Faculty Position in Interactive Storytelling and Game Design at Reykjavik University

The School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University seeks to hire a faculty member for a new academic position in the field of interactive narrative and game design. We are interested in an ambitious, highly qualified academic who can combine innovative teaching and cutting-­edge research in the rapidly evolving area of interactive digital entertainment within our school.

The faculty position is funded through a collaboration with massively multiplayer game developer CCP Games Inc.  We are particularly interested in active researchers who see opportunities in breaking new ground with CCP and with existing faculty within Reykjavík University, in particular within CADIA, the school's artificial intelligence research center. CCP will fund the faculty position for a minimum of 5 years; following that period, CCP and Reykjavík University will seek continued funding for the position. Full academic freedom is respected, however, by both CCP and Reykjavík University.

See here for more information. The application deadline is 30 April 2013 and interviews will be held in May 2013.

LICS 2013 Accepted Papers

This is not news anymore, but the list of accepted papers for LICS 2013 is available here.

As usual, the accepted papers look very interesting and I hope to find the time to read several of them when they become available. (This might be wishful thinking. It seems that finding time to read papers is getting harder by the day, alas.)

For what it is worth, here are two papers that immediately caught my attention browsing through the list of accepted papers and that are available on line.

• Dexter Kozen, Kim Guldstrand Larsen, Radu Mardare and Prakash Panangaden. Stone Duality for Markov Processes.
• Mikołaj Bojańczyk, Bartek Klin, Sławomir Lasota and Szymon Toruńczyk. Turing Machines with Atoms. 

To whet your appetite, here is what is probably the main result in the latter paper.

Theorem: In sets with equality atoms, there is a language that is decidable in nondeterministic polynomial time, but not deterministically semi-decidable.

Before you get carried away, here is what the authors write below the statement of this theorem.

A consequence of the theorem is that, with atoms, P is not equal to NP. It is not our intention to play up the significance of this result. In a sense, the theorem is too strong for its own good: it shows that computation with atoms is so different from computation without atoms, that results on the power of nondeterminism in the presence of atoms are unlikely to shed new light on the power of nondeterminism without atoms.

Congratulations to all the authors of accepted papers.

BCS Lovelace Medal to Samson Abramsky

Happy Easter news for the TCS community. Samson Abramsky is being awarded the British Computer Society (BCS) Lovelace Medal for 2013. (The press release is here.) The BCS Lovelace Medal was established in 1998 in honour of Lady Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace and daughter of Lord Byron. The Medal is presented annually to individuals who, in the opinion of BCS, have made a significant contribution to the advancement of Information Systems.

Quoting Samson,

It is particularly pleasing that this award recognizes work of a highly foundational character, and shows the commitment of BCS to support the study of computing not only for its manifold applications, but as a fundamental scientific discipline in its own right.

As the press release states, Samson

is pre-eminent in setting the modern agenda in the foundations of computer science, an area where he has made immense contributions since the 1980s. His contributions in each of the past three decades had a major impact on the field, notably: Domain Theory in Logical Form, Game Semantics and Categorical Quantum Mechanics. He has shown the ability to change research fields and to establish new interdisciplinary approaches.  His work over the past decade has shown that methods and concepts developed in theoretical computer science can be applied very directly in quantum information, and the foundations of quantum mechanics itself.

Another recent example of application of methods from "volume B TCS" to other fields is in this short paper, where Samson and Wiktor Winschel apply coalgebraic and other structural methods originating from computer science to economics and game theory.

Congratulations to Samson!

Does it also work in theory?

Courtesy of Robbert Dijkgraaf's media page.

How to write an unsuccessful letter of nomination for an award

The following piece of text has been going through my head since the meeting of an award committee I attended earlier this week. I had to get rid of it by writing it down. So here it is, for your reading pleasure. I thought that it was best to choose a "How to have your abstract rejected" style for this piece.

You have just seen the call for nominations for an award and you have an excellent candidate for this accolade in mind. The call for nominations asks for a letter of nomination and gives some criteria that a nominee for the award should satisfy. How can you increase the chances that your nomination will be unsuccessful? The aim of this short piece is to present some simple approaches that are guaranteed to increase the chances that your nomination will be unsuccessful, even if you were nominating Albert Einstein for the Relativity Award 2013.

