of nondeterminism without atoms.

Congratulations to all the authors of accepted papers.

BCS Lovelace Medal to Samson Abramsky

Happy Easter news for the TCS community. Samson Abramsky is being awarded the British Computer Society (BCS) Lovelace Medal for 2013. (The press release is here.) The BCS Lovelace Medal was established in 1998 in honour of Lady Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron. The Medal is presented annually to individuals who, in the opinion of BCS, have made a significant contribution to the advancement of Information Systems.

Quoting Samson,

It is particularly pleasing that this award recognizes work of a highly foundational character, and shows the commitment of BCS to support the study of computing not only for its manifold applications, but as a fundamental scientific discipline in its own right.

As the press release states, Samson

is pre-eminent in setting the modern agenda in the foundations of computer science, an area where he has made immense contributions since the 1980s. His contributions in each of the past three decades had a major impact on the field, notably: Domain Theory in Logical Form, Game Semantics and Categorical Quantum Mechanics. He has shown the ability to change research fields and to establish new interdisciplinary approaches.  His work over the past decade has shown that methods and concepts developed in theoretical computer science can be applied very directly in quantum information, and the foundations of quantum mechanics itself.

Another recent example of application of methods from "volume B TCS" to other fields is in this short paper, where Samson and Wiktor Winschel apply coalgebraic and other structural methods originating from computer science to economics and game theory.

Congratulations to Samson!

Does it also work in theory?

Courtesy of Robbert Dijkgraaf's media page.

How to write an unsuccessful letter of nomination for an award

The following piece of text has been going through my head since the meeting of an award committee I attended earlier this week. I had to get rid of it by writing it down. So here it is, for your reading pleasure. I thought that it was best to choose a "How to have your abstract rejected" style for this piece.

You have just seen the call for nominations for an award and you have an excellent candidate for this accolade in mind. The call for nominations asks for a letter of nomination and gives some criteria that a nominee for the award should satisfy. How can you increase the chances that your nomination will be unsuccessful? The aim of this short piece is to present some simple approaches that are guaranteed to increase the chances that your nomination will be unsuccessful, even if you were nominating Albert Einstein for the Relativity Award 2013.

The first step in ensuring lack of success of a nomination is not to read the guidelines in the call for nominations. This will make it highly likely that your letter will not address at least some of the criteria that a good nomination should have. However, this leaves open the possibility that, by chance, your letter of nomination address some of the most important criteria for nominating your candidate. The best approach to prevent this from happening is to be systematic. Do read the call for nominations and make sure that you avoid addressing each of the criteria listed there. For example, if the call asks for (a link to) a CV, do not provide any!

However, the systematic approach requires precious time, effort and organization. Isn't there a better way to achieve your goal of submitting an unsuccessful nomination without sweating too much? Indeed there is! The perfect, no-sweat unsuccessful letter of nomination is a one liner that reads:

I nominate X for award Y. Best regards, Z

Submitting this letter template, which you should feel free to reuse, will strongly indicate to the award committee that is in charge of evaluating the nominations and of selecting the award recipient(s)

1. that you really do not know why the nominee deserves the award, and
2. that you are not willing to invest any time and effort in finding out why the nominee is worthy of the honour and in convincing the committee that (s)he is the one to select.
   

Is there a better way of achieving your goal? If so, I should really like to know.

Monotasking vs. multitasking

I am enjoying reading Out of Their Minds (The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists) by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere. IMHO, the book does a great job in making the lives and ideas of some of the leaders in our field accessible to a general public. I will recommend it to my students and to the colleagues of mine who will prepare future Pearls of Computation seminars.

At the end of the chapter devoted to Donald E. Knuth,  the authors quote Don Knuth as saying:

I do one thing at a time. This is what computer scientists call batch processing---the alternative is swapping in and out. I do not swap in and out.

This quote reminded me a TED talk, in which Italian designer Paolo Cardini encourages his audience to consider the virtues of monotasking.

