Papers I find interesting---mostly, but not solely, in Process Algebra---, and some fun stuff in Mathematics and Computer Science at large and on general issues related to research, teaching and academic life.
The Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), founded in 2012 in
L’Aquila (Italy) as Center for Advanced Studies of the National
Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) and then established in March 2016
as a School of Advanced Studies providing post-graduate education,
offers 40 PhD fellowships for the academic year 2017/18.
Amng others, the GSSI invites applications for 10 fellowships in “Computer Science”, with emphasis on algorithmics, formal methods for concurrent systems, and software engineering.
The official language for all PhD courses is English.
The fellowships are awarded for three years and their yearly amount
is € 16,159.91 gross. All PhD students have free accommodation at the
GSSI facilities and use of the canteen.
The application must be submitted through the online form available at www.gssi.it/phd/ by 31st May 2017 at 18.00 (Italian time zone).
For more information, please consult the Call for Applications at www.gssi.it/phd/ or write an email to info@gssi.it or call +39 0862 4280262.
I hope that readers of this blog will consider applying for this position and join the School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University. Come and help us shape the future of CS research and teaching in Iceland!
Reykjavik University seeks an ambitious leader to carry out the
development of a growing School of Computer Science. The dean is
responsible for administrative affairs as well as for leading the
faculty's academic agenda. The dean reports to the Rector of Reykjavik
University and is a member of the university's executive committee.
We seek candidates that have:
Strong strategic vision and the ability to shape and lead a team of faculty members and staff
Doctorate in computer science or related subjects
Academic teaching and research experience
Management, operations and leadership experience
Experience from industry or collaborations with industry
International experience
Reykjavik
University's School of Computer Science provides education and research
in computer science, software engineering and related subjects. The
School offers BSc, MSc and PhD degrees. External accreditation committee
for doctorate studies assessed the school to be the strongest in
Iceland in its field and one conducting top-level international research
(http://www.ru.is/media/td/SCS_accreditation.pdf). The school has around 850 enrolled students and nearly 30 faculty and staff members.
For further information, please contact Ari Kristinn Jónsson, Rector (ari@ru.is) and Sigríður Elín Guðlaugsdóttir, Executive Director of Human Resources (sigridureg@ru.is) tel: +354-599-6200.
Applications should be submitted before March 15th, 2017, through our applications website: radningar.hr.is.
The
role of Reykjavik University is to create and disseminate knowledge to
enhance the competitiveness and quality of life for individuals and
society, guided by good ethics, sustainability and responsibility.
There
are four schools within the university; School of Business, School of
Computer Science, School of Law and School of Science and Engineering.
Education and research at RU are based on strong ties with industry and
society. We emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration, international
relations and entrepreneurship. Reykjavik University currently has
around 3600 students and 240 employees.
The Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTAustria) is a young international institute dedicated to basic research and graduate education in the natural and mathematical sciences, located in Klosterneuburg on the outskirts of Vienna. Our colleague Thomas Henzinger has been the president of the institute since its birth, and I thought that it might be interesting for the readers of the Bulletin of the EATCS and of this blog to hear about the development of IST Austria and his opinions on how to create an excellent research institution.
I interviewed Thomas Henzinger (abbreviated to TH in what follows) via email and present his answers to my questions in what follows.
LA:Could you briefly introduce IST Austria, its aims and its current state of development?
TH: The Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria was founded in 2006 with the goal to build in Austria a world-class institution for basic research and graduate education in science. Currently we are half-way towards our goal of 90 research groups in biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and computer science.
LA: As far as I know, IST Austria only started its operations in 2009.
It already underwent a successful, international evaluation in 2011 and
has grown
remarkably since then. In your opinion, which strategic decisions have
been crucial in making IST Austria a high-quality research institute in
such a short period of time and in attracting top-class scientists at
various stages of their careers to it?
TH: The most important decision of the Austrian government was to start IST Austria from scratch, independent of any existing institution, and to give the Institute maximal freedom in designing itself. Whenever we take a design decision at IST Austria, we consider primarily one criterion: how can we best compete for the most promising young faculty and the most talented PhD students in the world? Three of our most important design decisions, all guided by this criterion, were: (1) We hire all young faculty on a tenure track, giving them both independence and the opportunity to be promoted to a full professorship, based solely on performance. (2) We never assign open faculty slots to research topics or scientific disciplines, but always try to offer our positions to the most promising candidates we see, independent of their field. (3) All PhD students are admitted centrally and must complete a multidisciplinary curriculum and rotation projects with several professors before they embark on their thesis research.
LA:So far, which aspects of the development of IST Austria
are you most proud of? How would you like to see IST Austria grow in
the near future? Do you think that the institute will expand its
research in computer science and, if so, how?
TH:I am proudest of the fact that 30 of our 45 professors are funded by the European Research Council. I believe that relative to our size, this makes us the most successful institution in Europe. Among our 45 current professors, there are 8 computer scientists. We hope to double both numbers over the next 10 years.
LA: I recently watched the video of the panel discussion "IST Austria: On the Way to the Top: What Makes a Research Institution Excellent?'', which you chaired, on YouTube. It was truly inspirational. However, since you were running short of time, you did not get a chance to express your views on the topic and I, for one, would be very interested in hearing them. So, in your opinion, what makes a research institution excellent? Would the advice you would give to a computer science department in a European university that strives for excellence be any different?
