PhD Position in Probabilistic Session Types at the IT University of Copenhagen

Marco Carbone has a PhD position at the IT University Copenhagen in the PROBABILIST project (PROBABILIstic Session Types), funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF-FNU) starting in August or soon thereafter. The project is in cooperation with Nobuko Yoshida at the University of Oxford.

See here for details and encourage suitable students to apply for this exciting PhD position. Spread the news!

Answers to four teaching-related questions from Teaching Affairs at Reykjavik University

The Teaching Affairs Office at Reykjavik University is creating a video in which several faculty members answer some questions related to the principles that guide their pedagogical work. I am taking part in that enterprise and was asked to answer the four questions below. Here are the written versions of the answers I intended to give orally, as a note to myself and in case they are of interest to anyone. 

What would your answers to those questions be? 

Q1: What is your teaching philosophy? or What is your approach to teaching? 

My approach to teaching is eclectic. Overall, I try (and often fail, alas) to create a stimulating learning environment in cooperation with my students and teaching assistants, where anyone should feel safe to make mistakes and learn from them. 

I'll do anything to entice my students to engage actively with the material covered in my courses provided it is in reasonably good taste and conveys my enthusiasm for the subject I'm asked to teach. This includes the much-maligned lecture, since I firmly believe that telling a good story is still one of the best ways we have to inspire our students and to provide the context and intellectual history of the ideas we cover in our courses. However, I view lectures as arenas for a game of intellectual table tennis with the students, as "commedia dell'arte" performances in which we interact and learn from one another. 

Q2: Has your teaching philosophy changed? If so, how and why has it changed? 

At the beginning of my career, I focused too much on the content I thought I was expected to deliver during my courses. However, over the years, I have come to realise that less is more and that we should "distil and conquer". Today, students can access content from a huge variety of sources, but they can't typically get context and enthusiasm for the subject they are learning, which, to my mind, comes from the development of a good story as a course progresses. I also think that we should try to avoid being boring in our teaching. This is especially true when we teach the topics we love in theoretical computer science. Students find those topics exotic, hard and dry, whereas our subject has a long and extremely interesting intellectual heritage that every cultured person should know and that we could covey to our students as keen storytellers. See Scott Aaronson's book and his teaching statement, which I still find inspiring after all these years. 

Q3: How do you promote active learning in your teaching? 

I try to emphasise learning in every component of my teaching. Note that I wrote "learning" because I believe that all learning is an active process. 

Even when I lecture, I do my best to play intellectual table tennis with my students by asking them "why" and "what if" questions, and by encouraging them to think about the concepts we are covering in real time. Apart from using the Socratic method in my lecturing, I set students assignments so that they can deepen their understanding of the course material by practising the skills they have learnt. In several of my courses, I also give students a couple of open-ended group projects that are just beyond their current abilities, so that they can challenge themselves and engage in peer learning. 

The most extreme form of active learning I have used in my teaching is exemplified by an intensive three-week course I designed with Anna Ingolfsdottir and that I have taught each year in the period 2013-2023. After a brief introduction putting the material the students are going to learn and the work they are going to do in context, I give them material they should read and start experimenting with independently by the end of day one of the course. From day two of the course and over the following three weeks, I set students challenges that they tackle in groups at their own speed, acting as a facilitator in the classroom and introducing new course topics on a by-need basis. 

Every year, students rise to the challenge and do work which often goes beyond my expectations and of which they are proud. 

Q4: What have you found to be the most effective active learning strategy in your teaching context?

I don't believe that there is a "most effective active learning strategy". However, having worked at Aalborg University for a decade in a previous life, I have come to appreciate the Aalborg model for problem-based learning as an extremely beneficial strategy to foster creativity, critical thinking and the ability to learn independently in students. To my mind, Reykjavik University would stand to gain by embracing more aspects of problem-based learning in earnest. 

Call for papers - GandALF 2025

If you do research on any of the topics covered by GandALF, do consider submitting a paper to the conference and making the trip to Malta in mid-September!

Call for papers  - GandALF 2025

The Sixteenth International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification 

will take place in Valletta, Malta, 15-18 September 2025.

