October issue of the Bulletin of the EATCS

The October issue  of the EATCS Bulletin is now available online at http://www.eatcs.org/beatcs/index.php/beatcs/issue/view/10. You can download a pdf with the printed version of the Bulletin from http://www.eatcs.org/images/bulletin/beatcs111.pdf. 

This is issue number 111 of the BEATCS and is the first one edited by Kazuo Iwama, the new editor in chief of the EATCS. Apart from four  EATCS columns, including the first one edited by Giovanni Pighizzini, this issue of the Bulletin also features contributions by Erik Demaine (recipient of the Presburger Award 2013), by Luca Moscardelli (recipient of the first Young Researcher in Theoretical Computer Science Award of the Italian Chapter of the EATCS) as well as by Jacopo Mauro and Alessandra Scafuro (recipients of the two Best Italian Ph.D. Thesis in Theoretical Computer Science Awards for 2013 of the Italian Chapter of the EATCS). And I have not yet mentioned the conference reports and the contributions related to EATCS matters, amongst which the calls for nominations for several EATCS awards and fellowships.

I hope that you will enjoy this issue of the Bulletin. Of course, Kazuo and I welcome suggestions for improving the BEATCS. Feel free to drop us a line with your ideas and desiderata.

Call for Nominations: The EATCS-IPEC Nerode Prize 2014 for outstanding papers in multivariate algorithmics

The call for nominations for the EATCS-IPEC Nerode Prize 2014 for outstanding papers in multivariate algorithmics is out. The award committee consists of Georg Gottlob (Oxford University), Jan Arne Telle (University of Bergen) and Peter Widmayer (ETH Zurich, chair). Do make their job hard by nominating your favourite eligible papers!

Turing Machine Opera by Helsinki Skaala Opera

The full show can be watched by starting from this link.

ERC Advanced Grants to TCS researchers

A couple of days ago, the ERC announced that, in its sixth and last Advanced  Grant competition under the EU's Seventh Research Framework Programme, it is awarding over €660 million to 284 senior research leaders. TCS folks will be happy to hear that the following colleagues of ours have been awarded ERC Advanced Grants:

• Monika Henzinger. Challenges in Graph Algorithms with Applications.
• Rachid Guerraoui. Adversary-Oriented Computing.
• Pavel Pudlak. Feasibility, logic and randomness in computational complexity.
• Jean-Daniel Boissonnat. Algorithmic Foundations of Geometry Understanding in Higher Dimensions.
• David Pointcheval. Cryptography for the Cloud.
• Nello Cristianini. Patterns in Big Data: Methods, Applications and Implications. 
• Leslie Ann Goldberg. Mapping the Complexity of Counting.

Congratulations to the award recipients! I am sure that, with the support of the ERC, they will advance the state of the art in their respective fields of interest, benefiting TCS as a whole.

Addendum: As kindly pointed out by anonymous commenters, I have failed to mention that Nati Linial received an ERC Advanced Grant for the project High-dimensional combinatorics and that Lex Schrijver got one for Applying Fundamental Mathematics in Discrete Mathematics, Optimization, and Algorithmics. These two grants are in the field of mathematics, as is the one awarded to Saharon Shelah for the project Model theory and its applications: dependent classes.

Call for Nominations for the Presburger Award 2014

Presburger Award for Young Scientists 2014 

CALL FOR NOMINATIONS 

Deadline: December 31st, 2013

Starting in 2010, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) established the Presburger Award. The Award is conferred annually at the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP) to a young scientist (in exceptional cases to several young scientists) for outstanding contributions in theoretical computer science, documented by a published paper or a series of published papers. The Award is named after Mojzesz Presburger who accomplished his path-breaking work on decidability of the theory of addition (which today is called Presburger arithmetic) as a student in 1929.

Nominations for the Presburger Award can be submitted by any member or group of members of the theoretical computer science community except the nominee and his/her advisors for the master thesis and the doctoral dissertation. Nominated scientists have to be at most 35 years at the time of the deadline of nomination (i.e., for the Presburger Award of 2014 the date of birth should be in 1978 or later).