TH: Most science administrators agree that the key to excellence is the principle "hire the best scientists and leave them alone." It is easy to advocate this principle, but it is difficult to implement it. The temptation to think strategically top-down -to focus on research areas when hiring professors, on research projects when hiring students, on industrial and societal needs when asking for more funds- is very hard to resist. But giving in to that temptation usually means leaving the quickest path to scientific excellence.
LA:To your mind, what is the role of PhD education in
achieving research excellence? Would you have any advice to share with
us on how to run an international PhD granting institution in Europe
that is capable of attracting very strong students?
TH: Attracting top PhD students from all over the world is critical because top students attract top professors. In fact, in my experience it is more difficult to attract top students: they are often more "brand driven" than professors, and it takes a long time for an institution to build up a world-wide reputation that trickles down to undergraduates looking for PhD programs. I wish I had a quick solution for this problem.
LA: You have been the President of IST Austria from its inception. This must
be more than a full-time job. However, at the same time, you have
managed to remain very active in research, pursuing new avenues and
maintaining a research group. How did you do so? Is there any "secret"
you'd like to share with us?
TH: It is difficult to "context switch" between administrative and scientific problems. But the opportunity to talk with my students and postdocs almost on a daily basis is what keeps me sane. It is important also because it allows me to see the Institute and its administration from the "other" side, and because it gives me greater credibility when trying to recruit faculty.
I have been asked to distribute this call. The Gran Sasso Science Institute is a new, ambitious international centre for advanced studies and PhD school. Give this opportunity a thought.
Gran Sasso Science Institute - Computer Science Area
Expression of Interest for Faculty Positions
Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) is a new Center for Advanced studies and PhD School established in L’Aquila (Italy).
The Computer Science Area of GSSI (http://cs.gssi.infn.it/phd-program/information/)
invites expressions of interest for permanent positions at the level of
Full or Associate Professor, and for tenure track (Ricercatore TD – B),
and temporary (Ricercatore TD – A) research assistants. Highly
qualified candidates with a strong research background in the following
fields: cryptography, network security, algorithms, and software
engineering are encouraged to apply. The Institute is particularly
interested in (potential) leaders of multi-disciplinary research groups
in the above fields.
Candidates must have an excellent record of publications, a clear
potential to promote and lead research activities, and a specific
interest in teaching at the postgraduate level to skilled students
recruited internationally.
APPLICATIONS
Applicants should submit their expression of interest by sending
a motivation letter in which also the position(s) of interest are specified.
a curriculum vitae
a list of publications,
a brief research statement.
Applications (and questions regarding the application process) must be submitted in electronic form, preferably by April 1st 2017, to eoi-cs@gssi.it.
DISCLAIMER
Please note that this is not a permanent job vacancy advertisement.
The expressions of interest received will contribute to the decision of
the Gran Sasso Science Institute whether or not to open official calls,
their number and the selection procedures. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
1- Duties Teaching post-graduate courses, leading internal seminar and tutoring PhD students. All activities are in English.
2- Salary The salary will be determined on a personal basis, also
taking into account past positions covered abroad. Indicative figures
of the gross amount for starting (minimum) salary are:
Professor (prima fascia) € 72.431
Associate Professor (seconda fascia) € 50.831
Assistant Professor, tenure track (ricercatori TD – B) € 34.898
Assistant Professor, no tenure track (ricercatori TD – A) € 34.898
Net income may vary depending on income taxes, local taxes,
retirement plan, health care deduction and tax exemptions. Professors
who have held a tenured position outside Italy for more than three years
(at the corresponding level) might be eligible for a partial
recognition of past services, depending on specific legal constraints.
The EATCS is proud to announce that the EATCS Award Committee
consisting of Fedor Fomin (chair), Christos Papadimitriou and Jean-Eric
Pin has selected Professor Éva Tardos (Cornell University, USA; http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~eva/) as the recipient of the EATCS Award 2017. Eva is the first female theoretical computer scientist who receives the EATCS Award.
The EATCS Award is given to acknowledge extensive and widely
recognized contributions to theoretical computer science over a
life-long scientific career. The list of the previous recipients of the
EATCS Award is available at http://eatcs.org/index.php/eatcs-award.
The EATCS Award carries a prize money of 1000 Euros and will be presented at ICALP 2017, which will take place in Warsaw (Poland) from the 10th till the 14th of July 2017.
I continue my notes on this year's SOFSEM conference where I left them.
On Wednesday, I attended the tutorial session by Andrew Butterfield on
Unifying Theories of Programming (UTP), a paradigm introduced by C.A.R.
Hoare. Broadly speaking, UTP combines denotational, operational and
algebraic semantics in a unified framework for both the formal
specification and implementation. It is almost as there was no distinction
between syntax and semantics. Andrew Butterfield also showed us his
tool UTP2, programmed in Haskell, and how the library for UTP in the
Isabelle theorem prover works.
One important
part in any conference is to be able to discuss with other colleagues
and experts about interesting papers. On Wednesday I missed the keynote
talk by Jakko Hollmen about Predictive Analytics because I was
talking about some papers with colleagues. (I found that to be a valid excuse to miss a
talk in a conference!) Also, on Wednesday we had the social programme:
an excursion with a guide around the city centre of Limerick and the
conference dinner in the Bunratty Castle. Inside the castle we not only
enjoyed a typical Irish dinner but also an entertainment program. It was
a dinner with a medieval flavour because of the place but also because
of the show we saw and the way we ate. We had a broth, pork ribs and
chicken... But without forks! So we ate with our hands while listening
to some typical Irish songs performed by the very talented people of the
Bunratty Castle.
