A Selection of Papers from CONCUR 2010

As I have already mentioned in earlier posts, I enjoyed a lot of talks in the programme for CONCUR 2010. Here are just a few highlights, with apologies to all the speakers whose talks/papers I do not mention in this post. Overall, the conference programme was of very high quality. This bodes well for the future of CONCUR.

• Lutz Schröder and Yde Venema. Flat Coalgebraic Fixed Point Logic. Lutz presented the paper and gave a very clear introduction to the coalgebraic approach to the study of modal logics. Technically, this paper presents a unified co-algebraic treatment  of flat fixed-point logics. (Fixed-point logics, such as the mu-calculus, are widely used in computer science, in particular in artificial intelligence and concurrency.) The main results in the paper are the completeness of the Kozen-Park axiomatization and a general  EXPTIME upper bound for flat fixed-point logics.
• Fides Aarts and Frits Vaandrager. Learning I/O Automata. The talk was delivered by Frits, who addressed the general question of learning models of reactive systems automatically, e.g., for model-based testing or software engineering.In this work, Fides and Frits establish links between three widely used modelling frameworks for reactive systems: the ioco theory of Tretmans, the interface automata of De Alfaro and Henzinger, and Mealy machines. It is shown that, by exploiting these links, any tool for active learning of Mealy machines can be used for learning I/O automata that are deterministic and output determined. The approach presented in the paper has been implemented on top of the LearnLib tool and has been applied successfully to three case studies, including learning a model of Fides' biometric passport. 
• Pawel Sobocinski. Representations of Petri net interactions. . Pawel, who was my co-chair for SOS 2010, presented a novel compositional algebra of Petri nets. The algebra contains two binary operators (tensor product and sequential composition) and twelve constants! He also introduced a stateful extension of the calculus of connectors and showed that .these two formalisms have the same expressive power.
• Pavol Cerny, Thomas Henzinger and Arjun Radhakrishna. Simulation Distances.  The simulation preorder is often used to establish the correctness of an implementation I with respect to a specification S as follows: I correctly implements S if S can simulate the behaviour of I. In other words, this happens if everything the implementation I does is allowed by the specification S. The result of such a verification is boolean and cannot be used to assess how far I is from implementing the behaviour allowed by  S. This paper extends the simulation preorder to the quantitative setting by  defining three different simulation distances. The correctness distance measures how much the specification must be changed in order to be satisfied by the implementation. The coverage distance measures how much the implementation restricts the degrees of freedom offered by the specification. The robustness distance measures how much a system can deviate from the implementation description without violating the specification. The paper develops a comprehensive theory for those notions of simulation distances. 

Reading the papers from CONCUR 2010 will keep me busy for some time. 

Milner Session at CONCUR 2010

During CONCUR 2010, the concurrency-theory community paid a small tribute to Robin Milner by dedicating a session of its flagship conference to him. The so-called Milner Session was held on Wednesday, 1 September, from 2pm till 4pm. It consisted of a talk by Jos Baeten and of three presentations of papers that were selected for the conference by the PC.

Jos kicked off the session with a talk devoted to Milner's contributions to concurrency theory. He focused on his seminal Calculus of Communicating Systems, providing an overview of its syntax, of some of the design decisions Milner made in that calculus and of its semantics. The presentation by Jos was followed by a short discussion, with remarks from Ugo Montanari, Kohei Honda and myself, amongst others.

My two readers might be interested in reading a short note  by Samson Ambramsky entitled Robin Milner's Work on Concurrency that was published yesterday in the Proceedings of MFPS 2010. According to Samson,

Robin’s ideas have become part of the air we breathe in our scientific community.....

CCS was not just a new calculus, but a new paradigm — that has played a central role in the subsequent development of our subject. It opened up the world of compositional behavioural modelling.

I have always found that one of the red threads in Milner's work was the, I believe novel, emphasis on behavioural semantics and on his standpoint that a process is an equivalence class of process descriptions (be they terms in a process algebra/calculus or states in a labelled transition system/automaton) modulo some notion of behavioural equivalence. Milner himself reiterated this point in several of his writings/talks, and I am glad to see this mentioned in Samson's piece.

We knew what functions were already! But what are processes? CCS established the fundamental methodological point of studying them through their observational behaviour (defined in terms of labelled transition systems via SOS).

This led inexorably in turn to notions of observational equivalence.

Thanks to Jos and Samson for their tributes to Milner's work.

Amongst the contributed talks in the Milner Session, let me mention the excellent talk by Edsko de Vries, who presented joint work with Vasileios Koutavas and Matthew Hennessy on Communicating Transactions. Communicating transactions are obtained by dropping the isolation requirement from standard transactions and can be used to model automatic error recovery in distributed systems. Edsko presented a behavioural theory for a version of CCS with communicating transactions that  is sound and complete with respect to the may-testing preorder. The technical work looked really impressive.

I really enjoyed Silvia Crafa's talk entitled A Logic for True Concurrency, which presented joint work with Paolo Baldan. Perhaps, I was biased since Silvia's talk brought me back in time some twenty years, when a different version of myself was working on topics related to true concurrency. However, I was not the only one to be impressed by that paper, which proposes a logic for true concurrency whose formulae describe events in computations and their causal dependencies. The induced logical equivalence is hereditary history preserving bisimilarity. The authors also identify fragments of the logic that capture other truly concurrent behavioural equivalences in the literature: step, pomset and history preserving bisimilarity. After Silvia's talk, I felt that her paper with Paolo should have been written long ago. 

A Thought Experiment

Suppose that a top-class conference to which you usually submit your papers decide to publish its proceedings in an electronic open-access outlet instead of using a commercial publisher, like STACS and FST-TCS have done over the last few years. Would that decision have any effect on whether you submit your papers to that conference? Would you encourage your students to submit to that conference in order to further their future career? Do you think that a prestigious conference has anything to lose in publishing its proceedings in an electronic open-access outlet?

CONCUR 2010

From August 30 till the very early hours of September 3, I was in Paris to co-chair SOS 2010 and attend CONCUR 2010. It is always a pleasure to have the chance to attend CONCUR, which is the flagship conference for the concurrency-theory community, and the lure of Paris made this conference even more attractive than usual.

CONCUR 2010 was perfectly organized by Paul Gastin (LSV, ENS Cachan, France), François Laroussinie (LIAFA, Université Denis Diderot - Paris 7, France) and their support team (see the bottom of this page for the details), and was held at Université Denis Diderot - Paris 7.

According to the program chairs, there were 160 people registered for the main conference and 215 people were registered for the conference or one of the eight affiliated events. I am not a CONCUR historian, but I believe that this makes this edition of CONCUR one of the best attended on record, together with the one held in Bologna last year. I do not find this level of attendance particularly surprising----after all, Paris is an attractive city and it is one of the hotbeds of research in concurrency theory. However, it is a great credit to the organizational effort that everything went smoothly and that the atmosphere at the conference was relaxed and conducive to both scientific and social exchanges.

On behalf of the CONCUR community, I'd like to say thanks to François, Paul and their support team for organizing a great conference. We had many excellent talks on a variety of exciting topics, a session devoted to Robin Milner (chaired by Matthew Hennessy and featuring a talk by Jos Baeten), varied and tasty lunches served next to the conference room, and yet another edition of the CONCUR football match (which saw about 20 participants kick a ball around for about one hour before the conference dinner).

I hope to devote another post to the main conference and to SOS 2010. Here I will just limit myself to a few brief remarks on the invited talks that I could attend. (Unfortunately, I had to leave at an ungodly early hour on Friday, 3 September, and therefore I missed  Holger Hermann's invited presentation and the last day of the conference. Knowing Holger's communication skills, I am sure that I missed a great talk. I hope that Holger will make a recording of his talk available from his web page.)