The Presburger Award Committee of 2014 consists of Antonin Kucera (Brno, chair), Claire Mathieu (Paris), and Peter Widmayer (Zurich). Nominations, consisting of a two page justification and (links to) the respective papers, as well as additional supporting letters, should be sent by e-mail to:

Antonin Kucera
kucera@fi.muni.cz

The subject line of every nomination should start with "Presburger Award 2014", and the message must be received before December 31st, 2013.

The award includes an amount of 1000 Euro and an invitation to ICALP 2014 for a lecture. The Presburger Award is sponsored by CWI, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.

Previous Winners:

• Mikolaj Bojanczyk, 2010 
• Patricia Bouyer-Decitre, 2011 
• Venkatesan Guruswami and Mihai Patrascu, 2012 
• Erik Demaine, 2013 

Official website: http://www.eatcs.org/index.php/presburger

Call for nominations: EATCS Fellows

At its meeting at ICALP 2013 in Riga, the EATCS Council decided to start an EATCS Fellows Programme. The first call for nominations is appended.

I hope that EATCS members will submit strong nominations for consideration by the first EATCS Fellow-Selection Committee, which is chaired by Anca Muscholl. The deadline for nominations is December 31. The EATCS fellows will be announced at ICALP 2014 in Copenhagen.

                                                        
                                                                     
                                             
          CALL FOR NOMINATIONS FOR EATCS FELLOWS 2014
                                                                              
                                             
INSTRUCTIONS:
Please note: all nominees and nominators must be EATCS Members

Submit by December 31 of the current year for Fellow consideration by
email to the EATCS Secretary (secretary@eatcs.org). The subject line
of the email should read "EATCS Fellow Nomination - ".

REQUIREMENTS FOR EATCS NOMINATION:

The EATCS Fellows Program is established by the Association to
recognize outstanding EATCS Members for their scientific achievements
in the field of Theoretical Computer Science. The Fellow status is
conferred by the EATCS Fellows-Selection Committee upon a person
having a track record of intellectual and organizational leadership
within the EATCS community.  Fellows are expected to be “model
citizens” of the TCS community, helping to develop the standing of TCS
beyond the frontiers of the community.

In order to be considered by the EATCS Fellows-Selection Committee,
candidates must be nominated by at least four EATCS Members.  
Please verify your membership at http://www.eatcs.org/.

The EATCS Fellows-Selection Committee consists of 

- Rocco De Nicola (IMT Lucca, Italy) 
- Paul Goldberg (Oxford, UK)
- Anca Muscholl (Bordeaux, France, chair)
- Dorothea Wagner (Karlsruhe, Germany)
- Roger Wattenhofer (ETH Zurich, CH)

INSTRUCTIONS:

A nomination should consist of answers to the questions below. It can
be co-signed by several EATCS members. At least two nomination letters 
per candidate are recommended. If you are supporting the
nomination from within the candidate's field of
expertise, it is expected that you will be specific about the
individual's technical contributions.

To be considered, nominations for 2014 must be received by December 31, 2013.

1. Name of candidate
Candidate's current affiliation and position
Candidate's email address, postal address and phone number
Nominator(s) relationship to the candidate

2. Short summary of candidate's accomplishments (citation -- 25 words or less)

3. Candidate's accomplishments: Identify the most important
contributions that qualify the candidate for the rank of EATCS Fellow
according to the following two categories: 

A) Technical achievements
B) Outstanding service to the TCS community

Please limit your comments to at most three pages.

4. Nominator(s):
Name(s)
Affiliation(s), email and postal address(es), phone number(s)

Gödel Prize 2014: Call for Nominations

I should be grateful if you could help disseminate this call for nominations. Feel free to post it on your blogs, send it to your collaborators and your department members, and post it on social networks. 

The Gödel Prize 2014
Call for Nominations

Deadline: January 17, 2014.
The Gödel Prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science is sponsored jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (ACM-SIGACT). The award is presented annually, with the presentation taking place alternately at the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP) and the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC). The 22nd Gödel Prize will be awarded at the 41st ICALP in Copenhagen in July 2014.