That's not all that happened
on Wednesday. The organization had a surprise for us: since the lunch
break was two hours long, during the second hour we had a talk about
music and computers. Inside the Department of Computer Science in
Limerick there is the Digital Media & Arts Research Centre, and the
organization took advantage of this fact in order to propose them to
give 3 talks: one on Wednesday and two on Thursday. The first talk was
done by Mikael Fernström (http://www.idc.ul.ie/mikael/), who explained us his work. He uses computers in order to produce new
sounds (frequencies that a physical instrument wouldn't be able to make)
and algorithms in order to create music for "things". As an example, he
created a piece that took some variables from meteorological data so we
could listen to how the weather in Ireland sounds.
On Thursday, in this special sessions, Giuseppe Torre (http://www.muresearchlab.com/)
showed us his work, where he uses computers to represent art. For
example, his work 'AI PRISON' is a program in C++ that outputs '0'
unless the technological singularity in Kurzweil's sense (or
'Terminator' sense) appears. It is exposed in the BLITZ Contemporary Art
Gallery in Malta. Finally, Kerry l. Hagan (http://www.kerrylhagan.net/)
played some of his musical works. Again, the use of computers is the cornerstone. She uses a program that allows her to program and compose
the music she is going to play. This three artistic sessions where a really
nice touch from the organization.
Back to the
science, on Thursday we started with a keynote talk by Óscar Pastor
López about Model-driven Development. The idea is that developers should
be freed from programming concerns and be able to concentrate on
guaranteeing that the final software product corresponds to what the
company asked for. There are two basic notions in this field: capability
and the Model Driven Architecture. The first one is especially used at
the earliest steps of a software process in order to characterize the
relevant modelling components to be specified. Whereas the Model Driven
Architecture is used in the definition of the desired software process
in order to structure the development from requirements to code.
Afterwards
I attended the tutorial by Cristina Seceleanu about verification and
test-case generation for Automotive Systems. Nowadays a car is developed
with more electric components than hydraulic ones. For example, the
connection between the steering wheel and the steering control is done
by wires and software. This makes mandatory the use of testing in order
to verify the correct behaviour of a car. In this field of research
tools as UPPAAL are of great use. After the lunch we had the second
keynote talk of the day. Paul Spirakis explained us about "programmable
matter", which at the beginning seemed a field closest to sci-fi than
actual computer science. So, let me explain what I understood, nowadays
digital information (as internet) has spread along the world. That
information is simply data, which can be manipulated. This vision is
focused in our ability to manipulate data, and thus extended to
manipulate matter via information-theoretic and computing mechanisms,
incorporating information to the physical world. This is inspired in the
biological world where living organisms are built by cells and those
cells are built by information (DNA). Paul Spirakis explained us how
Network Constructions is a promising technique for modelling this idea
of "programmable matter". Broadly speaking, Network Constructions is
simply a collection of finite-automata that interact randomly like
molecules according to the rules of a common protocol.
The
last session on Thursday for me was the tutorial session by Louis-Marie
Traonouez by Plasma Lab, a statistical model checker (SMC). A SMC and
uses less resources than a model checker at the cost of losing
certainty. SMCs answers with a confidence level. Plasma Lab is SMC a
library written in Java that can be used in tools as UPPAAL. The
properties can be described in a form of bounded linear temporal logic
(like LTL but with bounds in the length of the paths).
The
last keynote talk of SOFSEM 2017 was on Friday and by Igor Walukiewicz.
The topic of the talk was automatic verification of recursive programs
with thread creation. Although this situation appears in programming
languages such as Java, Scala or Erlang it doesn't behave well in
automatic verification. For example, reachability is not decidable even
for pushdown systems where two threads are communicating over a 2-bit
shared variable. Igor Walukiewicz showed us some decidable setting by
relaxing the semantics of thread creation operation. The obtaining
result might not be very efficient but at least is computable.
Finally,
I want to end these notes on SOFSEM by acknowledging the excellent work
of the local organization at Limerick. It's true that SOFSEM 2017
didn't start very well in June, but all things considered everything
went smooth and fine in Limerick. Also, the organization always tried to
add something new to the conference (as those special talks about art
and computer science), which is always nice for the participants.
Next year SOFSEM will be held in Austria and my recommendation is to check it out!
Ignacio Fábregas has kindly sent me this report on the first two days of SOFSEM 2017, which is being held this week in Limerick, Ireland. I hope you'll enjoy reading it. Many thanks to Ignacio for agreeing to write this guest post.
SOFSEM has always be an atypical conference with a format
closest to a Winter School. This year marks a new beginning for the
SOFSEM conference, since it's the first time it's held outside the Czech
Republic or the Slovak Republic. As Jan van Leeuwen told us in the
Welcome Reception on Monday, the goal of the Steering Committee of SOFSEM is
to keep the spirit of SOFSEM alive while moving to a more typical
format for a computer science conference. The main ingredients are still
there: the keynote talks of renowned experts, tutorial sessions and the
Student Research Forum; the only main difference is the country
(Ireland) and the schedule (instead of having all the keynote talks the
first and last day, now they are distributed across the conference days).