The first step in ensuring lack of success of a nomination is not to read the guidelines in the call for nominations. This will make it highly likely that your letter will not address at least some of the criteria that a good nomination should have. However, this leaves open the possibility that, by chance, your letter of nomination address some of the most important criteria for nominating your candidate. The best approach to prevent this from happening is to be systematic. Do read the call for nominations and make sure that you avoid addressing each of the criteria listed there. For example, if the call asks for (a link to) a CV, do not provide any!

However, the systematic approach requires precious time, effort and organization. Isn't there a better way to achieve your goal of submitting an unsuccessful nomination without sweating too much? Indeed there is! The perfect, no-sweat unsuccessful letter of nomination is a one liner that reads:

I nominate X for award Y. Best regards, Z

Submitting this letter template, which you should feel free to reuse, will strongly indicate to the award committee that is in charge of evaluating the nominations and of selecting the award recipient(s)

1. that you really do not know why the nominee deserves the award, and
2. that you are not willing to invest any time and effort in finding out why the nominee is worthy of the honour and in convincing the committee that (s)he is the one to select.
   

Is there a better way of achieving your goal? If so, I should really like to know.

Monotasking vs. multitasking

I am enjoying reading Out of Their Minds (The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists) by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere. IMHO, the book does a great job in making the lives and ideas of some of the leaders in our field accessible to a general public. I will recommend it to my students and to the colleagues of mine who will prepare future Pearls of Computation seminars.

At the end of the chapter devoted to Donald E. Knuth,  the authors quote Don Knuth as saying:

I do one thing at a time. This is what computer scientists call batch processing---the alternative is swapping in and out. I do not swap in and out.

This quote reminded me a TED talk, in which Italian designer Paolo Cardini encourages his audience to consider the virtues of monotasking.

For several years in my career, I was largely a monotasking person. In my research, I mostly worked on one thing at the time. However, this has changed substantially over the years.  Now I find myself multitasking and context switching a lot and this leads to more stress at work. I guess that most of us have a similar story to tell; the length of the list of things to do increases much faster than our ability to get things done, alas.

Stephen Cook receives the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering

Stephen Cook has received Canada's highest honour,  the Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal for Science and Engineering. More on Stephen Cook's Herzberg Canada Gold Medal can be found here.

EATCS Award 2013 to Martin Dyer

The EATCS Awards Committee, consisting of Leslie Ann Goldberg, Vladimiro Sassone and Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide (chair), has unanimously decided to give the EATCS Award to Martin Dyer. The laudatio for Martin Dyer is available here. Martin's Wikipedia page mentions his key achievements in

(1) - polynomial time algorithm for approximating the volume of convex bodies (with Alan Frieze and Ravindran Kannan)
(2) - linear programming in fixed dimensions
(3) - the path coupling method for proving mixing of Markov chains (with Russ Bubley)
(4) - complexity of counting constraint satisfaction problems.

In addition, the laudatio singles out his work with Alan Frieze on developing the probabilistic analysis of algorithms. Dyer and Frieze showed that many NP-hard problems arising in combinatorial optimisation can be solved in polynomial expected time when the instances are drawn from natural distributions.

Congratulations to Martin!

Friday Fun

 

Source: One of the Computer Science students at Reykjavík University

Erik Demaine receives the EATCS Presburger Award 2013

The Presburger Award Committee, consisting of Peter Widmayer, Antonin Kucera and Monika Henzinger (chair), has unanimously decided to propose Erik Demaine (MIT, USA) as recipient of the 2013 EATCS Presburger Award for young scientists. Congratulations to Erik!

The Presburger Award is sponsored by CWI, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.

The citation for the award reads as follows.

Erik Demaine, born in 1981, has made outstanding contributions in several fields of algorithms, namely computational geometry, data structures, graph algorithms and recreational algorithms. In computational geometry and data structures he has solved or made significant progress on classic problems such as the carpenter’s rule problem, the hinged-dissection problem, the prefix-sum problem, and the dynamic optimality conjecture. In graph algorithms he used the powerful theory of graph minors to develop a suite of algorithms for approximately solving a general family of intractable problems. He also started the new field of computational origami, where his book is the leading authority in the field. His work  has shown promising applications to computer graphics, sensor networks, molecular biology, programmable matter, and manufacturing and engineering.

The committee recommends Erik Demaine as an exceptional young scientist who fully deserves the Presburger Award.

The committee would also like to mention that the quality of all nominations submitted this year was very high. The Presburger Award is attracting the best young scientists in the field of theoretical computer science worldwide.

