EATCS Award 2017 to Éva Tardos

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.

Report on the rest of SOFSEM 2017 (guest post by Ignacio Fábregas)

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!

Report on the first two days of SOFSEM 2017 (guest post by Ignacio Fábregas)

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.

Has the Feder-Vardi dichotomy conjecture been proved?

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:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.02409

Tómas Feder is the third author. (However, I noticed that the order of the authors in the version of the paper Feder posted on his web page is different from the one used in the arXiv version.)

The authors have also posted two videos on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/PBX51Qv5wtw
https://youtu.be/vD68km24Rh0

If the technical content of the paper is found to be correct by the community working on CSPs after careful peer review, this is a truly major result.

Call for Nominations for Scientific Directorship in Algorithms and Complexity at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics

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.)

Webpage with the details of the call for nominations: http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/fileadmin/inf/d1/download/MPI-INF-Call-for-Nomations.pdf (Self-nominations are possible.)

Email: nominations@mpi-inf.mpg.de

Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini: 70, but still going strong

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.

A belated happy 70th birthday, Mariangiola!

Great hiring opportunities for female researchers at the University of Groningen

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

See also:
- The applicants guide:
http://www.rug.nl/about-us/work-with-us/rff/university-of-groningen-rosalind-franklin-fellowship-positions-december-2017.pdf

- The Johann Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science:
http://www.rug.nl/research/jbi/

Martino Lupini receives the 2015 Sacks Prize of the Association for Symbolic Logic

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.

Alonzo Church Award 2017: Call for Nominations

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:

http://siglog.hosting.acm.org/the-alonzo-church-award-for-outstanding-contributions-to-logic-and-computation/

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.

Academic evaluation and hiring in Italy: The curious incident of Giovanni Sambin in the ASN 2016

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:

1. Number of publications in the period 2006-2016 (threshold 9);
2. Total number of citations  in the period 2001-2015 (threshold 80);
3. 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.

Workshops at LICS 2017

The following six workshops will be co-located with LICS 2017 and will take place on Monday, 19 June 2017, on the premises of Reykjavik University:

• WiL: Women in Logic. Proposers: Valeria de Paiva, Amy Felty, Anna Ingolfsdottir, Ursula Martin
• LCC: Logic and Computational Complexity. Proposers: Norman Danner, Anuj Dawar, Isabel Oitavem, Heribert Vollmer
• LMW: Logic Mentoring Workshop. Proposers: Anupam Das, Valeria Vignudelli, Fabio Zanasi
• LA: Learning and Automata. Proposers: Borja Balle, Leonor Becerra-Bonache, Remi Eyraud
• 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. 

What makes a research institution excellent?

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.

The panelists were Patrick Aebischer (president of EPFL until the end of 2016), Jonathan Dorfan (president of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology), Peter Gruss (former president of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft from 2002 till 2014), Helga Nowotny (former President of the European Research Council), Rolf-Dieter Heuer (Director General of CERN from 2009 to 2015), Haim Harari (President, from 1988 to 2001, of the Weizmann Institute of Science) and Olaf Kübler (former president of ETH Zurich). It doesn't get much better than this, in terms of experience about the subject matter and, if you are interested in the topic or even just in hearing experienced academics discuss it, I'd encourage you to have a glass of your favourite beverage, relax and have a look. It is remarkable how much agreement there was in isolating the key ingredients leading to research excellence.

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:

1. 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.
2. Small research settings.
3. Small group size, but large context.
4. Multidisciplinary contacts. One has to install interfaces between different disciplines. (Examples: Have only one coffee room.)
5. 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.
6. 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:

1. Make significant contributions to themes of global importance.
2. Identify and develop new themes of global importance. 
3. 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:

1. its best ten people,
2. the average quality of its professors and
3. 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?

October issue of the Bulletin of the EATCS

The October 2016 issue of the EATCS Bulletin is now available online at http://bulletin.eatcs.org/index.php/beatcs/issue/view/22, featuring the following interesting columns

- "Chaining introduction with some computer science applications", by Jelani Nelson
- "The Weisfeiler-Lehman Procedure", by Vikraman Arvind
- "Approximation bounds for centrality maximization problems", by Gianlorenzo D’Angelo
- "Which Tasks of a Job are Susceptible to Computerization", by Philipp Brandes and Roger Wattenhofer
- "Demystifying coding for schools—what are we actually trying to teach", by Tim Bell
- "The 1966 International Congress of Mathematicians: A micro-memoir", by Yuri Gurevich

and much more. Lance Fortnow has also written a short introduction to his book

The Golden Ticket P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible.