The
first day of the Conference the keynote speaker was Kim G. Larsen. He told
us about Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), that is, systems combining
computing elements with dedicated hardware and software having to
monitor and control a particular physical environment. In
order to study them, Larsen and his team propose a model-based approach,
powered by the use of the tool Uppaal. An example of CPS is the
adaptive cruise control for cars, an application where Europe is trying
to match U.S. (where the Google Self-Driving car has already been
approved by the legislation in several U.S. states) and where the team
of Kim Larsen is making advances.
After the
keynote talk we had the first parallel sessions: two sessions of the
Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) track and the first tutorial. I
went to the FOCS session about Semantics, Specification and
Compositionality, mainly because my talk was there :) But, more
importantly, there was a talk of Uli Fahrenberg and another by Linda
Bordo. Uli talked about behavioural specification theories for most
equivalences in the linear-time–branching-time spectrum. He humbly
defined his work as "almost" a rewriting of some old and overlooked
results. Going back, reading and, most importantly, understanding, old results
is a non-trivial exercise that computer science researchers should do
more often. On the other hand, Linda talked about link-calculus, as a
model that extends the point-to-point communication discipline of
Milner’s CCS with multiparty interactions. She used links to build chains
describing the flow of information among the agents participating in
that interaction. The difficult part comes when deciding both the
number of participants in an interaction and how they synchronize.
The
second day of conference we had two keynote talks. Axel Legay talked
about Software Product Lines (SPL), that is, the families of similar
software products built from a common set of features. For example, like
the mobile phones that a company as Samsung or HTC produce. He showed us
how he and his team formalizes SPLs by means of what they called
Featured Transition Systems and how the designed verification algorithms
and tools to check temporal properties over them. The second keynote
talk was by Marjan Mernik. He told us about Domain-Specific Languages
that assist software developers in programming, and some open problems
in the field like the lacking of tool support for different
Domain-Specific Languages and the difficulties combining them.
Relative
to the conference papers, in the FOCS session in Verification and
Automated System Analysis we have talks by Mohammad Reza Mousavi,
Nataliya Gribovskaya, Zhaowei Xu and Saket Saurabh. I want to highlight
Mohammad's talk about the complexity of deriving invertible sequences from
finite-state machines. The problem is the following: checking the
existence of input/output sequences (UIOs) that identify states of the
finite state machine specification (as it's the case of ioco) is
PSPACE-complete; so some UIO generation algorithms utilise what are
called invertible sequences; these allow one to construct additional
UIOs once a UIO has been found. Mohammad and his coauthors studied some
optimization problems and their complexity.
And
that's all for now. Tomorrow (18 January 2017) we'll have fewer talks since we have the
excursion and conference dinner. Also I'm planning to go for one
tutorial session by Andrew Butterfield. I'll tell you more on that.
The Feder-Vardi dichotomy conjecture (which, as far as I know, stems from this 1998 article) is a celebrated open problem in the study of the complexity of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). It states that, for every finite relational structure, the set of all CSPs that can be represented using only relations chosen from that set is either in P or is NP-complete.
A paper claiming a solution to the Feder-Vardi conjecture appeared yesterday on the arXiv:
The Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken is seeking nominations for the position of Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and Director of the Institute. The founding director, Kurt Mehlhorn, will be retiring in the next three years, and the Institute is looking for a new scientific director for the algorithms and complexity department. (More precisely, Kurt will step down as Director on the day a new director joins. He will stay on as a researcher at the Institute.)
Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini, one of the most influential Italian (theoretical) computer scientists, turned 70 yesterday. As witnessed by her DBLP entry, Mariangiola is still very active in research and is a prime example of a scientist who continues to challenge herself, to produce excellent work and to mentor young researchers at an age at which many are retired.
The purpose of this post is to celebrate Mariangiola's 70 birthday, hoping that some of the readers of this blog who are not familiar with her work will be tempted to read it and to spread it amongst their students.
Mariangiola Dezani has been one of the leading researchers in the foundations of programming languages and, in particular, of their type systems for about 40 years. She has offered seminal contributions to that field, introducing new type systems that deeply influenced theoretical developments and its practical applications.
In addition to her outstanding research activities, she has been a mentor and role model for young researchers, many of whom now have leading positions at high-class universities. Moreover, she has tirelessly supported female students and researchers in computer science at all stages of their career. She has turned the Department of Computer Science at the University of Turin, Italy, into a hotbed of research on the theory of programming languages. The group led by Simona Ronchi Della Rocca and her is one of the largest research teams in that field in the world, and is one of those with largest percentage of female researchers and students.
Mariangiola's research activity over the years has followed a path in which theoretical developments have been inspired by the evolution of programming languages: from lambda-calculus models in the 1980s, providing foundations for functional programming languages, to object orientation in the 1990s, to dynamic and distributed contexts with behavioural types for web services and session types since the year 2000.
Mariangiola's main scientific achievement in the first phase of her research career was the introduction of intersection type assignment systems, which were largely used as finitary descriptions of models of the lambda-calculus. Intersection types are one example of a theoretical concept developed by Mariangiola Dezani that has later had profound influence on the practice of programming languages. Indeed, their use in the typing discipline for a language has allowed compilers to generate more efficient code for different instantiations. In object-oriented languages, intersection types are employed, amongst other things, in expressing mixins (constructs that permit code reuse avoiding the ambiguities of multiple inheritance). They have also been advocated and are used for manipulating XML and semi-structured data in languages such as CDuce.