Addendum, 14 February 2013: Check out a Popular Science article on Erik's work here:  http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-01/dazzling-sometimes-absurd-always-playful-genius-erik-demaine.

Poster for the Pearls of Computation seminar series

The poster has been designed by the talented team at Podpunkt. In case you need a good design for book covers, logos or posters, you might wish to consider them. Look at their portfolio and enjoy their work. As I remarked in an earlier post, the Podpunkt studio has strong connections with mathematics and TCS.

ICALP 2013 deadline is two weeks away

The second call for papers for ICALP 2013 is available here. I hope that several readers of this blog will submit some of their best work to the conference. The deadline for submissions is February 15.

This is the 40th ICALP and, in addition to the invited talks and the award addresses, will also feature a special EATCS Lecture by Jon Kleinberg to celebrate this festive occasion.

Pearls of Computation: A new seminar series

This coming Friday I will kick off a new seminar series organized by ICE-TCS at Reykjavik University. The seminar series is called Pearls of Computation and aims at presenting the work of some of the recipients of the ACM Turing Award (or of some other major award related to computer science) in an accessible way. The target audience consists of students in computer science and anyone with a potential interest in the subject. (The inspiration for this seminar series comes from the Pearls of Theory talks that were held at BRICS in Aarhus in a past that looks so far away now.)

We will try to tell the stories behind the scientific contributions of some of the key figures in computer science in a non-technical way, highlighting the context in which they were made, the state of the art at the time, why they are important and what impact they have had. In the process, I believe that both the attendees and the speakers will all learn something new and develop an increased appreciation (and, why not, pride) for the contributions of some of the people who have shaped our field.

My inaugural talk in this series will be devoted to the life and work of Robin Milner (1934-2010), whose work has had a deep and lasting influence on my modest contribution to concurrency theory. The schedule for the talks that will take place this semester is available here.

Jaco de Bakker, 1939-2012

Jaco de Bakker, one of the founding fathers of the EATCS and a prominent Dutch TCS researcher, passed away on December 13, 2013. The following obituary by Jan Bergstra, Jan Willem Klop and Jan Rutten has been circulated recently on the Concurrency mailing list and appears on the web site of the Academia Europaea as well as on the EATCS web site.

On December 13, 2012, our colleague Jacobus Willem (Jaco) de Bakker, member of the Section Informatics of the Academia Europaea since 1990, passed away surrounded by his family in his home in Amsterdam after a short illness. He is survived by his wife Angeline, his children Bas, Jaska, Catrien, Jacob and Lisa, and two grandchildren.

Jaco was born on March 7, 1939, in Ede, the Netherlands. He was for more than 38 years, from 1964 until 2002, connected as Head of the Computer Science Department to the Mathematical Centre, later called CWI  (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) in Amsterdam. He was a Fellow of CWI since 2002. In 1973 he was appointed as Professor in Computer Science, in particular for the mathematical semantics of programming languages and reasoning on program correctness, at the VU University Amsterdam, at that time called Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He occupied this professorship until his emeritate in 2002. In 1989 he was appointed as a member  of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), in the Section Mathematics. In 1972, Jaco was one of the founding fathers of the EATCS, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science; he was Vice-President of the EATCS from 1972 until 1982, and Member of the Board until 1988. Since 1998 he was honorary member of IFIP Working Group 2.2, Formal Description of Programming Concepts. In 2002, during his retirement symposium at CWI, he received the Royal Decoration Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands (Ridder in de Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw).

Jaco de Bakker started his scientific career with his Ph.-D. thesis in 1967 at the University of Amsterdam, with promotor Adriaan (Aad) van Wijngaarden, entitled: Formal Definition of Programming Languages: with an Application to the Definition of ALGOL 60. Jaco de Bakker was world-wide known and recognized for his pioneering work in developing the denotational and operational semantics of many basic features in programming languages, in a precise and rigorous mathematical style. One of its highlights became known as
the induction rule of De Bakker and Scott. This culminated in his book Mathematical Theory of Program Correctness (1980). Later on, in the early eighties, he turned to the theory of communicating processes, introduced by Hoare and Milner, a theory known in those days as "concurrency". His initial investigations in this field were in cooperation with Jeffery Zucker. The basic features in this theoretical area were treated in the same mathematically rigorous style in his book Control Flow Semantics (1996) together with Erik
de Vink. Apart from these books, he wrote more than 150 scientific articles.

