LICS 2012 Test-of-Time Award

The latest issue of the LICS Newsletter (dated July 29) mentioned the appended information related to the LICS 2012 Test-of-Time Award. 

I strongly encourage the members of the LICS community to send their comments to Andre Scedrov (scedrov@math.upenn.edu), who chairs the award committee. As usual, the committee is faced with a very hard choice and they can do with some input from the community.


LOGIC IN COMPUTER SCIENCE (LICS) - TEST OF TIME AWARD

• The LICS Test-of-Time Award recognizes a small number of papers from the LICS proceedings from 20 years prior that have best met the "test of time".
• The LICS 2012 ToT Award committee consists of
• Martin Grohe,
• Prakash Panangaden,  
• Andre Scedrov (Chair), and  
• Ashish Tiwari.
• The committee will select between 0 to 3 papers  that appeared in LICS 1992 proceedings. All papers are nominated by default, but the  committee welcomes input from our community: please send your comments to  Andre Scedrov (scedrov@math.upenn.edu) which will be shared only among the committee members.  
• LICS 2012 ToT award will be presented during the business meeting at LICS 2012  to be held in Dubrovnik from June 22 to 25, 2012. 
• The list of papers from LICS 1992 is available at  http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/lics/archive/1992/index.html 
• The information about LICS ToT award and the list of past winners is available at  http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/lics/archive/test-of-time-award.html

October 2011 issue of the BEATCS Concurrency Column

I have just submitted the material for the October 2011 issue of the BEATCS Concurrency Column. This instalment of the column consists of a double bill:

• Interval Temporal Logics: a Journey by Dario Della Monica, Valentin Goranko, Angelo Montanari and Guido Sciavicco. [PDF]
• Assertional and Behavioral approaches to concurrency by Uri Abraham. [PDF]

The first piece is a survey  devoted to interval temporal logics. The article presents the main developments in the study of interval temporal logics over the past 10 years (a field of research to which the authors have contributed substantially) and outlines some landmark results on expressiveness and (un)decidability of the satisfiability problem for the family of interval logics. The authors give us a guided tour of this body of work, which, to my mind, deserves to be better known within the concurrency-theory community.

The second contribution is a a piece by Uri Abraham in which he compares two proofs of the mutual-exclusion property for the well known algorithm by Peterson: an assertional proof and a behavioural one. The article outlines a framework within which the behavioural approach can be formalized in a way that retains the intuitive content of the behavioural reasoning.

This is my last issue as editor of the Concurrency Column. I have been editing the column for the last eight years, and I feel that it is time to step down. The column will benefit greatly from a fresh perspective on the world of concurrency theory and I look forward to reading the pieces that will appear in future issues.I thank the contributors to the Concurrency Column over the last eight years and all my readers.

12 PhD positions in Computer Science and Engineering at IMT Lucca

Courtesy of Rocco De Nicola, here is an exciting opportunity for excellent students, which I am happy to advertise.

The institute for advanced studies IMT Lucca (Italy) announces 12 PhD positions in Computer Science and Engineering. The deadline for applications is September 28, 2011.

IMT (http://www.imtlucca.it/) is a research institute located in Lucca (Italy); courses are taught exclusively in English.

The PhD Program (https://www.imtlucca.it/phd_programs/computer_science_engineering/) coordinated by Rocco De Nicola aims at preparing researchers and professionals with broad training in the foundations of informatics as well as in applications to a variety of cutting-edge systems and disciplines.

A number of PhD students will be selected for working within the the two newly founded Research Unit:

SysMA (http://sysma.lab.imtlucca.it/

)
lead by Rocco De Nicola doing research on concurrent (distributed, mobile, autonomic) systems modelling and analysis
and
Dysco (http://dysco.lab.imtlucca.it/)
lead by Alberto Bemporad doing research on control and optimization technologies.

In addition, students will be selected to work on topics related to medical imaging, and imaging for the life sciences
http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~stsaft/#Openings

We hope that you may consider applying for and/or signaling these opportunities to colleagues and collaborators.

======= DETAILS ON THE ADVERTISED POSITIONS =======
6 IMT scholarship (12.423 EUR after taxes) plus accommodation and free meals (lunch and dinner).
1 MIUR scholarship (12.423 EUR after taxes) plus free meals (lunch and dinner).
5 positions to be funded with internal projects or third-party scholarships (negotiable salary) that come with a research budget of 3.000 EUR offered by IMT and free meals (lunch and dinner).

For further information please visit
http://www.imtlucca.it/phd_programs/call_for_applications/index.php
and/or contact the sender of this mail.