Web page: https://gandalfsymposium.github.io/2025/

The aim of the symposium is to bring together researchers from

academia and industry who are actively working in the fields of

Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification. The symposium covers

an ample spectrum of themes, ranging from theory to applications, and

encourages cross-fertilization. Papers focused on formal methods are

especially welcome. Authors are invited to submit original research or

tool papers on all relevant topics in these areas. Papers discussing

new ideas that are at an early stage of development are also welcome.

The topics covered by the conference include, but are not limited to,

the following:

Automata Theory

Automated Deduction

Computational aspects of Game Theory

Concurrency and Distributed Computation

Decision Procedures

Deductive, Compositional, and Abstraction Techniques for Verification

Finite Model Theory

First-order and Higher-order Logics

Formal Languages

Formal Methods for Systems Biology, Hybrid, Embedded, and Mobile Systems

Games and Automata for Verification

Game Semantics

Logical aspects of Computational Complexity

Logics of Programs

Modal and Temporal Logics

Model Checking

Models of Reactive and Real-Time Systems

Program Analysis and Software Verification

Run-time Verification and Testing

Specification and Verification of Finite and Infinite-state Systems Synthesis

## Proceedings:

The proceedings will be published by Electronic Proceedings in

Theoretical Computer Science. Authors of the best papers will be

invited to submit a revised version of their work to an special issue

of Acta Informatica. Selected papers from previous editions appeared

in special issues of the International Journal of Foundation of

Computer Science (GandALF 2010), Theoretical Computer Science (GandALF

2011 and 2012), and Information and Computation (GandALF 2013 and

2014).

## Invited Speakers:

- Radu Mardare (Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland)

- more TBA

## Submissions:

Submitted papers should not exceed fourteen (14) pages using EPTCS

format (please use the LaTeX style provided at https://style.eptcs.org),

be unpublished and contain original research. For papers reporting 

experimental results, authors are encouraged to make their data

available with their submission.

Submissions must be in PDF format and will be handled via

EasyChair Conference system at the following address:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gandalf2025

## Important dates:

Paper submission deadline: 30 May 2025

Acceptance notification: 4 July 2025

Camera-ready deadline: 25 July 2025

## Program Committee:

Elli Anastasiadi (Aalborg University)

Giorgio Bacci (Aalborg University) co-Chair

Giovanni Bernardi (Université Paris Diderot - IRIF)

Udi Boker (Reichman Universtiy)

Laure Daviaud (University of East Anglia)

Mohammed Foughali (IRIF/Université Paris Cité)

Adrian Francalanza (University of Malta) co-Chair

Silvia Ghilezan (University of Novi Sad)

Daniele Gorla (University of Rome "La Sapienza")

Ryan Kavanagh (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Tim Lyon (Technische Universität Dresden)

Mohammad Reza Mousavi (King's College London)

Ocan Sankur (Mitsubishi Electric R&D Centre Europe)

Sarah Winkler (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)

Sarah Winter (IRIF & Université Paris Cité)

... more to be announced

## Steering Committee:

Luca Aceto (Reykjavik University, Iceland)

Javier Esparza (University of Munich, Germany)

Salvatore La Torre (University of Salerno, Italy)

Angelo Montanari (University of Udine, Italy)

Mimmo Parente (University of Salerno, Italy)

Jean-François Raskin (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)

Martin Zimmermann (Aalborg University, Denmark)

What's your opinion on double-blind reviewing in TCS conferences?

Recent discussions with some colleagues spurred me to read again Ran Canetti's white paper on double-blind reviewing in IACR conferences. I also went back to a post by Boaz Barak and to its discussion thread, as well as to this post that motivated it. I was also reminded of the coverage of single- and double-blind reviewing in this chapter of the book "The Science of Science" (see, for instance, page 25 in that file). I recommend all those resources. 

FWIW, I share Ran Canetti's analysis of the pros and cons of double-blind reviewing. At the end of the day, evaluating scientific papers submitted to conferences and journals is largely a subjective exercise. IMHO, this is especially true for conferences where, apart from a number of clear accepts and clear rejects, a PC typically has to choose a small number of papers from a typically much larger pool of "scientifically equivalent" articles. 