The conference was given the best possible start by Vladimiro Sassone, who delivered a very clear talk entitled Trust in Anonymity Networks.  In his presentation, after having introduced the basic setting of anonymity protocols, Vladimiro presented an analysis of the privacy guarantees of the Crowds anonymity protocol, with and without onion forwarding, for standard and adaptive attacks against the trust level of honest users.

I had the great honour of chairing the session featuring the second invited talks, which was delivered by Maurice Herlihy. After-lunch sessions are always challenging, especially when the conference is held in France, but Maurice's talk, entitled Applications of Shellable Complexes to Distributed Computing, was the perfect digestive after an excellent lunch. In his talk, Maurice reviewed some of the ideas behind his award-winning application of tools from algebraic topology to distributed computing and then discussed some very recent results that will be presented at DISC 2010 in the paper Concurrent Computing and Shellable Complexes co-authored with Sergio Rajsbaum.

In her talk Taming Distributed Asynchronous Systems, Anca Muscholl delivered a good overview of many results and open problems related to  analysis techniques for distributed, asynchronous systems with two kinds of synchronization, namely shared variables and fifo channels. Anca has just received the prestigious CNRS silver medal for 2010 for computer science. Congrats to her!


The last invited talk I was able to attend was delivered by Frank S. de Boer, who gave a presentation entitled Dating Concurrent Objects: Real-Time Modeling and Schedulability Analysis. After giving the audience an overview of the CREDO project, Frank introduced a real-time extension of the concurrent object-oriented language Creol, and showed us how to analyze schedulability of an abstraction of real-time concurrent objects in terms of timed automata. He concluded the talk by telling the audience about techniques for testing the conformance between these behavioral abstractions and the executable semantics of Real-Time Creol in Real-Time Maude. I enjoyed the talk, and I think that Frank was successful in keeping his audience away from their laptops and in making the attendees resist the temptation of checking their email during his talk, which was one of his stated aims!

Addendum.  Holger Hermann's invited presentation is now available (in flash) from here. Enjoy!

One year of Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS)

Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS) was launched by Rob van Glabbeek in 2009, as an initiative to have proceedings of all worthy workshops in Theoretical Computer Science freely available on-line. The papers in the proceedings are simply entries in the CoRR repository. DOI numbers are assigned to EPTCS publications, and they are indexed in CrossRef and in the Directory of Open Access Journals.  There is no charge for authors or workshops/conferences.

The idea caught on like wildfire, and since EPTCS was launched over 30 proceedings were published, and 22 more have been accepted for publication.

Perhaps one of the reasons is that the procedure for submitting a proposal is very simple, and our response time to a proposal is very fast, usually less than 10 days. Additionally, thanks to efficient workflow, proceedings usually appear within 10 days after all the constituents have been delivered.

We find that it is very important to properly record workshop proceedings in one, easily searchable place. Also, we want to contribute in this way to the growing acceptance of the view that all scientific publications should be freely available on-line.

We hope that researchers working in Theoretical Computer Science will follow the example of the many others in accord with the originators of this idea.  Please see http://published.eptcs.org/ for the list of published workshops.

The editors,

Rob van Glabbeek (NICTA, Sydney, Australia)
   Editor in Chief
Luca Aceto (Reykjavik University)
Rajeev Alur (University of Pennsylvania)
Krzysztof R. Apt (CWI and University of Amsterdam)
Lars Arge (Aarhus University)
Ran Canetti (Tel Aviv University)
Luca Cardelli (Microsoft Research)
Rocco De Nicola (Universita di Firenze)
Jose Luiz Fiadeiro (University of Leicester)
Wan Fokkink  (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Lane A. Hemaspaandra (University of Rochester)
Matthew Hennessy (Trinity College Dublin)
Bartek Klin (Warsaw University, University of Cambridge)
Evangelos Kranakis (Carleton University)
Shay Kutten (Technion)
Nancy Lynch (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Aart Middeldorp (University of Innsbruck)
Benjamin Pierce (University of Pennsylvania)
Gordon Plotkin (University of Edinburgh)
Vladimiro Sassone (University of Southampton)
Robert H. Sloan (University of Illinois at Chicago)
Wolfgang Thomas (RWTH Aachen University)
Irek Ulidowski (University of Leicester)
Dorothea Wagner (Universitaet Karlsruhe (TH))
Martin Wirsing (LMU Munich)
Moti Yung (Google Inc. and Columbia University)

Rolf Nevanlinna Prize to Daniel Spielman

Daniel Spielman  has been chosen for the 2010 Rolf Nevanlinna Prize for smoothed analysis of Linear Programming, algorithms for graph-based codes and applications of graph theory to Numerical Computing. The full details are here.


Congrats to Daniel for landing another prize after the Goedel prize 2008, which he received in Reykjavik during ICALP 2008.

Details about the other prize winners are here.

An interesting publication experiment in the logic-programming community

Krzysztof Apt has alerted me of the changes that have taken place in the Logic Programming community. The Association for Logic Programming (ALP) recently left the Springer LNCS series and embraced a new publication model for the proceedings of their flagship conference (the International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP)) that tries to upgrade the papers directly to journal papers. Here is how the co-chairs of the 2010 edition of the conference describe the new publication model and its rationale.

The Logic Programming (LP) community, through the Association for Logic Programming (ALP) and its Executive Committee, decided to introduce for 2010 important changes in the way the main yearly results in LP and related areas are published. Whereas such results have appeared to date in standalone volumes of proceedings of the yearly International Conferences on Logic Programming (ICLP), and this method – fully in the tradition of Computer Science (CS) – has served the community well, it was felt that an effort needed to be made to achieve a higher level of compatibility with the publishing mechanisms of other fields outside CS.

In order to achieve this goal without giving up the traditional CS conference format a different model has been adopted starting in 2010 in which the yearly ICLP call for submissions takes the form of a joint call for a) full papers to be considered for publication in a special issue of the journal, and b) shorter technical communications to be considered for publication in a separate, standalone volume, with both kinds of papers being presented by their authors at the conference. Together, the journal special issue and the volume of short technical communications constitute the proceedings of ICLP.

The special issue of the journal  Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP) devoted to the 26th International Conference on Logic Programming Special is the first of a series of yearly special issues of that journal putting this new model into practice. It contains the papers accepted from those submitted as full papers (i.e., for TPLP) in the joint ICLP call for 2010. The collection of technical communications for 2010 will appear in turn as Volume 7 of the Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs) series, published on line through the Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server (DROPS). Both sets of papers will be presented by their authors at the 26th ICLP.

This seems a very interesting way of dealing with some of the concerns that have been aired by some pundits about the publication culture within CS, while preserving the crucial role that conferences play in CS. I think that it is certainly worth a thought.

Call for papers: ICALP 2011

The first call for papers for ICALP 2011, which is presently being distributed at ICALP 2010, is here.

I hope that you will make plans to submit excellent papers to ICALP 2011.

Organizing a conference with satellite events

Suresh asked me to expand on a comment I posted here, where I described my experience with the organization of ICALP 2008 in Reykjavik, which I believe is still the most attended and event-packed ICALP conference on record.

First of all, even without satellite events, ICALP is a three-track conference, and has been so since 2005, though typically only two tracks are running in parallel at each point in time. At ICALP 2008, in addition we had 12 satellite events, including the DYNAMO training school for doctoral students. There were no tutorials, apart from the lectures at the PhD school, but we hosted a masterclass by Peter Winkler on mathematical puzzles, which I estimate was attended by well over 250 people, including local high-school teachers and students. Overall, nearly 500 people were registered for the main conference and/or the satellite events.