The Prize is named in honor of Kurt Gödel in recognition of his major contributions to mathematical logic and of his interest, discovered in a letter he wrote to John von Neumann shortly before von Neumann’s death, in what has become the famous “P versus NP” question. The Prize includes an award of USD 5000.

Award Committee: The winner of the Prize is selected by a committee of six members. The EATCS President and the SIGACT Chair each appoint three members to the committee, to serve staggered three-year terms. The committee is chaired alternately by representatives of EATCS and SIGACT. The 2014 Award Committee consists of Krzysztof Apt (CWI Amsterdam), Giuseppe F. Italiano (Università di Roma Tor Vergata), Joseph Mitchell (State University of New York at Stony Brook), Andrew Pitts (University of Cambridge), Daniel Spielman (Yale
University), and Éva Tardos (Cornell University).

Eligibility: The rules for the 2014 Prize are given below and they supersede any different interpretation of the generic rule to be found on websites of both SIGACT and EATCS. Any research paper or series of papers by a single author or by a team of authors is deemed eligible if

1. the paper was published in a recognized refereed journal no later than December 31, 2013;
2. the main results were not published (in either preliminary or final form) in a journal or conference proceedings before January 1st, 2001.

The research work nominated for the award should be in the area of theoretical computer science. The term “theoretical computer science” is meant to encompass, but is not restricted to, research areas covered by ICALP and STOC. Nominations are encouraged from the broadest spectrum of the theoretical computer science community so as to ensure that potential award winning papers are not overlooked. The Award Committee shall have the ultimate authority to decide whether a particular paper is eligible for the Prize.

Nominations: Nominations for the award should be submitted by email to the Award Committee Chair Giuseppe F. Italiano: goedelprize at gmail dot com

Please make sure that the Subject line of all nominations and related messages begin with Goedel Prize 2014. To be considered, nominations for the 2014 Prize must be received by January 17, 2014.

Any member of the scientific community can make nominations. The Award Committee may actively solicit nominations. A nomination should contain a brief summary of the technical content of the paper(s) and a brief explanation of its significance. A printable copy of the research paper or papers should accompany the nomination. The nomination must state the date and venue of the first conference or workshop publication or state that no such publication has
occurred. The work may be in any language. However, if it is not in English, a more extended summary written in English should be enclosed. To be considered for the award, the paper or series of papers must be recommended by at least two individuals, either in the form of two distinct nominations or one nomination including recommendations from two different people. Additional recommendations may also be enclosed and are generally useful. The Award
Committee encourages recommendation and support letters to be mailed separately, without being necessarily shared with the nominator(s). The rest of the nomination package should be sent in a single email whenever possible. Those intending to submit a nomination should contact the Award Committee Chair by email well in advance. The Chair will answer questions about eligibility, encourage coordination among different nominators for the same paper(s), and also accept informal proposals of potential nominees or tentative offers to prepare formal nominations. The committee maintains a database of past nominations for eligible papers, but fresh nominations for the same papers (especially if they highlight new evidence of impact) are always welcome.

Selection Process: The Award Committee is free to use any other sources of information in addition to the ones mentioned above. It may split the award among multiple papers or declare no winner at all. All matters relating to the selection process left unspecified in this document are left to the discretion of the Award Committee.

EATCS Award 2014: Call for Nominations

The European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) annually honours a respected scientist from our community with the prestigious EATCS Distinguished Achievement Award. The award is given to acknowledge extensive and widely recognized contributions to theoretical computer science over a life long scientific career.

For the EATCS Award 2014, candidates may be nominated to the Award Committee consisting of

• Leslie Ann Goldberg (University of Oxford)
• Kim Guldstrand Larsen (Aalborg University)
• Vladimiro Sassone (University of Southampton)

The deadline for nominations is December 31, 2013. Nominations will be kept strictly confidential. They should include supporting justification and be sent by e-mail to the chair of the EATCS Award Committee:

Leslie Ann Goldberg,
Department of Computer Science,
University of Oxford,
Wolfson Bldg, Parks Rd,
Oxford OX1 3QD United Kingdom
Email: leslie.goldberg@cs.ox.ac.uk

The list of previous recipients of the EATCS Award may be found at http://eatcs.org/index.php/eatcs-award.