For several years in my career, I was largely a monotasking person. In my research, I mostly worked on one thing at the time. However, this has changed substantially over the years.  Now I find myself multitasking and context switching a lot and this leads to more stress at work. I guess that most of us have a similar story to tell; the length of the list of things to do increases much faster than our ability to get things done, alas.

Stephen Cook receives the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering

Stephen Cook has received Canada's highest honour,  the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. More on Stephen Cook's Herzberg Canada Gold Medal can be found here.

EATCS Award 2013 to Martin Dyer

The EATCS Awards Committee, consisting of Leslie Ann Goldberg, Vladimiro Sassone and Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide (chair), has unanimously decided to give the EATCS Award to Martin Dyer. The laudatio for Martin Dyer is available here. Martin's Wikipedia page mentions his key achievements in

(1) - polynomial time algorithm for approximating the volume of convex bodies (with Alan Frieze and Ravindran Kannan)
(2) - linear programming in fixed dimensions
(3) - the path coupling method for proving mixing of Markov chains (with Russ Bubley)
(4) - complexity of counting constraint satisfaction problems.

In addition, the laudatio singles out his work with Alan Frieze on developing the probabilistic analysis of algorithms. Dyer and Frieze showed that many NP-hard problems arising in combinatorial optimisation can be solved in polynomial expected time when the instances are drawn from natural distributions.

Congratulations to Martin!

Friday Fun

 

Source: One of the Computer Science students at Reykjavík University

Erik Demaine receives the EATCS Presburger Award 2013

The Presburger Award Committee, consisting of Peter Widmayer, Antonin Kucera and Monika Henzinger (chair), has unanimously decided to propose Erik Demaine (MIT, USA) as recipient of the 2013 EATCS Presburger Award for young scientists. Congratulations to Erik!

The Presburger Award is sponsored by CWI, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.

The citation for the award reads as follows.

Erik Demaine, born in 1981, has made outstanding contributions in several fields of algorithms, namely computational geometry, data structures, graph algorithms and recreational algorithms. In computational geometry and data structures he has solved or made significant progress on classic problems such as the carpenter’s rule problem, the hinged-dissection problem, the prefix-sum problem, and the dynamic optimality conjecture. In graph algorithms he used the powerful theory of graph minors to develop a suite of algorithms for approximately solving a general family of intractable problems. He also started the new field of computational origami, where his book is the leading authority in the field. His work  has shown promising applications to computer graphics, sensor networks, molecular biology, programmable matter, and manufacturing and engineering.

The committee recommends Erik Demaine as an exceptional young scientist who fully deserves the Presburger Award.

The committee would also like to mention that the quality of all nominations submitted this year was very high. The Presburger Award is attracting the best young scientists in the field of theoretical computer science worldwide.

Addendum, 14 February 2013: Check out a Popular Science article on Erik's work here:  http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/dazzling-sometimes-absurd-always-playful-genius-erik-demaine.

Poster for the Pearls of Computation seminar series

The poster has been designed by the talented team at Podpunkt. In case you need a good design for book covers, logos or posters, you might wish to consider them. Look at their portfolio and enjoy their work. As I remarked in an earlier post, the Podpunkt studio has strong connections with mathematics and TCS.

ICALP 2013 deadline is two weeks away

The second call for papers for ICALP 2013 is available here. I hope that several readers of this blog will submit some of their best work to the conference. The deadline for submissions is February 15.

This is the 40th ICALP and, in addition to the invited talks and the award addresses, will also feature a special EATCS Lecture by Jon Kleinberg to celebrate this festive occasion.

Pearls of Computation: A new seminar series

This coming Friday I will kick off a new seminar series organized by ICE-TCS at Reykjavik University. The seminar series is called Pearls of Computation and aims at presenting the work of some of the recipients of the ACM Turing Award (or of some other major award related to computer science) in an accessible way. The target audience consists of students in computer science and anyone with a potential interest in the subject. (The inspiration for this seminar series comes from the Pearls of Theory talks that were held at BRICS in Aarhus in a past that looks so far away now.)