In the Netherlands Jaco de Bakker was the originator of an extensive school of theoretical computer scientists. He supervised many Ph.D.-theses, and was the driving force in the eighties, together with Willem-Paul de Roever and Grzegorz Rozenberg, behind several nation-wide programmes for research and education in the Netherlands, such as REX (Research and Education in Concurrent Systems). REX lasted from 1988 to 1993; it was preceded by LPC (Landelijk Project Concurrency, National Project Concurrency) from 1984-1988. Prior to these programmes Jaco was Director, together with Jan van Leeuwen, of the 'Advanced Course on Foundations of Computer Science', a biennial series of influential courses with international attendance, from 1974 to 1982, held in Amsterdam. Jaco was also one of the founding fathers in 1979 of the Dutch Association for Theoretical Computer Science (WTI, Werkgemeenschap Theoretische Informatica), since 1995 called NVTI (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Theoretische Informatica). Jaco was Chairman of the WTI from 1979 until 1987. Jaco was proud of the fact that 32 scientists who at some time worked in his group were eventually appointed full professor.

Also in the eighties, Jaco was instrumental in stimulating the involvement and participation of the Dutch research community in the big European computer science frameworks such as FAST, Meteor, ESPRIT (European Programme for Research in Information Technology) and BRA (Basic Research Actions). As Head of the CWI Department Software Engineering he stimulated intensive contacts with the European research community, resulting in a lively and productive research atmosphere in which researchers of many nationalities cooperated on a regular basis.

In addition to playing a crucial role in education and research in theoretical computer science, Jaco de Bakker was also a gifted and respected science director and administrator. He influenced  the lives of many of us. We all remember him as a great scientist and  an amiable person. Moreover many computer scientists will remember him as a friend.

Jan Bergstra, Jan Willem Klop and Jan Rutten

Heidelberg Laureate Forum

I have been asked to distribute this announcement, which was sent on the IMU Newsletter. This sounds like a potentially interesting initiative, which might be of interest to some of the young researchers in TCS. 

You may have heard of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings
which are now in their 63rd year and have become a unique
platform for the dialogue between different scientific
generations in medicine, physics, chemistry, and the
economic sciences, fields for which Nobel Prizes are
awarded, see http://www.lindau-nobel.org/.

Creating a similar event for mathematics and/or computer
science has been contemplated by various persons and groups.
Thanks to Klaus Tschira and his foundation, this idea has
now become reality.

The first Heidelberg Laureate Forum will take place from
September 22 until 27, 2013 and bring together the best
students in mathematics and computer science with winners
of the most prestigious awards in these two disciplines:
Abel, Fields, and Turing Laureates. Detailed information
can be found at http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/.

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum is supported by various
institutions, among these are
- The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
- The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- The International Mathematical Union (IMU)
which award the three outstanding prizes.

Application:
============
In the attachment is the press release which describes
how young researchers in the fields of mathematics and
computer science can apply for participation. The
application Web page is:
http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/heidelberg-laureate-forum-2013/application/.

IMU asks the readers of IMU-Net to distribute this
information among their friends and colleagues so
that as many potential candidates for participation
as possible are reached. Please note that the
application deadline is

February 15, 2013.

2013 AMS David P. Robbins Prize to Alexander Razborov

TCS folks might like to know that the American Mathematical Society has announced that Alexander Razborov is the recipient of the 2013 AMS David P. Robbins Prize. The Robbins Prize is given every three years for a paper that reports on novel research in algebra, combinatorics, or discrete mathematics.

Razborov receives the prize for his paper "On the minimal density of triangles in graphs" (Combinatorics, Probability and Computing, 17 (2008), no. 4, 603-618), and for introducing flag algebras to solve problems in extremal combinatorics.

The full citation for this prize and additional information can be found in the massive Joint Mathematics Meetings Prize Booklet. Bloggers may like to read the response by John Baez to receiving the 2013 AMS Levi L. Conant Prize. (Presented annually, the Conant Prize recognizes the best expository paper published in either the Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS in the preceding five years.) John writes:

I put a lot of energy into explaining math and physics online. Blogging is no substitute for more formal writing about academic subjects, but it fills a gap, especially for the millions who don’t live near a good research university. Socrates complained that “writing is unfortunately like painting, for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.” This is no longer true with blogs: the author is there to answer your questions! So, I am hoping that eventually blogs will be taken seriously by academia and the AMS will have an award for the best mathematics blog. But I am very happy to receive this prize for a more traditional form of mathematics exposition.