The next award will be presented during ICALP 2014, which will be held in the period 7-11 July 2014 in Copenhagen,

Preliminary call for papers for ICALP 2014

The preliminary call for papers for ICALP 2014 is available here. (Warning: it is 19 MB, so don't be surprised if it takes some time to download it.) In case, you do not want to download the file, here is the most relevant information. (In the light of a suggestion in one of the comments to this post, I copy-pasted the whole preliminary CFP below.)

Conference dates: 7-11 July 2014
Submission deadline: 14 Feb. 2014
Notification date: 11 Apr. 2014
Final version due: 28 Apr. 2014
Location: IT University Copenhagen

The PC chairs are Elias Koutsopias (Track A), Javier Esparza (Track B) and Pierre Fraigniaud (Track C).

The invited speakers are

• Sanjeev Arora (Princeton University, USA),
• Maurice Herlihy (Brown University, USA)
• Viktor Kuncak (EPFL, CH), and
• Claire Mathieu (ENS Paris, France).

I hope that you will submit your best work to the conference. There will be a lot going on in Copenhagen in early late June-early July, both scientifically (SEA 2014, SWAT 2014 and ICALP 2014 will all take place one after the other) and culturally.

------------------------ FULL PRELIMINARY CFP -------------

ICALP 2014

7 July – 11 July 2014

IT University of Copenhagen

Preliminary Call for Papers

Invited speakers:

Sanjeev Arora • Maurice Herlihy • Viktor Kuncak • Claire Mathieu

Committees

Track A

Elias Koutsoupias (chair) • Dimitris Achlioptas • Pankaj Agrawal • Nikhil Bansal •

Gerth Stølting Brodal • Jean Cardinal • Ning Chen • Giorgos Christodoulou • Xiaotie Deng • Ilias Diakonikolas • Chaled Elbassioni • Amos Fiat • Leslie Goldberg • Vipul Goyal • Giuseppe Italiano • Marcin Kaminsky • Haim Kaplan • Ioardanis Kerenidis • Anna Karlin • Robert Krauthgamer • James Lee • Ashwin Nayak • Jared Saia • Piotr Sankowski • Maria Serna • Christian Sohler • Ryan Williams

Track B

Javier Esparza (chair) • Paolo Baldan • Michele Boreale • Tomas Brazdil • Véronique Bruyère • Veronique Cortier • Anuj Dawar • Kousha Etessami • Maribel Fernandez • David Frutos Escrig • Pierre Ganty • Peter Habermehl • Manfred Kufleitner • Slawomir Lasota • Oded Maler • Sebastian Maneth • Madhavan Mukund • JensPalsberg • Thomas Schwentick • Sonja Smets • Jiri Srba • Steve Zdancewic

Track C

Pierre Fraigniaud (chair) • Keren Censor-Hillel • Andrea Clementi • Benjamin Doerr • Panagiota Fatourou • Michal Feldman • Antonio Fernández Anta • Leszek Gasieniec • Phillip B. Gibbons • Magnus Halldorsson • Robert Kleinberg • Anne‑Marie Kermarrec• Michal Koucky • Gopal Pandurangan • Boaz Patt-Shamir • Andrea Pietracaprina • Andrea Richa • Luís Rodrigues • Christian Scheideler  •  Jukka Suomela • Philipp Woelfel

Organization

Thore Husfeldt (chair), thore@itu.dk

Important dates

Submission deadline: Friday, 14 February 2014

Author notification: Friday, 11 April 2014

Final manuscript due: Monday, 28 April 201

Publication of the best Italian PhD theses in TCS

The Italian Chapter of the EATCS has reached an agreement with Atlantis Press (an imprint of Springer) for the publication of the best Italian PhD theses in TCS in a  special series. Fabio Mogavero's thesis, awarded last year, is the first volume published under this agreement and can be found here.  The thesis of the other winner from last year, Rossano Venturini, will be released soon.