The workshops were held the day before ICALP or during the week-end following it. They were selected by the ICALP organizers amongst a fairly large number of proposals that we received in response to a call for workshops, based on their perceived scientific quality and on their potential interest to the ICALP community. As ICALP organizers, we made sure that each workshop had a suitable room at the university and some minimal amount of logistical and technical support. (Typically, at least a local student or a postdoc was permanently in residence during each workshop.) We also printed the preliminary proceedings of the workshops and took care of arranging lunches and coffee breaks. The costs were covered by the workshop registration fees. Overall, the overhead generated by the organization of the satellite events was minimal, or at least it looks so two years after the facts :-)

Organizing such a conference was not an easy job, but it was not as daunting as it may seem. In hindsight, I think that it was important to organize the event at the university (not a hotel---in passing, I very much prefer attending events held at universities rather than hotels), to have the assistance of the university support services, of some local students and postdocs, and of experienced conference organizers who took care of the registrations, of the lunches and coffee breaks and of the social programme. Magnus Halldorsson, Anna Ingolfsdottir and I organized ICALP and were assisted by Bjarni Haldorsson and MohammadReza Mousavi in the organization of the workshops. I firmly believe that the task of organizing a conference like ICALP should be shared amongst several people. This certainly worked for us and helped us work more cheerfully, and overcome personal problems, mishaps and periods of crisis and panic that arose during the year before the conference took place.

Overall, I do not think that organizing ICALP ended up being much more work than organizing a single-track conference without satellite events.

Let me close by adding that the model used for ICALP is rather common in conferences related to TCS with a "volume B flavour". See, for instance, the experience of the ETAPS conference series, which involves five major conferences, tutorials and a large number of satellite events, and of the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC), featuring eight major conferences and large number of workshops in 2010. Readers of this post may like to know that typically workshops are proposed by members of the community, and so are the tutorials at ETAPS.

As an external observer, I fail to see why STOC could not follow the example of those federated conferences and, at the same time, broaden its scope to cover more topics in TCS and accept a few more papers, if their quality is excellent, rather than relinquish its high-profile, peer-reviewed status.

Gödel Prize 2010

I have not seen any official announcement yet, but, according to Wikipedia and to Theory Announcements (thanks to the anonymous commenter who pointed out the latter source), the Gödel Prize 2010 has been awarded to Sanjeev Arora and Joe Mitchell for their concurrent discovery of a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the Euclidean Travelling Salesman Problem. Congrats to Arora and Mitchell!

Extended Deadlines for SOS 2010

I am co-chairing SOS 2010, an affiliated workshop of CONCUR 2010, which will be held in Paris. You are still on time to submit a paper to that event! The new submission deadlines are as follows:

• Submission of abstract: Friday 28th May 2010 Tuesday 1st June 2010 (strict)
  
• Submission: Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Monday 7th June 2010 (strict)

Can you resist the lure of Paris in late August-early September?

My Workplace

Here are some views of my workplace and its environment. The two photos above picture the entrance to my "professorial work area" :-) The one on the right depicts the entrance to my work area and its immediate environment, with the work places of Anna Ingólfsdóttir (left) and Magnús Halldórsson (right, behind the stand where we place some of our recent papers and books). This is the heart of our ICE-TCS enclave.

Can one work in such an environment? So far, the answer seems to be yes, but this is mainly because I am starting to believe one can work anywhere provided everyone in one's neighbourhood adheres to some basic ground rules.

Is the open-space environment conducive to academic work? This I am much less convinced about.

To conclude, here is what the open-space work environment looks like when I arrive at work in the morning. (The photo is taken from outside my cubicle.)

First Presburger Award to Mikolaj Bojanczyk

The Presburger Award Committee, consisting of S. Leonardi, A. Tarlecki, and W. Thomas (chair) has chosen Mikolaj Bojanczyk as the first recipient of the EATCS Presburger Award for young scientists.

The motivation from the award committee reads as follows:

Mikolaj Bojanczyk, 32 years old, has contributed numerous deep results to automata theory and to logic and algebra in computer science. Among them is the theorem stating that tree walking automata are strictly weaker than general tree automata, the definition of new decidable logics based on quantifiers for boundedness, and the development of a novel algebraic framework for the study of properties of unranked trees. His work thus led to the solution of long-standing open problems and introduced methods that open new directions in theoretical computer science (also relevant to neighbour disciplines such as data base theory). The committee recommends Mikolaj Bojanczyk as an exceptional young scientist who not only fully deserves the Presburger Award but is also an ideal first recipient. The committee also would like to mention that more than one excellent nomination was made, a fact which lets us hope that the Presburger Award will receive several nominations of truly exceptional level from all areas of theoretical computer science in the coming years.

Let me add that, in 2005, Mikolaj's doctoral thesis, entitled ”Decidable Properties of Tree Languages”, received the Ackermann award of the European Association of Computer Science Logic. In 2006, he was awarded the ”Witold Lipski prize for young Polish researchers in computer science”. In 2007, he received the Kuratowski award for young Polish mathematicians, awarded by the Polish Mathematical Society. In 2009, Mikolaj became one of the very few young computer scientists to obtain a European Research Council Starting Grant.

Congrats to Mikolaj for yet another well-deserved award. May his work go from strength to strength.

Fifth International Summer School on Rewriting

The 5th International School on Rewriting will be held in the period  July 3-8, 2010, in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The programme includes both basic and advanced lectures. Perhaps some of your graduate students will be interested in attending the event.



Term rewriting is a core area in Theoretical Computer Science. It is powerful model of computation underlying much of declarative programming, which is heavily used in symbolic computation in logic and computer science. Applications can be found in theorem proving and protocol verification, but also in fields as diverse as mathematics, philosophy and biology.

     

School of Computer Science at RU on Twitter

The School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University, where I work, has made the step to advertise its events and news on Twitter. See here. Our aim is to make potential students and the community at large aware of what the school can offer.

Does your institution have a Twitter page too? Do you think that Twitter is a good channel for spreading news to potential CS students?

ICE-TCS Logo

After five years of operation, ICE-TCS (our little research centre in TCS) finally has a logo, which you see displayed above in its full glory. The logo design is courtesy of Emilka Bojańczyk. Do have a look at her graphic design work, which I like a lot. If you need logos, posters or any other kind of TCS- or Maths-related  design work, I strongly recommend Emilka.

Apart from being a professional graphic designer, Emilka has a mathematical background (she graduated with honours from the Mathematics Department of Warsaw University in 2002) as well as strong family connections with TCS :-) She has also designed the logo for the STACS conference series, amongst other things.

Thanks Emilka!

LICS 2010 Test-of-time Award Winners

I just read an email announcing the papers selected for the 2010 LICS Test-of-Time Award. For the 2010 LICS Test-of-Time Award, all papers from LICS 1990 were considered by an Awards Committee consisting of Glynn Winskel (chair), Jean-Pierre Jouannaud and John Mitchell.

In view of the weight of highly-influential papers, across a range of areas, the committee has taken the exceptional step of selecting four papers! They are:

• Model-checking for real-time systems by R. Alur, C. Courcoubetis and D. Dill. This paper was a pioneer in the model checking of real-time systems. It provided a polynomial-space algorithm for the model checking of a real-time logic (an extension of CTL with timing constraints) with respect to a continuous-time model. Its techniques are still used extensively and results of this paper form part of almost any course or tutorial on real-time verification.
• Symbolic model checking: 10^20 states and beyond by JR Burch, EM Clarke, KL McMillan, DL Dill and LJ Hwang. This paper revolutionized model checking. Through its symbolic representation of the state space using Randy Bryant's Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) and its careful analysis of several forms of model checking problems, backed up by empirical results, it provided a first convincing attack on the verification of large-state systems. The paper was a major agent in establishing BDDs as a tool in mainstream computer science.
• The theory of ground rewrite systems is decidable by M Dauchet and S Tison. This paper asked what has proved to be a very important question, whether the first-order theory of one-step rewriting is decidable. The paper settled the question positively for the theory of ground rewrite systems using innovative techniques on tree automata. Its techniques rekindled an interest in automata theory on finite trees, now a major topic, with many current applications from rewriting through to security, program analysis and concurrency.
• Recursive types reduced to inductive types by P Freyd. This paper showed what was really going on with the classic method of solving domain equations.  By separating positive and negative occurrences of the unknown in a domain equation, it gave an elegant category-theoretic treatment of recursively defined domains that extends the well-understood and widely-used methods of initial-algebra semantics. Its methods are now standard. They led to new techniques for relating operational and denotational semantics, and new mixed induction/coinduction principles.