Congratulations to all the prize recipients and happy 2013 to everyone. 

A Short Play on Alan Turing

The inspiration from this piece, which I post as a finale for the Turing Year events at Reykjavik University, comes from "Il Bivio di Alan" by Mario Cristiani, Chiara Bodei and Maria Rita Lagana, which was in turn inspired by the radio drama "Turing's Test" by Phil Collinge and Andy Lord. I thank Chiara Bodei for sharing their piece with me. The text below is not much more than a translation of "Il Bivio di Alan", which you can watch here (in the original Italian version). The version of the play below was acted at Reykjavik University on Thursday, 29 March 2012.

Alan M. Turing: The Man and the Scientist

This dialogue is set in a simply furnished bedroom. A man, Alan Turing, is lying on the bed motionless. On the side table lies a half-eaten red apple. A desktop computer suddenly materializes out of thin air  on a desk next to the bedroom's window. The computer screen lights up, the machine boots up and produces a jingle similar to the Window's one .

Computer: Start-up completed. Time reset. Welcome everyone. Today is the 7th of June 1954. The man who lies on the bed next to me is Alan Mathison Turing. He just committed suicide by eating an apple poisoned with cyanide, just like Snow White in his favourite fairy tale.

Many of you probably won't know who Alan Turing was, but you all use computers like me without knowing that we are children of his genius. His code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during World War II was instrumental in deciphering the Enigma code used by the Nazi Navy, and definitely shortened the war. Alan Turing is also considered by many to be the father of Artificial Intelligence. He realized very early on that computing machines could be used to solve symbolic manipulation problems, such as playing checkers and chess, and solving jigsaw puzzles. This realization led him to ask a fundamental philosophical and scientific question: "When can a computing machine be said to be intelligent?" To answer this question, Turing proposed the Turing Test, which was based on the idea that a computer could be said to exhibit intelligence if a human interrogator could not distinguish it from a human being. HAL 9000, the computer in 2001 Space Odyssey supposedly passed the Turing test. To this day, I am not aware of any of my fellow machines that can do so. However, in 2012, often humans are tested using CAPTCHAs, which are reverse forms of the Turing Test in which humans try to convince a computer that they are indeed humans!

One would expect that,  during his life, Turing would have been celebrated for all these monumental achievements. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Turing's life was a sad one. He was a homosexual at a time when homosexuality was a crime in the UK, he was convicted of gross indecency and was given a choice between imprisonment or chemical castration via oestrogen hormone injections. He chose the latter and, on this day, he committed suicide.

Computer: Alan, Alan, wake up! Can you hear me?

Turing: Who....what are you?

Computer: I am the product of your imagination. I am your machine.

Turing (as if talking to himself): I did not know that poison had this effect.

Computer: This has nothing to do with poison. I am the incarnation of your Universal Turing Machine, of the programmable computer you dreamt up in 1936 while solving a problem in mathematical logic. Since then, it was only a matter of time before someone built me based on your detailed plans. You could have done so yourself, had you not stopped dreaming.

Turing: I did not want to stop, but they turned my life into a nightmare. They came to ask for my help when my nation needed me to understand encrypted messages exchanged by the Nazi forces, but then I became a liability because of my homosexuality.

In all honesty, I loved to work at Bletchey Park and to develop algorithms for code breaking, to discover meaning where there seemed to be none, to develop machines that could help us analyze increasingly more sophisticated encrypted messages. It was like a game, it was like testing oneself by running a marathon in 2 hours and 46 minutes. I am still proud of that time.

Then, the same people who enlisted my help forced me to act against my own self. But why am I saying this to you? You do not think!

Computer: Are you sure? After all, you are the one who argued that machine intelligence might be possible and invented the Turing Test! Didn't you suggest that a machine be built to emulate the thinking process of a child and that it be trained to develop into a machine that could think like an adult human being?

Turing: Yes, I did. The times were not ripe though. Just as they were not ripe for my active homosexuality. The authorities were afraid that I could leak secrets to handsome Russian spies, I guess. (Laughs bitterly.)

Turing the scientist was of help to them: they treated that one well during the war and honoured him with an OBE. However, Turing the man was indecent, immoral and even dangerous for national security.

Computer: But, the man and the scientist are one! They should have seen what your worth to humanity had been.

Turing: My worth.... Do you know how much I am worth? A shirt, five fish knives, a pair of trousers, three pairs of shoes, a compass, an electric shaver and an open bottle of sherry. This is what I am worth!

