EC comes to Europe

The EC'16 conference will be held in lovely Maastricht, NL next year with Vincent Conitzer as general chair. As far as I can tell, this is the second time that EC comes to Europe in its 17-year history. This is a step that, as president of the EATCS, I warmly welcome.

Submit your best work to EC'16 and you'll have a chance to visit a historical city at the heart of Europe to boot!

Four EATCS Awards with deadline for nominations on the 31st of December 2015

This is to remind you that the deadline for nominations for the following awards is the 31st of December 2015:

    EATCS Award: http://eatcs.org/index.php/eatcs-award
    EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award: http://www.eatcs.org/index.php/dissertation-award
    EATCS Fellows: http://www.eatcs.org/index.php/eatcs-fellows
    Presburger Award: http://eatcs.org/index.php/presburger

I strongly encourage members of the TCS community to nominate eligible colleagues for these accolades. Writing a good letter of nominations takes a little work, but  this is time well spent as it puts some of the many outstanding members of our community and their research areas in the spotlight, and provides role models for the younger members of the TCS community.

Call for nominations for the 2016 Alonzo Church Award

It's been a long journey, but the Alonzo Church Award is finally off the ground. Here is the call for nominations I just received from the first award committee. You will notice that the deadline for nominating papers for the first award is close: March 1, 2016.  (Of course, the call for nominations will be issued earlier next year.) For the time being, I hope that you will follow Littlewood's zero-infinity law: If you  have a paper (or papers) you'd like to nominate for the award, do it now, where in this case "now" means "by the end of February 2016" :-)

The award committee, whose members I thank on behalf of the EATCS, look forward to receiving your nominations!

The 2016 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/

Eligibility and Nominations

The contribution must have appeared in a paper or papers published within the past 25 years. Thus, for the 2016 award, the cut-off date is January 1, 1991. 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 2016 award are now being solicited. The nominating letter must summarize 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, 2016, and should be submitted to vardi@cs.rice.edu.

Presentation of the Award

The 2016 award will be presented at LICS, the flagship conference of SIGLOG. 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 2016 Alonzo Church Award Committee consists of the following four members: Catuscia Palamidessi, Gordon Plotkin, Wolfgang Thomas, and Moshe Vardi (chair).

The 'novelty' of arXiv overlay journals

Last September, Nature published an article on a new publishing initiative by Timothy Gowers. The Nature piece starts thus:

"New journals spring up with overwhelming, almost tiresome, frequency these days. But Discrete Analysis is different. This journal is online only — but it will contain no papers. Rather, it will provide links to mathematics papers hosted on the preprint server arXiv. Researchers will submit their papers directly from arXiv to the journal, which will evaluate them by conventional peer review."

and ends as follows:

"The question, perhaps, is how readily researchers will embrace the model. “Apart from being an arXiv overlay journal, our journal is very conventional, which I think is important so that mathematicians won't feel it is too risky to publish in it,” says Gowers. “But if the model becomes widespread, then I personally would very much like to see more-radical ideas tried out as well” — for example, post-publication review and non-anonymous referees."

Based on the first paragraph of this blog post by Timothy Gowers, it is highly likely that Discrete Analysis will start by publishing some very strong papers. This will probably play an important role in enticing mathematicians to publish some of their best work in it and in giving the new journal a good impact factor within a reasonable amount of time.

However, as mentioned in the Nature piece and as Gowers himself pointed out in his blog post announcing Discrete Analysis, arXiv overlay journals are not new. In TCS, Logical Methods in Computer Science published its first issue ten years ago and has become one of the favourite publication outlets for researchers working on logic in computer science, broadly construed. Logical Methods in Computer Science is an open-access journal, covered by Thompson ISI , SCOPUS, DBLP, Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt. (Impact factor: 0.443.) All journal content is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

Moreover, the 'arXiv overlay principle' is also used by Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS), an international refereed open access venue for the rapid electronic publication of the proceedings of workshops and conferences, and of Festschriften, etc, in the general area of theoretical computer science, broadly construed. This proceedings series, which was initiated in 2008-2009 by the sterling effort of Rob van Glabbeek, has published 200 volumes at the time of writing this blog post. (Congrats to EPTCS for reaching the milestone of 200 volumes!)

Just like Discrete Analysis will do, Logical Methods in Computer Science (and EPTCS for workshops and conferences) only publishes papers that have undergone classic peer review and have been vetted for publication by the cognizant editor. For what it is worth, I therefore fail to see why Logical Methods in Computer Science and Discrete Analysis, once it starts publishing papers, are not doing journal publishing, as hinted in this excerpt from a post from the scholarly kitchen:

"My view is that while this is a fascinating way to draw out from arXiv links to good preprints in relevant fields, this is not journal publishing. In Gower’s blog he moves on from talking about the idea of the overlay journal to a more polemical discussion of how his venture is in essence the future of the journal, reducing costs and supplying quality content in a way that may be used in the same way journal articles are used now. While Gowers has every right to his views on this, I would argue that, while his is certainly an exciting way to make use of preprints in arXiv, what it does is quite distinct from a journal. As discussed above, the journal is a matter of record, and like it or not, journals form a part of the academic and recognition workflow that allows for career progress, grant making, more research and more articles to be published."

Logical Methods in Computer Science is "a matter of record", and publishing in it does carry weight in hiring and promotion decisions. Prime conferences in the field, such as LICS, have used it for their special issues.

Whether a journal publishes its contents as overlay of the arXiv or by some other means, IMHO it is the process that went into selecting the papers and the scientific quality of what is published that matter.

EATCS Awards 2016: Deadline approaching!

This is to remind you that the deadline for nominations for the following EATCS awards is the 31st of December 2015:

EATCS Award: http://eatcs.org/index.php/eatcs-award
EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award: http://www.eatcs.org/index.php/dissertation-award
EATCS Fellows: http://www.eatcs.org/index.php/eatcs-fellows
Presburger Award: http://eatcs.org/index.php/presburger

I strongly encourage members of the TCS community to nominate eligible colleagues for these accolades. Writing a good letter of nominations takes a little work, but this is time well spent as it puts some of the many outstanding members of our community and their research areas in the spotlight, and provides role models for the younger members of the TCS community.

The deadline for nominations for the Gödel Prize (http://eatcs.org/index.php/goedel-prize) is January 31, 2016.

The award committees for the above-mentioned prizes and honours look forward to receiving your nominations!

Logarithms in the cultural pages of an Italian newspaper

Last Saturday, the cultural pages of a major Italian newspaper featured an article with the title "Arte digitale - la creatività salvata da social e logaritmi" ("Digital art - creativity saved by social networks and logarithms", sic) . The article ends with the following war cry: un "logaritmo vi seppellirà" oppure un "logaritmo vi salverà! " (a logarithm will bury you or a logarithm will save you!).

Well, after all, "logarithm" is an anagram of "algorithm" :-)