Jacopo Mauro and Alessandra Scafuro are the two recipients of the Best Italian Ph.D. Thesis in Theoretical Computer Science Award 2013, and their theses will appear in the above-mentioned series in due course.

Congratulations to the above-mentioned young researchers!

Ten truths to assist students in choosing a PhD supervisor

Today, the dean of my school shared a well-written article by Tara Brabazon entitled "10 truths a PhD supervisor will never tell you". Here it is, for your reading pleasure.

The article contains useful advice for postgraduate students who are looking for a suitable supervisors, as well as some priceless quotes. I especially liked these two:

1. "Time is finite. Bureaucracy is infinite."
2. "If the prospective supervisor needs a personality replacement, lacks the life skills to manage a trip to the supermarket or requires electronic tagging so that he (or she) does not sleep with the spouses of colleagues, then make another choice. Supervisors should be functional humans."

The comments to that article offer a valuable counterpoint to the "ten truths" and are well worth reading too.

2013 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing

This is not exactly news since the announcement of the award was made a few days ago and I heard about it already during the ICALP 2013 conference dinner. However, since I have not come across any mention of the 2013 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing on the TCS blogs, let me "announce" that the Dijkstra Prize Committee has selected Nati Linial as the recipient of this year’s Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. The prize is given to him for his outstanding paper

Nati Linial. Locality in Distributed Graph Algorithms. SIAM Journal on Computing, 21(1), pages 193-201, 1992. See also here.

You can read the official award citation here. Congrats to Nati Linial and to the award committee for an excellent choice.

June Issue of the Bulletin of the EATCS

The June 2013 issue of the Bulletin of the EATCS is now available as a single  PDF file and from the open journal system. With this issue, we say goodbye to Maria Serna, who has been the editor in chief of the BEATCS for the last five years, editing 15 issues of the Bulletin. As current president of the EATCS, I warmly thank Maria for all the hard work she has put into the challenging task of editing the BEATCS while taking care of all her other duties. Her efforts were way beyond the call of duty.

From the October 2013 issue, the BEATCS will be edited by Kazuo Iwama. I wish Kazuo the best of luck in this new role and look forward to working with him.

If you have any suggestion on how to improve the quality of the BEATCS even further, feel free to contact Kazuo or me, or simply post your suggestions as comments to this blog post.

EATCS YouTube Channel and Slides for Jon Kleinberg's EATCS Lecture

At long last, the EATCS has a YouTube channel. (Thanks to the EATCS Secretary office in Patras for setting it up and for making us enter the 21st century :-)) In due course, the videos of the invited talks and of the EATCS-Award-2013 presentation by Martin Dyer from ICALP 2013 will be available from that channel. For the moment, you can enjoy Erik Demaine's wonderful Presburger Award 2013 video.

Make sure that you subscribe to the channel to get updates on our postings.

The slides for Jon Kleinberg's inspiring EATCS lecture are available here.  Several people asked me for the slides and Jon agreed to make them public. Thanks Jon!

Conference photos taken at ICALP 2013 can be found here. Enjoy.

CAV Award 2013

The CAV Award for 2013 has been presented to Kim G. Larsen, Paul Pettersson and Wang Yi for their seminal work on Uppaal, which is the foremost tool suite for the verification of real-time systems and the synthesis of real-time controllers. Congratulations to the awardees for receiving this well deserved accolade and to the award committee for making such an excellent choice!

If you are interested in using the tool for research and/or teaching, simply download it and read this tutorial by Frits Vaandrager. You will be up and running in no time. 


Uppaal has its roots in a tool originally developed in Uppsala and described in the conference paper Automatic verification of real-time communicating systems by constraint-solving co-authored by Wang Yi, Paul Pettersson and Mads Daniels (Proceedings of FORTE 1994). Since then, Uppaal has been jointly developed by Kim G. Larsen's research group at Aalborg University and by the group led by Wang Yi at Uppsala University. In this period, Uppaal has become an industrial-strength tool for computer-aided verification of computing systems that has been applied to many case studies by several research groups in academia and industry. The efficiency of its computational engine has been improved greatly by theoretical and practical advances relying on highly non-trivial insights. Moreover, the tool now supports the analysis of quantitative extensions of timed automata, automatic model-based testing of real-time systems and the synthesis of controllers in the context of timed games. It is still under continuous development.