Congratulations to all the recipients of the awards!

Typos, typos....

I always tell my students at all levels that there is no excuse for not spell checking one's writings. There are rather good spell-checking programs out there, and one should use them to spot obvious typos.

Spell-checking programs, however, are no substitute for careful proof reading of one's papers. I was reminded of this fact of professional life some time ago when, while reading the revision of a journal submission of mine, I spotted the mention of a "format for impotence of operators" (in lieu of "format for idempotence of operators"). It would have been embarrassing, but admittedly amusing, to send the paper off with that typo left unspotted, just as it was entertaining for my students to attend a lecture mentioning a "poof technique" (rather than "proof technique") on a slide :-)

No spell-checker can find those typos. I'll use them to motivate my students to proof read their texts with care.

ICALP 2010: Accepted papers

The list of accepted papers for ICALP 2010 is out. Based on what I saw as a PC member for track B, the overall quality of the submissions was, in general, very high and many good papers could not be selected for presentation at the conference.

Journal Editors or Black Holes?

Sometimes journal editors (or referees) are observationally very similar to black holes. A paper is submitted, but no review escapes the force of gravity generated by the scientist in question. If the academic who is submitting the paper is well established, (s)he might not be overly bothered by this "black-hole-like effect" and live to see the day. However, in case the paper is submitted by a young scientist who might be applying for jobs, the negligence of an editor or a reviewer might have negative consequences on the career of the author of the paper.

Suppose, by way of example, that a young scientist submits a substantial paper to a high-impact journal reporting on the major findings in her doctoral dissertation. The first review round takes a whole year, despite repeated enquiries to the handling editor, and the editor asks for major revisions based on the detailed referee reports. The author works hard at handling the suggestions from her reviewers, and submits a revised paper. One more year passes and the email enquiries by the author receive no answer from the cognizant editor.

What would be the best line of action for the young scientist in question? Should she wait for a second bunch of reports, which might never come, or would she be best served by withdrawing the paper and submitting it elsewhere? What advice would you give in a situation like this one?

What Are The Hot Research Areas in Concurrency Theory?

Yesterday Andrei Sabelfeld (Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden) visited ICE-TCS with Arnar Birgisson, a former master student of mine who is now doing doctoral studies under his supervision. Andrei delivered the seminar Information flow in web applications in the ICE-TCS seminar series (the abstract for the talk is here), we talked about liveness and safety properties and about academic matters in general. We at ICE-TCS enjoyed his visit a lot.

Over dinner,  Andrei asked me:

• What are the big unsolved problems in concurrency theory?
• And what are the hot research areas in the field?

I gave my quarter-baked personal answers, but I'd like to hear yours.

I have the feeling that research in concurrency theory is driven more by "hot research areas" than by collections of big open problems, but that's just my personal impression, even though at some point I started collecting a list of open problems and stated some in this essay. 

Also, how much does the "hotness of a research area" inform the research you do and that you suggest to your students? For what it is worth, for good or for worse, I mostly tend to follow my own personal interests and inclinations rather than the directions of the field at large. However, one  has to "sell" one's work and have it published. It is undoubtedly easier to do so if the work is considered to be hot and timely by a substantial fraction of the research community. Doing work in areas that are considered "important" by many will probably also give a student better opportunities to find further employment.

Overall, I feel that it is important to give one's students a good problem to work on for her/his dissertation. There are certain characteristics that a good problem should have for sure, but is "hotness" one of those?

Addendum: There is a lot of good career advice for everyone here.

LICS 2010 Accepted Papers and Martin Grohe's Latest Opus

The list of accepted papers for LICS 2010 is out. As usual, the programme looks very interesting and exceedingly strong.

For an interested, but not very knowledgeable, observer like me, one of the most interesting looking papers that have been selected for the conference seems to be yet another seminal contribution by Martin Grohe. The paper is Fixed-Point Definability and Polynomial Time on Graphs with Excluded Minors.

From the abstract of that ten-page paper, I learn that Grohe proves that fixed-point logic with counting captures polynomial time over all classes of graphs with excluded minors. To my untrained eye, this looks like an amazing result. The proof of this theorem will take up the whole of this monograph, which is currently being written and will be well over 200 pages long. The current draft spans 238 pages.

Would such a result meet the current requirements for the Gödel prize, say? It seems to me that it would not, unless Grohe also publishes a journal paper based on a fragment of his monograph. Taking the view that proofs of certain results are likely to be very long and that very few journals in computer science would publish papers that are 250 pages long, say, would it not be reasonable to let a research monograph qualify a piece of research for the Gödel prize? After all, if the result is important, it will be studied in depth by many researchers, ensuring a more thorough level of peer review than the one obtained via a standard refereeing process for a journal.

The loss of a giant: Robin Milner has passed away

I just read the following message from Gordon Plotkin. This is really sad news. I plan to post a more elaborate message soon, but we have lost another intellectual giant, a gentleman and a true inspiration for us all.

-----------------------------

Dear Colleagues,

I am deeply saddened to pass on the following message from Barney and Chloë Milner:

"We are sorry to announce that Robin Milner died on Saturday 20th March, in Cambridge, just three days after the funeral of his wife, Lucy.

He will be greatly missed by his family and friends, as well as the academic community."


Gordon Plotkin

SOS 2010

I am co-chairing SOS 2010 (Structural Operational Semantics 2010) with Pawel Sobocinski (Southampton). The call for papers has been posted on several mailing lists and all the information on this workshop, which is affiliated with CONCUR 2010, is available from the workshop's web site.

Consider submitting a paper and join us in Paris on August 30 to discuss the latest research on Structural Operational Semantics! I have a series of long-overdue posts describing some of the recent work by my co-authors and me on this topic. I hope to find some time to write those posts after the teaching is over and I have cleared my desk a little.

First Clay Mathematics Institute Millennium Prize Announced Today

It looks like the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) is parting with its first one million USD. Indeed, today the CMI  announced that Grigoriy Perelman is the recipient of the Millennium Prize for the resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. Full details are here and a full-length press release is also available. 

What do you think will be the next Millennium Prize Problem to fall? It seems very unlikely that it will be our own P vs. NP problem, but, as Bohr taught us,  “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future".  

Magnús Halldórsson receives the first Reykjavík University Research Award

This is a belated post on a piece of news that is mostly of local (read, Icelandic) relevance. However, I think that TCS researchers everywhere will be pleased to know that the first research award from Reykjavík University, where I have worked since November 2005, has been given to Magnús M. Halldórsson, for his work on approximation algorithms for computationally hard problems, amongst others. (The announcement in English is here.)  It is good to see the first research award go to a TCS researcher, also because this sets high standards for future such awards.

It will be interesting to see whether future award committees will be influenced by considerations related to "academic politics" in selecting awardees for the university research award. If not, I expect to see a few awards in the coming years go to people working in (T)CS and combinatorics.

Belated congratulations to Magnús.

Two PhD Studentships Available

Yesterday night, I posted the appended announcement of two PhD studentships, which became available thanks to a successful grant application to the Icelandic Fund for Research (Rannis), on a couple of mailing lists.

I am posting it here too, just in case any of the readers of this blog is interested in applying or has any student who would be a suitable candidate for the studentships.

