Wednesday, August 14, 2013

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.

Wednesday, August 07, 2013

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.