Overall, the Uppaal tool is a real success story for the research community working on automated verification of computer systems. As all long-term research and tool development efforts, the work on Uppaal and its applications is due to many gifted researchers and their students. The CAV Award 2013 cannot recognize them all, but the list of authors of the many papers stemming from the work on UPPAAL gives a hint of the magnitude of the research effort involved in building such a tool over a period of nearly 20 years.

ICALP 2013 (Part 3): Award sessions

The best paper award session at ICALP 2013 was held last Monday before the welcome reception (which included excellent, and plentiful, finger food and wine). Mark Bun, John  Fearnley and Dominik Pajak delivered very good presentations of the award-winning papers. I hope that you will check out their papers. In the case of the paper by Mark and Justin Thaler, you can also read this expository blog post. 

The EATCS Award and the Presburger Award were delivered last Tuesday in a joint ceremony that also included the award of honorary doctorates to Josef Gruska and Juris Hartmanis. (See this earlier post of mine for some more information on the ceremony for the honorary doctorates.)

The master of ceremony for the award session was Paul Spirakis. First Martin Dyer received the EATCS Award from Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide and delivered a presentation entitled Counting ain't easy. Martin started by citing the following fragment of a rhyme from the Winnie the Pooh books:

Cheers for Pooh!
(For who?)
For Pooh -
(Why, what did he do?)
I thought you knew

He then proceeded to give an accessible historical overview of what he did do, covering essentially all the work mentioned in the laudatio for the award.

Last, but by no means least, Tony Kucera presented the Presburger Award 2013 to Erik Demaine. Unfortunately, Erik could not be with us in Riga, but we had a virtual presentation of the award to him via Skype. Moreover, Erik produced an excellent video of a presentation that we could play and enjoy at the conference. Rather than attempting to summarize Erik's inspirational talk, I will simply limit myself to letting him speak for himself.

ICALP 2013 (Part 2): Invited talks

ICALP 2013 in Riga featured five invited presentations and a special EATCS lecture to celebrate the 40th edition of the ICALP conference.

The scientific program for the conference was preceded by short presentations by the rector of the University of Latvia and by Rusins Freivalds. The rector welcomed the ICALP participants, gave us some interesting information about the University of Latvia and wished us long coffee breaks. Rusins discussed the unity of science, and reminded us that, even at the time of the iron curtain, there was one Computer Science.

The conference proper was kicked off on Monday, 8 July, by an invited talk delivered by the Liverpool-bound Paul Spirakis. Paul's talk was entitled A Guided Tour in Random Intersection Graphs. Random Intersection Graphs are random graphs in which there is a universe M of labels and each one of the vertices selects a random subset of M. Two vertices are connected if, and only if, their corresponding subsets of labels intersect. Random intersection graphs were introduced by M. Karonski, E.R. Sheinerman and K.B. Singer-Cohen and have several applications, as well as a rich theory. Paul's talk provided a survey of the main results on the topic obtained by his research group on combinatorial problems over random intersection graphs, such as independent sets, Hamiltonian cycles, colouring, maximum cliques, expansion and random walks. Paul closed the talk by saying that this model is an excellent area of study for PhD students in TCS.

Tuesday's invited address was delivered by Daniel Marx. Daniel's talk has three chapters (his words) and was entitled The Square Root Phenomenon in Planar Graphs. Its starting point was the observation that most of the classic NP-hard problems remain NP-hard when restricted to planar graphs, and only exponential-time algorithms are known for the exact solution of these planar problems. However, in many cases, the exponential-time algorithms on planar graphs are significantly faster than the algorithms for general graphs: for various problems on planar graphs, one often sees a square root appearing in the exponent of the running time of the best algorithms for their solution. Daniel told his audience that, by now, we have a good understanding of why this square root appears: most of these algorithms rely on the notion of treewidth and its relation to grid minors in planar graphs. Daniel also argued that, under the  Exponential Time Hypothesis, one can show that these algorithms are essentially best possible, and therefore the square root must appear in the running time. 