If you prefer the whole issue, you can download a pdf with the printed version of the bulletin from http://www.eatcs.org/images/bulletin/beatcs120.pdf. 

As usual, thanks to the support of the EATCS members, the EATCS Bulletin is published in open access form. Consider joining the association!

Ágnes Cseh receives one of the 2016 Klaus Tschira Awards for Achievements in Public Understanding of Science

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 supervision of 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.

The calls for nominations for most of the EATCS-related awards are out

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.

• EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award 2016
• EATCS Fellows 2017 
• Presburger Award 2017
• EATCS Award 2017

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!

CS@Aalborg University: Research evaluation 2011-2015

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.

Zoltán Ésik (1951-2016): In Memoriam

The following obituary for Zoltán Ésik will appear in the October issue of the Bulletin of the EATCS and on the web page of Academia Europaea.

Zoltán Ésik (1951-2016)

In Memoriam 

Luca Aceto and Anna Ingólfsdóttir

ICE-TCS, School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University

Our friend and colleague Zoltán Ésik passed away in Reykjavik, Iceland, on Wednesday, 25 May 2016. He was visiting us as he did with some  regularity, compatibly with his many engagements throughout the world. 

The day before his untimely death, Zoltán had delivered an ICE-TCS seminar entitled Equational Logic of Fixed Point Operations at Reykjavik University. At the start of his talk, he looked somewhat tired and out of breath. However, the more he was presenting a research topic that he loved and that has kept him busy for most of his research career, the more he seemed to be feeling at ease. After the talk, we spent some time making plans for mutual visits in the autumn of 2016 and we discussed some EATCS-related matters. His wife Zsuzsa and he were due to spend a few days travelling in the north of Iceland before their return to Szeged, but life had other ideas. 

Zoltán was a scientist of the highest calibre and has left behind a large body of deep and seminal work that will keep researchers in theoretical computer science busy for a long time to come. The list of refereed publications available from his web site at 
http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/~ze/classified.pdf 
includes two books, 32 edited volumes, 135 journal papers, four book chapters, 86 conference papers and seven papers in other edited volumes. However, impressive as they undoubtedly are, these numbers give only a very partial picture of Zoltán's scientific stature. Together with the late Stephen Bloom, Zoltán was the prime mover in the monumental development of Iteration Theories. As Stephen and Zoltán wrote in the preface of their massive book on the topic, which was published in 1993 by Springer:

Iteration plays a fundamental role in the theory of computation: for
example, in the theory of automata, in formal language theory, in the
study of formal power series, in the semantics of flowchart algorithms
and programming languages, and in circular data type definitions.  It
is shown that in all structures that have been used as semantical
models, the equational properties of the fixed point operation are
captured by the axioms describing iteration theories. These structures
include ordered algebras, partial functions, relations, finitary and
infinitary regular languages, trees, synchronization trees, 2-categories,
and others.

It is truly remarkable that the equational laws satisfied by fixed point operations are essentially the same in a large number of structures used in computer science. Isolating those laws, and showing their applicability, has been one of the goals of Zoltán's scientific life and we trust that the members of our community will keep reading his work on iteration theories, which continued and went from strength to strength after Stephen and he published their 600-page research monograph in 1993. During his last talk in Reykjavik, we asked Zoltán whether he was planning to write a new edition of that book, and half-jokingly told him that it would probably be about 1,200 pages.

Zoltán's research output includes contributions to automata theory, category theory, concurrency theory, formal languages, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic, graph theory, logic in computer science, logic programming, order theory, semiring theory and universal algebra, amongst others. The breadth of research areas to which he has contributed bears witness to his amazing mathematical powers and to his curiosity. Wherever he went and no matter how long he had travelled to get there, Zoltán's brain was always open. 