We will try to tell the stories behind the scientific contributions of some of the key figures in computer science in a non-technical way, highlighting the context in which they were made, the state of the art at the time, why they are important and what impact they have had. In the process, I believe that both the attendees and the speakers will all learn something new and develop an increased appreciation (and, why not, pride) for the contributions of some of the people who have shaped our field.

My inaugural talk in this series will be devoted to the life and work of Robin Milner (1934-2010), whose work has had a deep and lasting influence on my modest contribution to concurrency theory. The schedule for the talks that will take place this semester is available here.

Jaco de Bakker, 1939-2012

Jaco de Bakker, one of the founding fathers of the EATCS and a prominent Dutch TCS researcher, passed away on December 13, 2013. The following obituary by Jan Bergstra, Jan Willem Klop and Jan Rutten has been circulated recently on the Concurrency mailing list and appears on the web site of the Academia Europaea as well as on the EATCS web site.

On December 13, 2012, our colleague Jacobus Willem (Jaco) de Bakker, member of the Section Informatics of the Academia Europaea since 1990, passed away surrounded by his family in his home in Amsterdam after a short illness. He is survived by his wife Angeline, his children Bas, Jaska, Catrien, Jacob and Lisa, and two grandchildren.

Jaco was born on March 7, 1939, in Ede, the Netherlands. He was for more than 38 years, from 1964 until 2002, connected as Head of the Computer Science Department to the Mathematical Centre, later called CWI  (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) in Amsterdam. He was a Fellow of CWI since 2002. In 1973 he was appointed as Professor in Computer Science, in particular for the mathematical semantics of programming languages and reasoning on program correctness, at the VU University Amsterdam, at that time called Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He occupied this professorship until his emeritate in 2002. In 1989 he was appointed as a member  of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), in the Section Mathematics. In 1972, Jaco was one of the founding fathers of the EATCS, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science; he was Vice-President of the EATCS from 1972 until 1982, and Member of the Board until 1988. Since 1998 he was honorary member of IFIP Working Group 2.2, Formal Description of Programming Concepts. In 2002, during his retirement symposium at CWI, he received the Royal Decoration Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands (Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw).

Jaco de Bakker started his scientific career with his Ph.-D. thesis in 1967 at the University of Amsterdam, with promotor Adriaan (Aad) van Wijngaarden, entitled: Formal Definition of Programming Languages: with an Application to the Definition of ALGOL 60. Jaco de Bakker was world-wide known and recognized for his pioneering work in developing the denotational and operational semantics of many basic features in programming languages, in a precise and rigorous mathematical style. One of its highlights became known as
the induction rule of De Bakker and Scott. This culminated in his book Mathematical Theory of Program Correctness (1980). Later on, in the early eighties, he turned to the theory of communicating processes, introduced by Hoare and Milner, a theory known in those days as "concurrency". His initial investigations in this field were in cooperation with Jeffery Zucker. The basic features in this theoretical area were treated in the same mathematically rigorous style in his book Control Flow Semantics (1996) together with Erik
de Vink. Apart from these books, he wrote more than 150 scientific articles.

In the Netherlands Jaco de Bakker was the originator of an extensive school of theoretical computer scientists. He supervised many Ph.D.-theses, and was the driving force in the eighties, together with Willem-Paul de Roever and Grzegorz Rozenberg, behind several nation-wide programmes for research and education in the Netherlands, such as REX (Research and Education in Concurrent Systems). REX lasted from 1988 to 1993; it was preceded by LPC (Landelijk Project Concurrency, National Project Concurrency) from 1984-1988. Prior to these programmes Jaco was Director, together with Jan van Leeuwen, of the 'Advanced Course on Foundations of Computer Science', a biennial series of influential courses with international attendance, from 1974 to 1982, held in Amsterdam. Jaco was also one of the founding fathers in 1979 of the Dutch Association for Theoretical Computer Science (WTI, Werkgemeenschap Theoretische Informatica), since 1995 called NVTI (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Theoretische Informatica). Jaco was Chairman of the WTI from 1979 until 1987. Jaco was proud of the fact that 32 scientists who at some time worked in his group were eventually appointed full professor.