In passing, Daniel contributed also one paper to ICALP Track A and one to ICALP Track B!

Susanne Albers delivered the invited talk on Wednesday, 10 July, on Recent Advances for a Classical Scheduling Problem. In her talk, Susanne revisited the  classic on-line makespan minimization problem, which has been studied since the 1960s. After presenting the classic results on this problem, starting from Graham's 1966 List algorithm and its competitive analysis, she surveyed recent research on settings in which an online algorithm is given extra information or power while processing a job sequence.

The scientific programme on Thursday, 11 July, started with an invited talk by Orna Kupferman, who gave the only invited address that could be readily classified as belonging to ICALP Track B. Orna's presentation dealt with Formalizing and Reasoning about Quality. Traditionally, formal approaches to the verification of reactive systems are boolean in nature: either a system satisfies its specification or it doesn't. In case a system does not meet its specification, one expects a good verification framework to provide a counter-example, that is, a reason why the system is not correct. Orna and her co-authors have generalized formal specification and verification methods to address the quality of systems. In her talk, Orna introduced the linear temporal logic LTL[F], where F is a set arbitrary functions over the interval [0, 1]. Formulae in LTL[F] are interpreted over computations consisting of sequences of atomic propositions. The satisfaction value of an LTL[F] formula is a number between 0 and 1 that describes how well a computation satisfies a formula. The logic generalizes traditional LTL with the functions in F; examples of functions that might be in F are  the maximum or minimum between the satisfaction values of subformulas (these are the quantitative counterparts of boolean OR and AND, respectively), their product and their average. In her talk, Orna showed us how to generalize classic decision problems in formal methods, such as satisfiability, model checking and synthesis,  to search and optimization problems in the quantitative setting. This is achieved by means of an extension of the automata-theoretic approach to LTL to the setting of LTL[F]. 

Before the conference dinner, Jon Kleinberg delivered  a special EATCS lecture to celebrate the 40th ICALP. Jon gave an inspiring and very articulate talk entitled Algorithms, Networks, and Social Phenomena. The talk discussed the development of computational models for systems involving social networks and large human audiences. In particular, Jon focused on how information spreads through such systems, and the ways in which this spread is affected by the underlying network structure. Jon said a few times that, despite having so much data at our disposal, we still do not understand human behaviour. However, IMHO, the work by Jon and his coworkers is shedding some light on some aspects of our behaviour. 

Peter Widmayer delivered the last invited talk on Friday, 12 July. His presentation was entitled To Be Uncertain Is Uncomfortable, But to Be Certain Is Ridiculous, and was accessible and well paced. The starting point of Peter's talk was a "Socratic dialogue" between a statistical physicist and himself. Traditionally, in combinatorial optimization one assumes that an input instance is given with absolute certainty. The goal is then to find an optimum solution for the given instance. In contrast, as the statistical physicist would argue, input data are in reality uncertain, noisy and inaccurate. As a consequence, an optimum solution to a combinatorial optimization problem might not be meaningful in practice. (For example, the shortest path to our work place we computed yesterday evening might not be usable this morning because of changed traffic conditions.) Peter advocated the development of algorithms that find "meaningful" solutions in the presence of uncertain inputs, proposed an approach towards reaching this goal. and argued that it leads to good solutions in the real world.

Videos of these talks (with the exception of Kleinberg's talk, which, as far as I know, was not recorded) will be available in due course.

ICALP 2013 (Part 1)

ICALP 2013 has just finished. It has been an action packed conference and there has been next to no breathing space. I think that the conference was a great success and the organizers deserve our most heartfelt thanks for all their work.