Zoltán also contributed to the research community with his service work and received several awards. Here we will limit ourselves to mentioning that he was elected member of the Academy of Europe in 2010, was named Fellow of the EATCS in 2016, was a member of the council of the EATCS from 2003 to 2015, and of the Presburger Award Committee in 2015--2016. He represented the Hungarian theoretical computer science community in the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) as member of TC1 since 2000 and was one of the prime mover in the establishment of the IFIP WG 1.8, Working Group on Concurrency. He also received the Gy. Farkas Research Award and the K. Rényi Research Award of the János Bolyai Mathematical Society.

Zoltán's appetite for work was phenomenal, but he also liked to have fun, to spend time with friends eating good food and drinking excellent wine, and to travel. Indeed, Zoltán's lust for travel was amazing. We lost track of his visits to myriads of research institutions and universities all over the world. He attended conferences in the most remote locations and always made sure that he would reserve some time for enjoying the most beautiful and known sites. At times, we had the feeling that he had been everywhere in the world.  

Despite being often on the move, Zoltán was very much a family man. He was very proud of his wife Zsuzsanna, their daughter Eszter and their son Robert. He always told us about the latest developments in their lives and was happy about his four grandchildren. We had the pleasure of enjoying Zsuzsanna and Zoltán's exquisite hospitality both in Szeged and in their summer home on Lake Balaton.

Zoltán was very loyal to his friends and would make trips to see them wherever they were living. We were lucky to be amongst them and had the pleasure of hosting him in Aalborg, Florence and Reykjavik, where he visited us a few times and where the thread of his life was cut. We will miss the time we spent doing research or relaxing together, his sense of humour, his conviviality and his hospitality. 

LICS 2017: Call for Workshop Proposals

                                        Call for Workshop Proposals
                                                  LICS 2017
                                32nd Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium
                                    on Logic in Computer Science

                                     http://lics.rwth-aachen.de/lics17/


The thirty-second Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic In Computer Science (LICS'17) will be held in Reykjavik, Iceland on June 20–23, 2017. The workshops will take place on June 18–19, 2017. June 18 will only be used by two-days workshops (if any), or in case the number of workshops is really large. This year, workshop fees should be around 65 euros for a one-day workshop (including lunch and two coffee breaks).

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit proposals for workshops on topics relating logic – broadly construed – to computer science or related fields. Typically, LICS workshops feature a number of invited speakers and a number of contributed presentations. LICS workshops do not usually produce formal proceedings. However, in the past there have been special issues of journals based in part on certain LICS workshops.

Proposals should include:

        • -  A short scientific summary and justification of the proposed topic.
             This should include a discussion of the particular benefits of the topic to the LICS community.
        • -  A discussion of the proposed format and agenda.
        • -  The proposed duration, which is typically one day (two-day workshops can be accommodated too).
        • -  Procedures for selecting participants and papers.
        • -  Expected number of participants. This is important for the room!
        • -  Potential invited speakers.
        • -  Plans for dissemination (for example, special issues of journals).

Proposals should be sent to Patricia Bouyer: bouyer@lsv.fr

** Important Dates **

        Submission deadline:    November 1, 2016
        Notification:                   November 15, 2016
        Program of the workshops ready: May 19, 2017
        Workshops:                      June 18–19, 2017
        LICS conference:                June 20–23, 2017

The workshops selection committee consists of the LICS General Chair, LICS Workshops Chair, LICS 2017 PC Chair and LICS 2017 Conference Chair.

An interview with Paul Spirakis, the new EATCS president

During its annual meeting at ICALP 2016 in Rome, the Council of the EATCS elected Paul Spirakis (University of Liverpool, UK, and University of Patras, Greece) as its new president. Paul is a well-known figure in the theoretical'computer-science community and truly needs no introduction. However, I felt that it might be a good idea to interview him briefly in order to give him the opportunity to present himself to the community and to discuss some of his plans for his mandate as president of the EATCS.

I interviewed Paul Spirakis via email and present his answers to my questions in this interview that will appear in the October issue of the Bulletin of the EATCS. In order to preserve the style of Paul’s answers, I did not edit them. I hope that the readers of this blog and of the Bulletin of the EATCS will enjoy reading the text of the interview and will find it as interesting as I did.

Proceedings of ICALP 2016

The proceedings of ICALP 2016 are now available from the LIPIcs web site. Many thanks to all the colleagues who have worked so hard to make this possible.

I hope that many of you will read the papers in the proceedings, which were selected by Davide, Michael, Yuval and  their PCs, and build on their research contributions.