Since the year 2000, Mariangiola's research has been mainly devoted to the study of self-adapting types for ensuring safety and liveness of
communication protocols also in presence of unexpected events. This
work has offered seminal contributions to the study of session types
and has led to practical applications whose impact will be felt for
years to come. Mariangiola first proposed a formalisation of Java with session types, which was later applied to the
design and implementation of SJ (Session Java). These
contributions initiated a flurry of research activity aiming at
applying session types to many real-world programming languages. She
also first studied a theory of progress in the session types for the
pi-calculus, whose core theory was later extended to multi-party session types. This formalism became the core of the
current version of an open-source protocol description language,
Scribble, which is developed at Red Hat
and Imperial. This language is used in the multi-million-USD Ocean Observatory Initiative project,
whose purpose is to build an infrastructure of sensors and other
computing devices located on the ocean floor so that oceanographers to
get data about the health of the marine ecosystem. This is an example
of the effectiveness and practical impact of the deep and elegant
theoretical work carried out by Mariangiola Dezani.
Jorge A. Pérez
asked me to post this very interesting opportunity for tenure-track positions at the University of Groningen, targeted to talented female researchers (see www.rug.nl/rff). Feel free to contact Jorge if you work in areas related to "Fundamental CS" (using the terminology in the call) and are interested in applying.
Rosalind Franklin Fellowships at the University of Groningen
The
University of Groningen (The Netherlands) initiated the prestigious
Rosalind Franklin Fellowship programme to promote the advancement of
talented international researchers at the highest levels of the
institution. The ambitious programme has been running since 2007 and has
financed over 90 Fellows.
The Rosalind Franklin Fellowship
programme is aimed at women in industry, academia or research institutes
who have a PhD and would like a career as full professor in a European
top research university. The Fellowship is only awarded to outstanding
researchers. New Fellows are given:
A tenure track position to work towards full professorship within a period of ten years;
Budget for a PhD student to enable them to make a flying start.
Successful
candidates will be expected to establish an independent, largely
externally funded research programme in collaboration with colleagues at
our University and elsewhere.
The
University of Groningen has 13 tenure track positions available in this
programme, currently co-funded by the European Union.
Within these,
the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences (FMNS) has five Rosalind
Franklin Fellowships to offer, including positions on
Fundamental Computer Science (Data Management, Theory of Computing, Algorithms, Networks, Security)
Artificial Intelligence (logic, neuromorphic computing, cognitive modelling or robotics)
Fundamental Mathematics (Algebra, Geometry, Analysis), Mathematical Data Analysis, Complex Systems
Ambitious female academics are invited to apply for these positions before February 1, 2017.
More information about the positions (including eligibility conditions and conditions of employment) is available on: www.rug.nl/rff
The 2015 Sacks Prize of the Association for Symbolic Logic for the best doctoral dissertation in Logic will be shared by Omer Ben-Neria, University of California, Los Angeles, and Martino Lupini, California Institute of Technology. The prize citations can be found here and are also appended to this post for ease of reference. Congratulations to the prize recipients!
Omer Ben-Neria received his Ph.D. in 2015 from Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Moti Gitik.
Martino Lupini received his Ph.D. in 2015 from York University, Toronto under the supervision of Ilijas Farah. He received his bachelor degree at the University of Parma (under the supervision of Celestina Cotti Ferrero) and a master degree from the University of Pisa advised by Mauro Di Nasso with a thesis entitled Recurrence and Szemerédi’s Theorem.
Martino Lupini is the second Italian young researcher to receive this accolade; the first was Matteo Viale in 2006. The successes of young Italian logicians witness the quality of the research in logic in Italy. This is yet another vindication of the analysis of the European Commission on the quality of research in Italian universities, compared with the resources available to Italian researchers: "Strong public science base despite an overall underinvestment in research and innovation." The executive report on Italy also states "R&D investment has slightly increased in recent years but the gap with the EU average is still quite significant." I hope that Italy will devote more of its budget to supporting its universities and research in the future. A starved system cannot continue producing young researchers like Martino Lupini for much longer.
Prize citations
Ben-Neria received his Ph.D. in 2015 from Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Moti Gitik. In his thesis, The Possible Structure of the Mitchell Order,
he proved the remarkable result that, under suitable large cardinal
assumptions on the cardinal $\kappa$, every well-founded partial order
of cardinality $\kappa$ can be realized as the Mitchell order of
$\kappa$ in some forcing extension. The Prizes and Awards Committee
noted that the proof is a tour de force combination of sophisticated
forcing techniques with the methods of inner model theory.
Lupini received his Ph.D. in 2015 from York University, Toronto under the supervision of Ilijas Farah. His thesis, Operator Algebras and Abstract Classification,
includes a beautiful result establishing a fundamental dichotomy in
the classification problem for the automorphisms of a separable unital
$C^*\/$-algebra up to unitary equivalence, as well as a proof that the
Gurarij operator space is unique, homogeneous, and universal among
separable 1-exact operator spaces. The Prizes and Awards Committee noted
that his thesis exhibits a high level of originality, as well as
technical sophistication, in a broad spectrum of areas of logic and
operator algebras.