---------------------------------------------------------

            Meta-Theory of Algebraic Process Theories

         School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University

          Two PhD studentships

Applications are invited for two PhD studentships at the School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University.  The positions are part of a three-year research project funded by Rannis (the Icelandic Fund for Research), under the direction of Luca Aceto and Anna Ingolfsdottir.

Aim of the project

Algebraic process theories, also known as “process algebras”, are prototype specification languages for reactive systems—that is, for devices that compute by reacting to stimuli from their environment. The main strength of such theories lies in the equational (calculational) style of reasoning they support. For each process theory, several natural questions immediately arise pertaining to the (non-)existence of (finite or recursive) sets of laws that allow one to prove by “substituting equals for equals” all of the valid equalities between process descriptions (closed or open terms) over fragments of the process theory at hand. Currently, answering such questions is only possible via delicate, error-prone and lengthy proofs.

The aim of the project is to contribute further advances to the study of the meta-theory of algebraic theories of processes.  The main goals of the project are

• to establish a generic framework for answering questions pertaining to the existence of equational axiomatizations of behavioural semantics over process algebras affording certain desirable properties, such as being finite or recursive, and
  
• to apply the proposed general theory to solve some of the main open problems in the study of the equational logic of processes.
  

Research environment

The research  within the project will be carried out in close collaboration with our long-term co-workers Wan Fokkink (VU Amsterdam), Bas Luttik (TU Eindhoven), MohammadReza Mousavi (TU Eindhoven) and Michel Reniers (TU Eindhoven).

The successful candidates will benefit from, and contribute to, the research environment at the Icelandic Centre of Excellence in Theoretical Computer Science (ICE-TCS). ICE-TCS has currently 14 permanent members, seven postdoctoral researchers and one Ph.D. student.  For more information about ICE-TCS, its members and its activities, see http://www.icetcs.ru.is/.

Qualification requirements

Applicants for the PhD studentships should have a good MSc degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or closely related fields, and have a strong background in discrete mathematics and formal systems. Some previous knowledge of topics from at least one of concurrency theory, process calculi and structural operational semantics is not a prerequisite, but would be desirable.

Remuneration

PhD position: 265,000 ISK (roughly 1,550 euros) per month before taxes, for three years, starting as early as possible and no later than October 2010.

Application details

By Friday, 26 February 2010, interested applicants should send their CV, including a list of publications where applicable, in PDF to the addresses below, together with a transcript of their academic record, a statement outlining their suitability for the project and the names of two referees.

Luca Aceto
email: luca@ru.is

Anna Ingolfsdottir
email: annai@ru.is

We will start reviewing applications as soon as they arrive, and will continue to accept applications until the positions are filled. However, we strongly encourage interested applicants to send in their applications as soon as possible.

About the School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University

The School of Computer Science at RU (http://www.reykjavikuniversity.is/computer-science/) has approximately 440 students at the undergraduate, masters and doctorate levels. The School is home to several strong research groups and the main research areas are algorithmics, artificial intelligence, combinatorics, concurrency theory, databases, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, software engineering, theoretical computer science and virtual environments.

The School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University  has ties with several leading foreign universities, facilitating collaboration, as well as faculty and student exchanges. In particular, the School has a joint M.Sc. degree in Computer Science with the University of Camerino, Italy, and a joint Ph.D. degree programme with KTH, Stockholm, Sweden.

Information about Ph.D. studies at the School of Computer Science is available at

http://www.reykjavikuniversity.is/departments/school-of-computer-science/ph.d-studies/

Concurrency Column for the February 2010 Issue of the BEATCS

I have just posted the paper for the concurrency column that will appear in the February 2010 Issue of the BEATCS. This installment of the concurrency column is devoted to a very informative survey, contributed by François Laroussinie, of recent work on the modelling and specification of open systems using games and alternating-time temporal logics. In particular, the paper focuses on fundamental semantic questions for those specification formalisms, such as the kind of properties that can be stated in various types of logics for games, and on the computational complexity of their model-checking problems. Enjoy it!

My New Workplace

The School of Computer Science has moved into its premises in the new building of Reykjavik University. The building is still a construction site, and will remain so for a few more months at least. You can see some photos here. There is no doubt that the building looks good. However, I am not so sure that it will offer the best working conditions for academic work. For instance, as a consequence of the downsizing of the building because of the economic crisis in Iceland, we have no offices and we are all sitting in an open space. (I'll try to post a photo of the TCS area when I get a chance to take one.)

I am not passing judgement yet on the effect that this will have on my work. The next few weeks will allow me to form an opinion on this issue. I will try to keep an open mind and to make the most of what I have available. However, it is hard to escape the nagging thought that I had a quieter working environment when I was a Ph.D. student.

Stay tuned for more information.

Job Announcement: Dean of the School of Computer Science at Reykjavík University

The School of Computer Science at Reykjavík University, my own stamping ground, is seeking a new dean. Our present dean, Ari K. Jónsson, will take over the rectorship of the university on January 23, 2010, and we are looking for excellent candidates to take over the deanship of the school. (The dean has direct responsibility for academic, administrative and fiscal operations of the School of Computer Science. The dean is part of the executive committee of the university and reports directly to the rector.)


The School of Computer Science hosts several active research groups and its main research areas are artificial intelligence, combinatorics, databases, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, software engineering, theoretical computer science and virtual environments.
 

The job announcement is here. Is any of you out there interested in applying for the job?

A Question on the Structure of Fields, Centres and Committees

Can anyone briefly explain to me, or point me to on-line information about, the raison d'être and operating characteristics of structures like the fields and centres at Cornell and MIT, or the interdisciplinary committees found at the University of Chicago?

I am asking wearing my hat of the chairman of the research council of my university, where we are mulling about the possibility of having similar structures. Thanks in advance for any information you might be able to provide!

Tony Hoare on Industrial vs. Pure Research

I have just read a very cogent retrospective piece that Tony Hoare has written for the October 2009 issue of CACM to mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of his seminal paper An axiomatic basis for computer programming. (This is the first article he wrote as an academic. Not a bad way to start, is it?) It is a read that I thoroughly recommend and that I'll make available to the students who are now taking my course on the semantics of programming languages. I am posting an excerpt from that viewpoint article on industrial vs. pure research in computer science since it may be of interest to readers of this blog. I pass the word to Tony.

"Pure academic research and applied industrial research are complementary, and should be pursued concurrently and in collaboration. The goal of industrial research is (and should always be) to pluck the 'low-hanging fruit'; that is, to solve the easiest parts of the most prevalent problems, in the particular circumstances of here and now. But the goal of the pure research scientist is exactly the opposite: it is to construct the most general theories, covering the widest possible range of phenomena, and to seek certainty of knowledge that will endure for future generations. It is to avoid the compromises so essential to engineering, and to seek ideals like accuracy of measurement, purity of materials, and correctness of programs, far beyond the current perceived needs of industry or popularity in the market-place. For this reason, it is only scientific research that can prepare mankind for the unknown unknowns of the forever uncertain future.

So I believe there is now a better scope than ever for pure research in computer science. The research must be motivated by curiosity about the fundamental principles of computer programming, and the desire to answer the basic questions common to all branches of science: what does this program do; how does it work; why does it work; and what is the evidence for believing the answers to all these questions? We know in principle how to answer them. It is the specifications that describe what a program does; it is assertions and other internal interface contracts between component modules that explain how it works; it is programming language semantics that explains why it works; and it is mathematical and logical proof, nowadays constructed and checked by computer, that ensures mutual consistency of specifications, interfaces, programs, and their implementations. There are grounds for hope that progress in basic research will be much faster than in the early days. I have already described the vastly broader theories that have been proposed to understand the concepts of modern programming. I have welcomed the enormous increase in the power of automated tools for proof. The remaining opportunity and obligation for the scientist is to conduct convincing experiments, to check whether the tools, and the theories on which they are based, are adequate to cover the vast range of programs, design patterns, languages, and applications of today's computers. Such experiments will often be the rational reengineering of existing realistic applications. Experience gained in the experiments is expected to lead to revisions and improvements in the tools, and in the theories on which the tools were based. Scientific rivalry between experimenters and between tool builders can thereby lead to an exponential growth in the capabilities of the tools and their fitness to purpose. The knowledge and understanding gained in worldwide long-term research will guide the evolution of sophisticated design automation tools for software, to match the design automation tools routinely available to engineers of other disciplines."