Double-blind reviewing and rebuttals are two ways in which our community tries to make the process of selecting a good programme for a conference---which is, after all, the job description of a conference PC---more objective than it really is. However, I keep wondering whether those steps make a difference, especially in addressing bias, in an age where every scientific contribution should be available online in publicly accessible form before it is submitted to a conference. Shouldn't we simply trust the PC chairs of a conference to make sure that the refereeing process and the PC discussion are as thorough as possible, given the time constraints under which they take place? 

What's your opinion on double-blind reviewing as authors, PC members and PC chairs, especially in conferences in TCS, broadly construed? Do you prefer to submit to conferences that implement double-blind reviewing? If so, why?

I'd be grateful if you could post your opinions as comments to this post. 

ICE-TCS seminar by Benjamin Moore on "Smoothed analysis for graph isomorphism"

Today, the ICE-TCS seminar series at Reykjavik University hosted a talk by Benjamin Moore (Institute of Science and Technology Austria) who is visiting our postdoctoral researcher Nicolaos Matsakis. 

Benjamin presented the main results in his paper "Smoothed analysis for graph isomorphism", coauthored with his ISTA colleagues Michael Anastos and Matthew Kwan. (In passing, I just saw that Matthew Kwan received the main prize of the Austrian Mathematical Society last year. Congratulations!) 

To my mind, Benjamin did an excellent job in presenting the context for their exciting (but very technical) contribution and the main ideas that underlie it. Kudos! The work by Benjamin and his collaborators provides another explanation of the effectiveness of the colour refinement algorithm (also known as the one-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm) in checking whether two graphs are isomorphic. I encourage you to read at least the introduction of their paper, which will be presented at STOC 2025, and the ISTA news article here, which does a much better job at putting their work in context than an interested, but ignorant, observer like me ever could. FWIW, I find results like theirs, which offer some explanation as to why theoretically hard problems are seemingly easy in practice, fascinating and I feel like that paper might be a strong candidate for a best paper award. 

It was also fitting to see recent work on smoothed analysis being presented at our seminar series since Daniel Spielman and Shang-Hua Teng received the 2008 Gödel Prize at ICALP 2008, which was held at Reykjavik University. Time flies, but great work is timeless. 

Interview with Magnús Már Halldórsson on Reykjavik University's website

Magnús Már Halldórsson, the director of ICE-TCS, was interviewed by the Communication Department at Reykjavik University to mark the 20th anniversary of ICE-TCS on April 29, 2025. The interview appeared last Friday on the Reykjavik University web site. In my biased opinion,  Magnús hit all the right notes. I hope that some of our students and colleagues, as well as the staff at Icelandic funding agencies and politicians, read it. 

I am also pleased to see theoretical computer science at the Department of Computer Science at Reykjavik University get some visibility on the university's website after twenty years. It leave the job of determining the level of contribution and the visibility ICE-TCS has given to the department and to computer science research in Iceland to others. 

In case anyone is interested in having a look at them, our annual reports from June 2007 till the whole of 2024 are available here. (Thanks to Tarmo Uustalu for reviving the centre's website and for keeping up to data!)

Dagstuhl Publishing – Highlights of 2024

On behalf of Dagstuhl Publishing, Michael Wagner has posted the highlights for 2024. IMHO, the computer-science research community owes the team at Dagstuhl Publishing and Schloss Dagstuhl a lot for its sustained support of research and open-access publication activities. I encourage any readers I might have to read the highlights for 2024 and share them within their networks. This is the least we can do to thank everyone at Dagsthul for their work. 

If you are a PC chair or an SC member of a high-quality conference that publishes its proceedings with a commercial publisher, and you care about open-access publication of research results and artefacts, consider suggesting that your conference apply for publishing its proceedings in LIPIcs. 

Last, but not least, consider submitting some of your best work to the journal Transaction on Graph Data and Knowledge, if it is in the areas covered by that diamond-open-access journal!