Gordon Plotkin asked me to post the call for nominations for the 2016 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation. The first edition of the award was given to Rajeev Alur and David Dill for
their invention of timed automata, see:
http://eacsl.kahle.ch/church16.pdf. I strongly encourage members of the community to nominate their favourite paper(s) for this accolade. See the call for the rules regarding eligibility and on how to submit your nomination.
The
2017 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:
The
2016 Alonzo Church Award was given to Rajeev Alur and David Dill for
their invention of timed automata, see:
http://eacsl.kahle.ch/church16.pdf
Eligibility
and Nominations
The
contribution must have appeared in a paper or papers published within
the past 25 years. Thus, for the 2017 award, the cut-off date is
January 1, 1992. 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 2017 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
are due by March
1, 2017,
and should be submitted to gdp@inf.ed.ac.uk.
Presentation
of the Award
The
2017 award will be presented at the CSL conference, the annual
meeting of the European Association for Computer Science Logic. 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
2017 Alonzo Church Award Committee consists of the following four
members: Natarajan Shankar, Catuscia Palamidessi, Gordon Plotkin
(chair), and Moshe Vardi.
Disclaimer: This post might contain imprecisions about the ASN, since I have never worked at an Italian university myself and I have never applied for the Italian ASN. I welcome corrections from whoever reads this post and has experience with this Italian evaluation exercise.Let me state at the outset that what I write pertains to fields such as computer science and mathematics. I do not know what is done in the humanities.
An Italian law dated 30 December 2010 specifies a procedure for academic hirings in Italy at the level of associate and full professor. According to that law, recruiting for those positions should be "based on scientific qualification
criteria. A national commission evaluates and assesses the candidates
scientific qualification." See this outdated web site, which should be compared with the one in Italian. Only candidates that have obtained the so-called Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale (ASN, National Scientific Qualification) can then apply for a professor position at an Italian university, if and when such positions are advertised.
One can wonder why Italy uses this two-step system for academic hirings, whose need is not felt in any of the countries where I have worked so far. I guess that the first step is meant to filter out potential candidates who do not meet minimum requirements for being a professor at any of the 63 public universities in Italy.
According to the regulations a "national commission evaluates and assesses the candidates
scientific qualification." In fact, there is one national commission for each of the many scientific areas considered in Italy. Many of these commissions have to examine hundreds of applications, and their members play the role of gatekeepers and paladins of quality in the Italian university system. I can only imagine how much work is needed to do a thoughtful job in one of those committees and how easy it is to make enemies regardless of how considerate one is in justifying one's opinions. The evaluation is partly based on bibliometric criteria, which are known beforehand, should simplify the work of the commissions and should give a look of objectivity to their decisions. However, as far as I know, the commissions can also base their decisions on a qualitative analysis of the applicants.
Given the crucial role played by the members of the evaluation committees, one would expect that their members are chosen by taking the candidates' scientific profile and experience carefully into account. As it turns out, however, the qualifications of candidates for the committee are evaluated using only the following three bibliometric criteria:
Number of publications in the period 2006-2016 (threshold 9);
Total number of citations in the period 2001-2015 (threshold 80);
H-index in the last 15 years (threshold 5).
In order to be eligible, one has to meet the thresholds in at least two of the above criteria. This might even seem reasonable. Note, however, that only publications indexed in Web of Science or Scopus count. In particular, journal papers published in outlets that are not indexed by Web of Science/Scopus are not taken into consideration (regardless of their content and impact) and conference papers don't count at all. Books and monographs don't count either, regardless of how influential they might be. Web of Science/Scopus are also used for calculating citations and the h-index. Again, this provides a smaller coverage than the one offered by Google Scholar, say.
By way of example, recently Giovanni Sambin, one of the most famous, currently active Italian logicians and an expert academic one would trust to lead a national evaluation committee for Mathematical Logic, was considered to be ineligible as an evaluator because he met only one of the above-mentioned criteria. His Google Scholar profile is here.
This kind of decisions makes me wonder whether there is an overemphasis on bibliometric evaluations in Italian academia. If experience over a long and distinguished academic career plays second fiddle to fairly arbitrary thresholds calculated using only Web of Science and Scopus, I wonder how reliable the decisions of the evaluation committees will be considered by Italian academics. Most importantly, having so many people spend a lot of time seeking the holy grail of the national qualification and small committees devote endless hours examining their qualifications looks like a huge waste of energy and resources. I cannot help but think that that energy and time would be best used for research, teaching and all the other tasks that make up our work.
LOLA: Syntax and Semantics of Low-Level Languages. Proposer: Matija Pretnar, Noam Zeilberger
Metafinite model theory and definability and complexity of numeric graph parameters. Proposers: Andrew Goodall, Janos A. Makowsky, Elena V. Ravve.
More details on this workshops will be available from the conference web page in due course. I hope that you'll consider attending them and submitting excellent papers to the conference.
Some time ago I stumbled across the video of the panel discussion "IST
Austria: On the Way to the Top: What Makes a Research Institution
Excellent?". (There is also a much shorter, 11-minute version of the video here.) I watched the discussion with great interest, and found it inspirational and thought-provoking.
Here is my quarter-baked summary of some of the contributions, with apologies for not covering the whole discussion, possibly biased reporting and for any error I might have made.