Computer: What is that?

Turing: This is what my boyfriend took from my apartment. This is the list of things I denounced to the police as stolen goods. I was in love with him. I do not think that you can understand.

Computer: Perhaps not. What happened afterwards?

Turing: I admitted my homosexuality and told them that there was nothing wrong with it, that one day homosexuality will not be a crime any more.

They offered me a choice: imprisonment or a "cure" via injections with female hormones.

Computer: I know that you chose the latter.

Turing: Yes, and look at what I have become. I have started growing breasts, I have the voice of a female actress and my mind has gone with my body. Do you know how it feels not to be able to recognize yourself any more? This is what remains of Alan Turing: a broken mind in a broken body --- the body of a loser.

Computer: You are wrong. This is not what will remain of you. So many ideas and technological advances converged to create a modern computer like me that it is foolhardy to give one person the credit for inventing it. But the fact remains that everyone who, in the year 2012, taps at a keyboard, sending an email, or opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of your Universal Turing Machine.

You will be remembered for your scientific legacy, which will have a far greater impact than, perhaps, even a visionary like you could have ever imagined.

Turing: This will not help me now that I am dead.

Computer: May I ask you why someone like you, who could run a marathon and endure the ensuing pain, ended up committing suicide?

Turing (after a long pause): Perhaps so that the memory of Turing the man could live forever like the one of Turing the scientist. Perhaps, for once and unexpectedly, logic failed me.

The lights slowly fade and the room darkens.

Upcoming Deadlines for the EATCS Awards

The deadline for submitting nominations for the EATCS Award 2013 and the Presburger Award 2013 is December 31. You have a little longer to propose papers for the Gödel Prize 2013 (deadline for nomination: 11 January 2013), which is jointly awarded with SIGACT.

I hope that you will take the time to send in nominations for those awards and to honour the work of some of the many outstanding researchers in TCS.

Xavier Leroy Receives Microsoft Research: 2012 Verified Software Milestone Award

Xavier Leroy of the Paris-Rocquencourt research center of INRIA, France, is the recipient of the 2012 Microsoft Research Verified Software Milestone Award. The award is given in recognition of Xavier's role as architect of the CompCert C Verified Compiler as well as his leadership of the development team.

The formal presentation of the Award will be made to Xavier at POPL 2013, which will take place in Rome, January 23-25, 2013.

The full award citation can be accessed here.  Its executive summary reads: 

"Microsoft Research is delighted to celebrate the advances made by Dr Leroy in the vital field of software verification. Compilers are the basis for all the software we generate, and by ruling out compiler-introduced bugs, the CompCert project has taken a huge leap in producing strengthening guarantees for reliable critical embedded software across platforms. We congratulate Dr Leroy on his significant achievement in winning this Award." 

Congratulations to Xavier for this  important recognition of his long-term work on CompCert.

Call for post-doctoral research positions at the Warsaw Center of Mathematics and Computer Science

I just received this call from Bartek Klin. Since it might be of interest to readers of this blog, I decided to post it. Warsaw is a hotbed for TCS research. Follow the links below for more details.

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

Call for post-doctoral research positions at the Warsaw Center of Mathematics and Computer Science.

Warsaw Center of Mathematics and Computer Science (WCMCS) is a joint project of two scientific units: the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics of the University of Warsaw (MIMUW), and the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IMPAN). The Center is built on the long-standing cooperation between the two units, in both teaching and research. The Center was designated as a Leading National Research Center (Krajowy Naukowy Osrodek Wiodacy, KNOW) by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education in July 2012. The award comes with a substantial grant which will provide financing of the Center for the next five years. The grant will be used for enhancing the research potential of both participating institutions; this includes financing post-doctoral positions.

The post-doctoral research positions at the WCMCS are aimed at young researchers who have just received their PhD. Successful candidates will be employed as an adiunkt (assistant professor) at one of the following institutions, as indicated in the candidate’s application:
* the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics at the University
of Warsaw, http://www.mimuw.edu.pl; or
* the Warsaw branch of the Mathematical Institute of the Polish Academy of
Sciences, http://www.impan.pl

The positions are for 6-12 months, with a possible extension to at most 18 months, altogether. The salary will be 7000 PLN per month, before taxes. In addition, the holder of the position will be eligible for financial support to participate in scientific meetings.