Amir Pnueli Dies

I just learned via a posting on the TYPES mailing list the sad news that Amir Pnueli, one of the inspirational and leading figures in several areas related to the formal specification and verification of computing systems, passed away yesterday at age 68. An email message circulated yesterday by his family states that "Amir has suffered a serious brain hemorrhage which he could not recover from. He passed away today [2 November] at noon."

In 1996, Pnueli received the Turing Award for seminal work introducing temporal logic into computing science and for outstanding contributions to program and systems verification.

His scientific legacy will be felt for many years to come.

Benchmarking Metrics: What and Why?

In his post entitled "Top 10 theory schools?", Jonathan Katz gives a list of what he considers to be the top 10 theory departments in the US. (Read the post and the comments for an update on the discussion.) One of the comments reads as follows:

I would agree about:


MIT (Silvio, Shafi, Ron, Michel, …)
Cornell (Rafael, Eva, Jon, Bobby,…)
Berkeley (Luca, Christos, Umesh,…)
CMU (Venkat, Manuel, Avrim, Ryan,…)
Princeton (Boaz, Sanjeev, Moses, Bernard,..)

The others are a bit flakier:

GA Tech (Santosh, Chris, Vijay, Sasha, …)
UT Austin (Adam, David, Brent)
UCSD (Mihir, 1/4 Russell, Daniele, maybe Hovav)
U Washington (Anna, Paul, Anup)

I would say at least he following schools are VERY comparable to above:

Stamford (Dan, Serge, Tim, Amin,…)
NYU (Subhash, Assaf, Yevgeniy, Richard, …)
Harvard (Salil, Michael(s), Leslie)
Columbia (Mihalis, Rocco, Tal)

I would say there are top 5, and then top 10 following them.

So this commentator measures the quality of a theory group using the perceived research quality of the very best researchers at a given institution. Another possible metric would be the size of the group of active researchers with high international visibility. Yet others could be the number of peer-reviewed publications in top-class journals and conferences, or the average such number per staff member.

What criteria are most useful and why (bearing in mind that, at the end of the day, we are always making subjective judgements)? I am interested in this topic since the School of Computer Science I am working at is presently undertaking a benchmarking exercise. The aim of the exercise is to find three to four departments in the Nordic countries with which we aim at comparing ourselves in the very short term, within five years and within 10-15 years. One of the interesting aspects of this exercise is that our school is substantially smaller than most of the departments elsewhere. So, what do you think would be good metrics for the benchmarking exercise? Standing of the top scientists within the school? Average number of peer-reviewed publications and citations? Or what?

EATCS Award 2010: Call for Nominations

The Call for Nominations for the EATCS Award 2010 has been published (see this pdf). Nominations and supporting data should be sent to the chairman of the EATCS Awards Committee, Emo Welzl. The next award is to be presented during ICALP'2010 in Bordeaux. The deadline for nominations is: December 15, 2009. So get your act together quickly and nominate one of the many "obvious suspects" for the award! 

Note that nominations are now kept alive for three years. Since I sent in an unsuccessful nomination last year, I don't need to do anything this time around and will just be a very interested observer :-)


I wish the award committee the best of luck with their work.

Five Years of Logical Methods in Computer Science

I have received this letter via email. I post it here since I strongly support journals like LMCS and I encourage my readers to submit good papers to it. Happy birthday LMCS! May your reputation grow with the years.



Dear Colleague:

We would like to bring the community up to date on the journal

   Logical Methods in Computer Science
   www.lmcs-online.org

We started this fully refereed, open access, free electronic journal in January 2005, intending to create a high-level platform for publications in all theoretical and practical areas in computer science involving logical methods, taken in a broad sense. We are now on Issue 3 of Volume 5 (there are four issues a year). So far, we have received more than 350 submissions of which we have published 162. In addition to individual submissions, our journal publishes special issues, e.g., of selected papers of high-level international conferences such as LICS, IJCAR, CAV, CSL, and RTA.

We are continuing actively to develop the journal. For example, we accept survey articles, and are developing `live' surveys, which can be continually updated as knowledge progresses. In another direction, we are considering allowing authors to provide additional material of an expository nature, such as slides and videos, to enable them to interest a wider spectrum of readers in their contribution.

The journal is an overlay of CoRR, the computer science repository of arXiv. There are no fees for authors nor for readers. Every paper is refereed by two or more referees, and high standards are applied. The editorial board consists of about sixty top specialists in all areas of logic in computer science.

The journal is covered by Mathematical Reviews, the ISI Web of Knowledge, and the DBLP Database.

We welcome your comments and suggestions, and we seek your contributions! For more information please consult our web pages:

     www.lmcs-online.org

Yours,

Editor-in-Chief:   Dana S. Scott <dana.scott@cs.cmu.edu>
Managing Editors:  Benjamin C. Pierce <bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu>
                  Gordon D. Plotkin <gdp@inf.ed.ac.uk>
                  Moshe Y. Vardi <vardi@cs.rice.edu>
Executive Editors: Jiri Adamek <adamek@iti.cs.tu-bs.de>
                  Stefan Milius  <s.milius@tu-bs.de>

IFIP 1.8 workshop on FORMAL METHODS FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

I have received the following announcement from Bas Luttik. I am happy to post it here since the event will be of interest to concurrency theorists and people working on formal methods at large, many of whom will be in Eindhoven for FM week.  (Not to mention the fact that I am the outgoing chair of IFIP WG 1.8.)

==============================

========================================
                       CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
======================================================================
      IFIP 1.8 workshop on FORMAL METHODS FOR EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

               http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~rvg/FMES/

           Eindhoven, The Netherlands, November 5, 2009
======================================================================

This IFIP 1.8 workshop is organised as part of the Formal Methods Week,
which takes place in Eindhoven from November 2 until November 6, 2009.
The goal of the workshop is to summarise research from different areas
of formal methods targeted to embedded systems, and to promote the use
of formal methods in different applications and in the engineering
discipline for embedded systems.

PROGRAMME:
----------
 8:30  Registration and coffee
 8:50  Opening

 9:00  Bert van Beek -
         The Compositional Interchange Format: concepts, formal basis,
         and applications
 9:45  Holger Hermanns -
         Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Performance Models of Industrial
         Networks on Chip Designs

 10:30 Coffee break

 11:00 Catuscia Palamidessi -
         Synchronization in the pi-calculus
 11:45 Joost-Pieter Katoen -
         Analysis and Semantics of Extended AADL Models

 12:30 Lunch
 14:00 The End

For abstracts of the talks and further details about the workshop we
refer to http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~rvg/FMES/.

REGISTRATION
------------
The registration fee for the workshop is 45 euros and covers coffee/tea
and lunch. You also need to register for FMweek, which costs an
additional 35 euros (administration costs). Please register via the
FMweek website: http://www.win.tue.nl/fmweek

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS:
---------------------
Rob van Glabbeek (National ICT Australia)
Ursula Goltz (Technical University Braunschweig, Germany)
Bas Luttik (Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
Uwe Nestmann (Technical University Berlin, Germany)

Presburger Award

In an old post I announced that the EATCS was about to initiate a young researcher award. I am happy to see that the call for nominations for the first Presburger Award has now been advertised. See here for the details. The award is meant for scientists in TCS who are 35 or younger.

