Italian Conference on TCS 2015

The 16th Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (ICTCS 2015) finished today a little over 1pm Italian time. The event, which was held in Florence, was well organized by Pierluigi Crescenzi, Michele Loreti and Betti Venneri and gave a bird's eye view of some of the research in TCS in Italy.

As part of the event, the Italian Chapter of the EATCS handed out three prizes. The Young TCS Researcher Award went to Ugo Dal Lago (University of Bologna), who delivered an inspiring one-hour talk on Higher-Order Probabilistic Computation: Calculi, Observational Equivalence, and Implicit Complexity. The Doctoral Research Award was presented to Ornela Dardha (University of Glasgow) for her doctoral dissertation Type Systems for Distributed Programs: Components and Sessions, which she completed at the University of Bologna under the supervision of Davide Sangiorgi. For the first time, the Italian Chapter of the EATCS also gave prizes to two master theses in TCS.

One of the contributed papers, Bounds and Fixed-Parameter Algorithms for Weighted Improper Coloring, was authored by Bjarki Ágúst Guðmundsson, Tómas Ken Magnússon, and Björn Orri Sæmundsson, who just finished their bachelor studies at Reykjavik University.  I can't think of a better advertisement for my department of computer science and hope that the authors will have a great career, whatever they decide to do in the future.

Thanks to Betti, Michele and Pierluigi for having organized a scientifically interesting and socially pleasant conference.