Also in the eighties, Jaco was instrumental in stimulating the involvement and participation of the Dutch research community in the big European computer science frameworks such as FAST, Meteor, ESPRIT (European Programme for Research in Information Technology) and BRA (Basic Research Actions). As Head of the CWI Department Software Engineering he stimulated intensive contacts with the European research community, resulting in a lively and productive research atmosphere in which researchers of many nationalities cooperated on a regular basis.

In addition to playing a crucial role in education and research in theoretical computer science, Jaco de Bakker was also a gifted and respected science director and administrator. He influenced  the lives of many of us. We all remember him as a great scientist and  an amiable person. Moreover many computer scientists will remember him as a friend.

Jan Bergstra, Jan Willem Klop and Jan Rutten

Heidelberg Laureate Forum

I have been asked to distribute this announcement, which was sent on the IMU Newsletter. This sounds like a potentially interesting initiative, which might be of interest to some of the young researchers in TCS. 

You may have heard of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings
which are now in their 63rd year and have become a unique
platform for the dialogue between different scientific
generations in medicine, physics, chemistry, and the
economic sciences, fields for which Nobel Prizes are
awarded, see http://www.lindau-nobel.org/.

Creating a similar event for mathematics and/or computer
science has been contemplated by various persons and groups.
Thanks to Klaus Tschira and his foundation, this idea has
now become reality.

The first Heidelberg Laureate Forum will take place from
September 22 until 27, 2013 and bring together the best
students in mathematics and computer science with winners
of the most prestigious awards in these two disciplines:
Abel, Fields, and Turing Laureates. Detailed information
can be found at http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/.

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum is supported by various
institutions, among these are
- The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
- The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- The International Mathematical Union (IMU)
which award the three outstanding prizes.

Application:
============
In the attachment is the press release which describes
how young researchers in the fields of mathematics and
computer science can apply for participation. The
application Web page is:
http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/heidelberg-laureate-forum-2013/application/.

IMU asks the readers of IMU-Net to distribute this
information among their friends and colleagues so
that as many potential candidates for participation
as possible are reached. Please note that the
application deadline is

February 15, 2013.

2013 AMS David P. Robbins Prize to Alexander Razborov

TCS folks might like to know that the American Mathematical Society has announced that Alexander Razborov is the recipient of the 2013 AMS David P. Robbins Prize. The Robbins Prize is given every three years for a paper that reports on novel research in algebra, combinatorics, or discrete mathematics.

Razborov receives the prize for his paper "On the minimal density of triangles in graphs" (Combinatorics, Probability and Computing, 17 (2008), no. 4, 603-618), and for introducing flag algebras to solve problems in extremal combinatorics.

The full citation for this prize and additional information can be found in the massive Joint Mathematics Meetings Prize Booklet. Bloggers may like to read the response by John Baez to receiving the 2013 AMS Levi L. Conant Prize. (Presented annually, the Conant Prize recognizes the best expository paper published in either the Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS in the preceding five years.) John writes:

I put a lot of energy into explaining math and physics online. Blogging is no substitute for more formal writing about academic subjects, but it fills a gap, especially for the millions who don’t live near a good research university. Socrates complained that “writing is unfortunately like painting, for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.” This is no longer true with blogs: the author is there to answer your questions! So, I am hoping that eventually blogs will be taken seriously by academia and the AMS will have an award for the best mathematics blog. But I am very happy to receive this prize for a more traditional form of mathematics exposition.

Congratulations to all the prize recipients and happy 2013 to everyone.