The award is named after Mojzesz Presburger who accomplished his ground-breaking work on decidability of the theory of addition (which today is called Presburger arithmetic) as a student in 1929.

The award includes an amount of 1000 € and an invitation to ICALP 2010 for a lecture.

I hope you will take the time to nominate young scientists for the award. Who would be your favourite candidates?

Treatment of Alan Turing was “appalling”

Arnar Birgisson, a former MSc student of mine who is now a PhD student at Chalmers, pointed out to me that last Thursday Gordon Brown issued a statement "recognising the “appalling” way he [Alan Turing] was treated for being gay." The piece of news may be found here.

It is understandable that Gordon Brown's statement focuses on Turing's work on breaking the German Enigma codes. However, I find it suprising that Turing's role in the development of computer science does not deserve any mention at all in the apology.

The statement ends as follows:

"So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better."

So long, and thanks for breaking the Enigma code, devising the Turing machine and the universal Turing machine, building some of the earliest programmable computers and all the rest.....

Nominations for the Gödel Prize 2010

The Call for Nominations for the 2010 Gödel Prize has been posted (see this pdf file). The 2010 Award Committee consists of Cynthia Dwork (Microsoft Research), Johan Håstad (KTH Stockholm), Jean-Pierre Jouannaud (INRIA and Tsinghua University; chair), Mogens Nielsen (University of Aarhus), Mike Paterson (University of Warwick) and Eli Upfal (Brown University). The deadline for nominations is 31 January, 2010.

I hope that the volume B community will nominate some excellent papers to give the very strong volume A papers a run for their money :-) What papers would you nominate? Post a comment with your favourite candidates. Perhaps you can garner some support for them, leading to an actual nomination for the prize.

I will try to post some suggestions myself when my list of things to do shrinks to an acceptable level. (Fat chance, alas.)

Tom Henzinger: The First President of IST Austria

Last Sunday night I came back to Iceland after a thoroughly enjoyable stay in Bologna for CONCUR 2009, SOS 2009 and the 16th EXPRESS workshop. This was a welcome opportunity to see many friends and colleagues, letting alone visiting my home country and a pretty city like Bologna.

I hope to find some time to report on the conference, not least to pay tribute to the great work done by the local organizers and their team (with special thanks to Christian, Cinzia, Ferdinanda, Jacopo and Jorge). With the start of the teaching period approaching fast and a pile of chores to catch up on, here I'll just limit myself to mentioning a piece of news that I learned at the conference while discussing with Krishnendu Chatterjee. From 1 September, Tom Henzinger is the first President of the Institute of Science and Technology (IST) Austria in Klosterbeuburg. You can read the official press release here.

The aim of the institute, which is richly funded by the Austrian government, is "to become a world-class research center offering, by 2016, an international, state-of-the-art environment for approx. 500 scientists and doctoral students." This commitment to excellence and to basic research is witnessed already by the first few hires IST has made and things can only improve under Tom's presidentship.

I wish Tom and IST the best of luck. It is great to see Austria invest on basic research with the creation of such an institute, which is already bringing to Europe top-class scientists like Herbert Edelsbrunner (the only computer scientist to have won the National Science Foundation's Alan T. Waterman Award) and researchers of exceptional promise like Krishnendu. Moreover, it is really awesome to see one of us be chosen as the leader of such an institute.

In Bologna I also guessed correctly that Tom is the scientist with the largest number of papers during the first 20 years of CONCUR (21 papers overall). I have every reason to believe that Tom Henzinger will continue to contribute to research in concurrency theory even as president of IST.

CAV Award 2009

Does any of my readers know who received the 2009 CAV Award? The conference ended on July 2, but the web page has not been updated with that information.

Post a comment if you know who the recipient of the award was.

A Look at my Crystal Ball

Let me make an attempt at predicting the winner(s) of the LICS Test-of-Time Award for 2009.

According to the rules of the award, the prize will go to a paper that was presented at LICS 1989 in lovely Asilomar. I was there as a second-year Ph.D. student and I presented a paper myself, but it was not award material.

The conference programme was really good and the award committee must have had a difficult choice. I do not know who will receive the award in mid-August, but let make a personal prediction: the award will be shared by the following two papers:

• Douglas J. Howe, Equality in lazy computation systems and
• Eugenio Moggi, Computational lambda-calculus and monads.

What papers do you think will receive the award? It will be interesting to look back at the predictions and see who was right.

Arthur Benjamin's Proposal for Changing Maths Education

ICE-TCS Theory Day 2009

Last Friday, ICE-TCS hosted its fifth annual theory day. This is an event we organize each year to advertise TCS to the local scientists and students, usually in connection with visits by guests of the centre from outside Iceland. (The list of previous guest speakers includes Thomas Erlebach, Wan Fokkink, Ryan Hayward, Jan Kratochvil, Kim G. Larsen, MohammadReza Mousavi, Mogens Nielsen and Moshe Vardi.)

The programme for this year's event is here. We had a keynote address delivered by Zoltan Esik, who presented work on regular words and linear orders, which may be found in, e.g., this paper of his. The session devoted to algorithms saw two excellent talks by the Halldórsson brothers on algorithms for detecting genomic copy variations and on scheduling wireless networks. (The latter talk was based on a paper that will be presented at ICALP 2009.) The scientific programme was brought to a close by two talks by PhD students, who are the future of TCS. Paul van Tilburg (Eindhoven University of Technology, NL) described some of the results he has achieved in his research work so far, which aims at connecting the time-honoured theory of automata with the theory of processes. Matteo Cimini (a PhD student I am supervising with Anna Ingolfsdottir) explained the Curry-Howard isomorphism, which is one of the pearls of TCS, to all of us in a clear way.

The event was followed by wine, pizza and a social gathering. The only happening that marred our celebration of TCS is a 6% salary cut that was announced by our rector during the session in the programme devoted to algorithms.

"May you live in interesting times" says an old Chinese curse. These are definitely interesting times here in Iceland, alas. However, despite the lack of resources, ICE-TCS will try to keep waving the flag of TCS on the island as far as it can. If you happen to be in Iceland and you wish to drop by and give a talk in our seminar series, drop us a line.

Concurrency column for the June 2009 issue of the BEATCS

Last month I submitted the concurrency column for the June 2009 issue of the BEATCS to the editor in chief. The piece is entitled Deriving labelled transition systems --- a structural approach and has been contributed by Julian Rathke and Pawel Sobocinski.

The paper reports on recent results obtained by the authors in their ongoing research effort whose aim is to contribute to the development of a general theory for the systematic derivation of a labelled transition semantics for a process calculus from a simpler, non-structural, description of the reduction semantics.

I think that we can expect to hear further developments on this line of work soon, but the authors already have a good story to tell and the paper they contributed to the BEATCS witnesses this fact.

Thanks to Julian and Pawel for their efforts in putting this good paper together!

Announcing LIPIcs, a new series of electronic conference proceedings in computer science

I just saw the appended message on the concurrency mailing list. I think that it will be of interest to readers of this blog. Much is afoot in the area of open-access conference and workshop proceedings and I guess that several events will consider publishing their proceedings in this series.

----

Dear colleagues,

Following an initiative of the conferences STACS (http://stacs-conf.org) and FSTTCS (http://www.fsttcs.org/), to opt for non-commercial, electronic proceedings, the German conference center Schloss Dagstuhl Leibniz Center for Informatics (LCI) has decided to establish a new series of conference proceedings called Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs,http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/publications/lipics/). The objective of this series is to publish the proceedings of high-quality conferences in all fields of computer science. An Editorial Board is being instituted to oversee the selection of the conferences to be included in this series.