Patrick Aebischer stated that Europe lacks super-brands such as Berkeley, CalTech, CMU, Harvard, MIT
and Stanford. One needs elite universities to
attract talents. The US attracts the best graduate students, the best
young researchers with their tenure-track system and also people in high-ranking management positions. He also mentioned that to foster excellence, it is useful to have some competition between public and
private universities. He said that integration
of research and education is key to achieve excellence, as are attracting and keeping the best faculty, and giving early independence to young individuals.
In order to achieve excellence, funding must be significant. A flexible organizational structure is needed to be able to compete at the highest level.
In this era, one can rise fast, but one can also fall faster than before.
Peter
Gruss started by asking a fundamental question: what makes creative research
possible? In his words, it is amazing how easy the answer is and how difficult it is
to achieve it: "Hire the most brilliant minds and give them everything
they need to stay brilliant." That's it.
He referred to the work of the historian Rogers
Hollingsworth who isolated the following ingredients for excellence in research institutions:
Excellence
in research and leadership. On this point, Gruss said that is critical that one hires top people
because top people hire people who are better than themselves. To get
them, one has to do head hunting plus advertising. One should strike a good
balance between tenured and non-tenured people to maintain flexibility.
Small research settings.
Small group size, but large context.
Multidisciplinary contacts. One has to install interfaces between different disciplines. (Examples: Have only one coffee room.)
Independence
as early as possible. Give young people stability for a certain period
of time to allow them to unfold their creativity. Coaching and mentoring of young
researchers must be provided.
Core institutional and flexible funds. There should be a balance
between high-trust and low-trust funding. When handing out high trust funding, an agency must trust the funded institution: Give them the money that you can
afford and let them do what they want with it. Trust them to make the
most of the received funding.
He also mentioned that a study in the US pointed out that 75% of citations in patents are to papers
funded by public money. Of this 75% of papers most of them belong to the
top10% of the papers cited within the scientific community. Hence one should
invest in research, in fact, in top research. Hire the best without compromise. Put a lot of weight on top scientists.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer mentioned the importance of "taking society with you." One has to promote science in society.
For
research, one needs to continuously develop a vision, which will drive
innovation and technology, partnership with industry and feed back to research. Every
excellent institution must keep this virtuous circle. One must think strategically and long term.
All
staff needs to have intellectual challenges, including administrative
staff. Excellence can be in individuals, but also in cooperation. Excellence
must allow for failure, for some research that might fail. This is
doing science at the edge. What one can guarantee is that the path will
be fruitful.
Olaf Kuebler stated that the strategy to create a leading research institution is deceptively simple: "Search, appoint and retain world-leading scientists. All else will follow."
The
reputation of a university is made by the people who leave the
university students, graduate students, assistant professors etc.
He also stated that an excellent research institution must:
Make significant contributions to themes of global importance.
Identify and develop new themes of global importance.
Harmonize its portfolio with its funders.
Helga Nowotny said that being
open towards the future is the key aspect of excellence. Invest in
excellent young people, who are competent rebels and understand that
scientific knowledge is always preliminary. One has to bear in mind that excellence is always a multi-dimensional concept.
One should provide
the best possible working conditions. This involves
a space component: space that makes
it almost obligatory to run into each other and discuss, as ideas emerge
by talking to each other, and
a time component: give time for the unexpected, for the
unforeseen, for serendipity.
Jonathan Dorfan mentioned that one should establish
a setting that is conducive for inter-disciplinary research, where
researchers from different fields can cooperate and exchange ideas.
Haim Harari closed the meeting with an articulate and thought-provoking short address. He started by pointing out what he considers to be key ingredients for an excellent research institution.
Funding
must be versatile and come from many sources. Only if one is versatile
one can have the right mix. Government funding leads inevitably to
egalitarianism and democracy. However, science is not democratic. Still there
has to be a balance between the power of the president and the faculty.
A
research institution should be as international as possible and as
national as possible. It should give something back to the taxpayers:
education and touching society. Technology transfer is the other thing
one return to society.
The Weizmann Institute put all the different subjects in the same campus, which leads to inter-disciplinary research that cannot be done by any single subject alone.
Harari also said that the excellence of a research institution should be evaluated according to three different measures:
its best ten people,
the average quality of its professors and
its worst professor.
The
quality of the worst professor says what the threshold of the
institution is for hiring and is a very important indicator of the
standards of the research institute/university.
In Harari's opinion, the president
of a research institute/university should regularly ask
herself/himself: If I could fire some of my professors, how many would I
fire?" If the number is a non-trivial fraction of the faculty, then the
threshold of the institution is not high enough.
So, in your opinion, what makes a research institution excellent?
It is fair to say that not many computer scientists try to present innovative research findings in a way that is accessible to an interested, but rather unspecialized, public. Even fewer succeed and the rewards for those who do are relatively minor. As a consequence, the number of essays and books about computer science that have a wide readership is substantially smaller than those about astronomy and physics, say. In my humble opinion, this is a pity, since many of intellectual achievements of computer science research deserve to be known by any intellectually curious layperson.