In case you do not know, the conference has being held in Riga at the University of Latvia. This has been the first time that ICALP has been organized in a country of the former Soviet Union and this was the 40th edition of the ICALP conference. First of all, kudos to the local organizers, who did their very best to make the conference a festive occasion and a very pleasant experience for all the attendees. The city of Riga is very pretty and all ICALP participants had a very warm welcome. The University of Latvia was also enrolling a new batch of students during ICALP and this meant that there was a continuous flow of young and happy-looking people on the university premises. This made the main hall of the university a very lively place to be. We were also blessed with sunny and warm weather, which also helped (especially coming from rainy Iceland).

According to the data presented by Agnis Škuškovniks, on behalf of the organizing committee, to the EATCS council and to the EATCS general assembly, there were 193 registered participants in ICALP 2013, of which 67 are students. Including the local participants, the six invited speakers and the two recipients of the honorary doctorates awarded on Tuesday (Josef Gruska and Juris Hartmanis), 217 people attended ICALP 2013. The pre-conference workshops were attended by 102 participants, which is a very healthy number.

The honorary doctorates were an excellent addition to the standard session devoted to the EATCS Awards. Gruska and Hartmanis delivered lucid and inspirational presentations. It was truly awesome to see Juris Hartmanis deliver an off-the-cuff speech on how he left Latvia and ended up at Cornell as chair of the newly-funded CS department. At 85, he is very articulate and sharp. I had the pleasure of discussing several subjects with him during a very pleasant dinner arranged by the organizers. He is still a truly inspirational figure.

Here are some quick EATCS- and ICALP-related news.

• ICALP 2014 will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, immediately after SWAT 2013. It will be a four-day ICALP and the general chair for the conference is Thore Husfeldt.
• ICALP 2015 will be held in Kyoto, Japan, and will be co-located with LICS 2015. Kazuo Iwama is the ICALP 2015 general chair. This will be the first ever ICALP outside Europe. 
• The EATCS will soon announce and EATCS Fellows programme. The first deadline for nominations will be at the end of this year and we plan to make the first announcement of fellows at ICALP 2014 in Copenhagen.
• The EATCS will begin a new EATCS Young Researcher School Series from 2014. The first school in the series will be organized by Tony Kucera in a beautiful location in Moravia in late July/early August. The theme of the school will be "Automata, Logic and Games". 
• Orna Kupferman gave a thought-provoking talk on "The Gender Challenge in TCS" at the EATCS General Assembly. It really got the audience thinking about this important matter.

In case you are interested in having a look, the slides I used for the EATCS general assembly, where the above decisions where made or communicated, are here. 

In a subsequent post, which I will write when I get home, I will try to discuss some of the many scientific highlights at ICALP 2013.  

To conclude, at the conference I heard that Paul Spirakis is moving to the University of Liverpool. Good luck to Paul!

Associate and/or assistant professor position in the Language Based Technology section of DTU

I have been asked to advertise this position, which might be of interest to several of my readers and their graduating PhD students/postdocs. 

The Language Based Technology section of DTU Applied Mathematics and Computer Science has a new opening for associate and/or assistant professors.

The date for applictions is on October 1st and full details about the call and how to apply are available at

    http://www.dtu.dk/english/career/7da12e65-dc28-42f6-ad11-6be53914b384.aspx

and more information about the Language Based Technology section is available at

    http://www.compute.dtu.dk/english/research/LBT

We are hoping to attract a brilliant associate or assistant professor to complement our research activities in the

modelling, analysis and realisation of systems using language-based techniques and tools.

Our current expertices include static analysis and model checking and take place in a number of research centres and research projects (MT-LAB, IDEA4CPS, TREsPASS, FutureID, SESAMO, PaPP). 

We are interested in concurrent, distributed and mobile systems where reliability and predictability are essential and hence properties related to safety, security and performance are of key interest; the systems may include considerations of socio-technical nature within Systems of Systems.

YouTube channel for the School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University

The School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University has, at long last, created its own YouTube channel. See https://www.youtube.com/user/rucomputerscience. We are uploading videos of talks from season one of our Pearls of Computation seminar series and from last year's Alan Turing Year events, as well as other material that might be of general interest.

In case you are interested in following the events we organize, I'd be grateful if you could spend approximately 5 seconds to open the page and click "Subscribe". Thanks in advance!