Details about joining this serie and about the editorial process can be found on-line, http://www.dagstuhl.de/fileadmin/redaktion/DROPS/LIPIcs/lipics_announce.pdf. The main features are as follows:
The proceedings in the LIPIcs series will be published electronically and will be accessible freely and universally on the internet, keeping the copyrights with the authors, and under an open access license guaranteeing free dissemination. To face the cost of electronic publication, a one-time fee will be required from the conference organizers. This fee will be kept to a minimum, intended to cover the costs of LCI, thanks in particular to a sharing of the workload between LCI and the conference organizers.

The LCI and the LIPIcs Editorial Board wish to attract the best conferences in computer science, and they hope you can encourage steering and program committees to join it!

Pascal Weil
LaBRI - CNRS
351 cours de la Libération
33405 Talence Cedex - France

pascal.weil@labri.fr
http://www.labri.fr/~weil

EPTCS, a new open access proceedings series

I have received the following message from Rob van Glabbeek, which I am very happy to post on this blog. I encourage readers of this blog to spread the announcement at their own institutions and to post it on their blogs, if they have any. I like to think that this new series of open access proceedings will offer the TCS community a good service. Of course, only time will tell whether this will happen, but I feel that the time is ripe for such initiatives in the TCS community. Spread the news!

With this posting, we are launching

   Electronic Proceedings in Theoretic Computer Science (EPTCS)

a new international refereed open access venue for the rapid
electronic publication of the proceedings of workshops and
conferences, and of festschrifts, etc, in the general area of
theoretical computer science, broadly construed.

We do not charge authors or event organisers for electronic
publication in EPTCS in any way. If hard-copies of proceedings are
desired, event organisers have the choice of organising the printing
themselves or taking advantage of a standard contract we will make
with a printing house. Copyright on all papers is retained by the
author, and full-text electronic access to all papers is freely
available, without any need for registration or subscription.

Permanent archival of EPTCS publications is ensured by organising
EPTCS as an overlay of the Computing Research Repository (CoRR): see
arXiv.org. The content of EPTCS will be indexed by DBLP.

Only original papers will be considered for publication in EPTCS:
manuscripts are accepted for review by an EPTCS conference or workshop
with the understanding that the same work has not been published, nor
is presently submitted, elsewhere. However, full versions of extended
abstracts published in EPTCS, or substantial revisions, may later be
published elsewhere.

The submission and refereeing process is handled entirely by the
organisation of the conference, workshop or festschrift to which the
paper is submitted. Our editorial board carefully selects which
workshops and conferences can be trusted to select scientific papers
of quality only, and only those events will be granted a contract to
fill a volume of EPTCS.

Our editorial board consists of:

Luca Aceto  Rob van Glabbeek Gordon Plotkin  
Rajeev Alur  Lane A. Hemaspaandra Vladimiro Sassone 
Krzysztof R. Apt Matthew Hennessy Robert H. Sloan  
Lars Arge  Bartek Klin  Wolfgang Thomas  
Ran Canetti   Evangelos Kranakis Irek Ulidowski  
Luca Cardelli  Shay Kutten  Dorothea Wagner  
Rocco De Nicola  Nancy Lynch  Martin Wirsing  
Jose' Luiz Fiadeiro Aart Middeldorp  Moti Yung  
Wan Fokkink  Benjamin Pierce     

Further information can be found on our website:

     http://eptcs.org/.

In the hope this initiative will benefit the theoretical computer
science community,

Rob van Glabbeek
(Editor in Chief)

Accepted Papers for LICS 2009

The list of papers selected for presentation at LICS 2009 is out. At first sight, it wasn't a great year for concurrency theory, but the programme looks very interesting as usual. Some of the papers I intend to check out when I can get my hands on them, and the dust settles, are, e.g.:

• Taolue Chen, Tingting Han, Joost-Pieter Katoen and Alexandru Mereacre. Quantitative Model Checking of Continuous-Time Markov Chains Against Timed Automata Specifications
• Joachim Parrow, Magnus Johansson, Björn Victor and Jesper Bengtson. Psi-calculi: Mobile processes, nominal data, and logic
• Frank Pfenning and Robert Simmons. Substructural Operational Semantics as Ordered Logic Programming
• Sumit Nain and Moshe Vardi. Trace Semantics Is Fully Abstract
• Udi Boker and Orna Kupferman. Co-ing Büchi: Less Open, Much More Practical

Plenty to read! Congrats to Sumit and Taolue, with whom I have had the pleasure to co-author papers at some point in the past.

Abel Prize 2009 to Gromov

The IMU electronic newsletter has informed me that The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the Abel Prize for 2009 to Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov for "his revolutionary contributions to geometry". As his Wikipedia page clearly indicates, Gromov has received a host of other awards before.

Reading material on Gromov and his work is available here. Being unable to understand his technical work, I will limit myself to pointing out what people have said about him.

• "It is incredible what Mikhail Gromov can do, just with the triangle inequality." (Dennis Sullivan)
• "The works of Mikhail Gromov should be read until the pages fall off." (Marcel Berger)

I would be happy if anyone apart from my coauthors and I ever read any of the my papers once, let alone "until the pages fall off".

Here is what the great man says about his opus:

The readers of my papers look only at corollaries, sometimes also at the technical tools of the proofs, but almost always never study them deeply enough in order to understand the underlying thought.

Does this mean that the "underlying thought" is carefully hidden in Gromov's papers? Shouldn't it be one of the author's duties in writing a paper to make the underlying thought apparent to the readers? What useful role can hiding the author's thoughts from the readers possibly have?

Anyway, we are surely in the presence of a giant of human thought, so kudos to him from a (hopefully) honest toiler.

Introduction to CS

Today I attended a curriculum revision meeting at my school. In particular, two new courses were discussed, and I feel that their quality will be paramount to the possible success of the revision effort. The courses are Introduction to CS and Problem Solving. The aim of the former course is to introduce incoming students to the algorithmic way of thinking and its applications in CS, as well as to introduce them to basic programming skills. Historical remarks on, and context for, the material covered in the course will be given to put it into perspective.

Can any of my readers point out suitable textbooks for such a course and/or examples of courses you are familiar with that have a similar emphasis?

Any experience report on problem solving courses would also be most welcome. Thanks in advance!

ACM TOCL Seeks New Editor in Chief

I have received this announcement from Vladimiro Sassone (chairman of the steering committee for the ETAPS conference series), who received it from Joe Halpern. I am posting it here since it may be of interest to readers of this blog.

Nominations (including self nominations) are invited for the next Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (ToCL):

http://www.acm.org/pubs/tocl/.

The position is for a term (renewable once) of three years, starting on July 1, 2009.

Candidates should be well-established researchers in areas related to computational logic, broadly conceived, and should have sufficient experience serving on conference program committees and journal editorial boards. Nominations, including a current curriculum vita and a brief (one page) statement of vision for ToCL, should be sent to Joseph Halpern <halpern@cs.cornell.edu>, by May 1, 2009.

Final selection will be made by a Selection Committee, consisting of Joseph Halpern (chair -- Cornell University), Kryzsztof Apt (CWI), Prakash Panangaden (McGill University), and Gordon Plotkin (University of Edinburgh). Nominations received after May 1, 2009, will be considered up until the position is filled.

Thanks for your help,

Joe Halpern

Ed Brinksma Becomes Rector of the University of Twente

I recently saw this press release (in Dutch) to the effect that Boudewijn Haverkort has become the new director of the Embedded Systems Institute in Eindhoven. Congratulations to him for this appointment.

By browsing through the press release, I learned that from January 1, 2009, Ed Brinksma, the former director of ESI, is Rector Magnificus of the University of Twente. Congrats to Ed too!

Ed is the second (theoretical) computer scientist I know of who has become rector of a European university. The other is Furio Honsell, the first ever computer scientist to become rector of an Italian university.

Do you know of other (theoretical) computer scientists who are rectors of universities? And is it good for the (T)CS community that some of its members take up rectorships? I do think so, and for many reasons mostly related to academic politics, but I'd like to hear your opinion.