I was therefore happy to learn about the Klaus Tschira Award for Achievements in Public Understanding of Science. Since 2006, the Klaus Tschira Stiftung has looked for young scientists who can write a generally understandable article (8,000 to 9,000 words) in German about their research and the content of their PhD thesis. The prize is awarded in each of biology, chemistry, information technology, mathematics, neurosciences and physics as well as in closely related fields. The contributions are judged by a panel of experts on science and communication, which selects the winners based on scientific quality and on how well the scientific contribution is presented in a way that is amenable to public understanding. Yearly, up to six winners receive the award, which is endowed with prize money of 5,000 Euros. The prize-winning contributions are published in a supplementary issue of the popular science magazine bild der wissenschaft (German). Moreover, all competitors are off ered a participation in a two-day workshop for science communication.
The piece by Ágnes Cseh (a former postdoc of Magnús M. Halldórsson's at ICE-TCS, Reykjavík University) you can find here is the English translation of the German original that was selected as one of the prize-winning contributions for 2016. (It will appear in the October issue of the Bulletin of the EATCS.) It is based on Ágnes’ PhD thesis Complexity and algorithms in matching problems under preferences, which she defended in 2015 under the supervisionof Martin Skutella at TU Berlin. I am sure that you will enjoy reading it as much as I did, regardless of whether you believe that algorithms can help us find stable marriages in real life.
As usual, the EATCS has issued its calls for nominations for the 2017 edition of most of its awards with deadline 31 December 2016. You can find the calls on the EATCS web page, but I collect them below for ease of reference.
The calls for the Alonzo Church Prize and the Gödel Prize, which the EATCS awards jointly with other associations, will follow.
Let's make the job of the award committees difficult by nominating some of the many colleagues who would richly deserve the awards for these accolades!
Every five years, the Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University undergoes a research evaluation. The purpose of this exercise is to provide the department with qualified and independent opinions on its "actual research topics, results, and performance, but also on strategic issues like funding, internal organization and synergies, possible new directions, collaboration with industry, internationalization, positioning IT as a key enabler in society, etc." So the overall aim is to improve the quality and impact of the research carried out within the department.
The evaluation committee for the period 2011-2015 consisted of Peter Apers (University of Twente, the Netherlands), Jan Gulliksen (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden), Chris Hankin (Institute for Security Science and Technology and Imperial College, UK), Heikki Mannila (Aalto University, President of the Academy of Finland, Finland) and Torben Bach Pedersen (Aalborg University, Denmark), who was the internal member and chair of the committee.
The report resulting from the latest such evaluation has recently been released and can be found here. The editors of the report were Manfred Jaeger, Jesper Kjeldskov, Hua Lu and Brian Nielsen. As a former editor of such a report in days long gone, I know that their job required a considerable use of time and effort.
So, what did the evaluation committee have to say? Quoting from its evaluation of the department as a whole,
"The Computer Science Department has two world-class groups and excellent staff in all groups. The Danish IT benchmarking exercise of 2014 shows that the Department is the best department in Denmark for number of refereed publications and BFI points per full-time faculty member. The Department is also top in a number of other metrics. During the review it was also reported that Aalborg Computer Science graduates are highly prized by industry. The Department thus deserves to be ranked even higher in the QS World University Rankings by Subject or the Academic Ranking of World University (ARWU \Shanghai") Subject ranking. The current rankings are to a large degree caused by the poor coverage of computer science publications in the commercial bibliometric indices used in these rankings (WoS, Scopus). Here, Google Scholar provides a much better coverage. However, the Department clearly has the potential to rise considerably in these rankings but will require support from the Faculty and University to achieve this."
The two world-class groups mentioned in the above quotation are the Database and Programming Technologies and the Distributed and Embedded Systems units. (The latter is now called Distributed, Embedded and Intelligent Systems unit as it now also includes researcers from what used to be the Machine Intelligence group.) Those two groups are led by the Danish computer scientists with the highest h-index, and have a truly impressive publication and grant-winning record.
You can find the committee's evaluations for each of the research groups in the report. Here I'll limit myself to mentioning an excerpt of what the committee wrote about the Distributed and Embedded Systems unit, where I had the pleasure to work for ten years.
"The Distributed and Embedded Systems group is a world-class group. It is involved in a broad range of activities from semantic foundations through tool development for verification and validation to real-world applications. The group is making excellent contributions across the whole spectrum of activity; this is internationally recognized by prestigious awards such as:
The ERC Advanced Grant LASSO
The 2013 CAV Award for Uppaal - the first time that this award has been granted to a non-US team
The ranking of "Uppaal in a Nutshell" as the 9th most influential paper in Software Engineering since 1972
Best paper awards, medals and other awards to Associate Professors
The h-index of Kim Guldstrand Larsen is outstanding and places him among the top echelon of researchers in this area; his h-index is higher than some Turing Award winners in cognate areas. It is also pleasing to note that some of the Associate Professors also have high h-indices for their career point. .....
The group has published well during the review period with 175 conference papers - 75% of which are in A and B venues - and 63 journals - 92% of which are in A and B venues. .....
The group has secured 37 new grants to a total value of DKK103.8M. ....
The major strength of the group is the people; not only the group leader but the strong group of more junior academic staff and an excellent group of support staff. The broad span from foundational work to applications is also unusual in such groups in other universities and is a considerable strength of DES. The profile and reach of the group is enhanced by its dissemination activities but also the engagement of senior staff in policy-related activities at national and European levels."
Of course there is still a lot of room for improvement, but this will require support from the university as a whole, high-profile new hires in the future and the development of the talent the department already boasts. However, the opinion of the evaluation committee clearly highlights the current strength of a CS department that, in my admittedly biased opinion, deserves to be better known worldwide.