The position comes with a teaching load of up to 60 hours per semester. At least 3/4 of the position’s duration should be between October 1 and June 30.

The applicant should have defended their PhD not earlier than 4 years before the planned beginning of the position. This period can be prolonged by the parental leave.

The candidate applying for a post-doc position at the WCMCS should submit the following documents:
* a cover letter of application addressed to the Board of WCMCS,
indicating the institution (MIMUW or IMPAN) and the period of his/her
employment,
* a CV including a list of publications, and copies of 5 best papers, at
most,
* a document that confirms holding the PhD Degree or information about the
expected date of obtaining such a degree,
* a research plan including a collaboration scheme with researchers from
MIMUW or IMPAN.

All documents should be sent as pdf files to the following e-mail address: wcmcs.postdoc@mimuw.edu.pl In addition, the applicant should ask at most two senior researchers to send their letters of support to the same e-mail address. The deadline for application is December 10, 2012.

A successful candidate can take his or her job immediately after the announcement of the results of the selection and not later than 8 months after that moment. If the candidate has no PhD degree while submitting, before starting the work he or she should present a document that confirms holding the degree.

More information about WCMCS at http://www.wcmcs.edu.pl

Jean van Heijenoort: Kaleidoscope

Yesterday, an email message on the FOM mailing list alerted me to the availability of a special issue of the journal Logica Universalis in celebration of the centenary of the birth of Jean van Heijenoort. I could not resist reading the contribution entitled Jean van Heijenoort: Kaleidoscope by  Anita Burdman Feferman. This 15-page piece is a wonderful read and paints the picture of a personality who must have been truly (much) larger than life. How often does one meet a logician who was a personal secretary to Leon Trotsky from 1932 to 1939, and from then until 1947, an American Trotskyist activist? Not to mention that he also had a love affair with Frida Kahlo to boot and that he was killed by his wife in an act of passion.

The book Politics, Logic, Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort by
Anita Burdman Feferman is now firmly on my list of things to read. (You can read a review here.)

Guide for Application to Obtain an Italian National Scientific Qualification

The new recruiting process for  full and associate professor positions in Italian universities is based on a two phase process. Candidates must first obtain the so-called Abilitazione, and then apply for a position at an Italian university. See here for more details.

In order to facilitate international participation in the first stage of this process, the University of Rome "La Sapienza" has created a guide and a series of video tutorials to help researchers who are not fluent in Italian or familiar with Italian rules apply.

For what they are worth (i.e. nothing), here are two considerations off the top of my head. 

1. First of all, kudos go to "La Sapienza" for producing this supporting material. I am not aware of other Italian institutions that are taking this step and/or who have search committees that are actively looking for foreign applicants. (If you are, please post a comment.)
2. There is probably something not quite right with a system that needs to be explained using four videos on YouTube :-)

Having said so, I sincerely hope that this new Italian process for recruiting university professors, based on scientific qualification criteria, will help the top Italian CS departments to become even stronger than they already are and that it will offer a ray of hope to young Italian academics. It will also be interesting to see how many non-Italians will apply for the abilitazione. 

Call for nominations: Gödel Prize 2013

The Call for Nominations for the 2013 Gödel Prize has been posted (pdf). Nominations for the award should be submitted to the Chair of the Award Committee, Sanjeev Arora - goedelchair@gmail.com. The deadline for nominations is January 11, 2013.

Any research paper or series of papers by a single author or by a team of authors is deemed eligible if

• the paper was published in a recognized refereed journal no later than December 31, 2012;
• the main results were not published (in either preliminary or final form) in a journal or conference proceedings before January 1st, 2000.

The Award Committee consists of  Krzysztof R. Apt (CWI Amsterdam and University of Amsterdam), Sanjeev Arora, Chair (Princeton University), Josep Díaz (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), Giuseppe Italiano (Università di Roma Tor Vergata), Daniel Spielman (Yale University), and Éva Tardos (Cornell University). On behalf of the TCS community, I thank the committee members for their important service.

Let me close with a message to the "volume B community". Perhaps the logic/semantics/programming languages community should think strategically, look at the most prominent journal papers meeting the eligibility requirements and drum up the strongest possible support for those. Feel free to look at your crystal ball and suggest candidates for nomination using comments to this post.

As the new president of the EATCS until ICALP 2014, I am taking a sabbatical from issuing nominations in order to avoid any possible conflict of interest.

John Cleese on creativity

Recently, I posted a link to a lecture on creativity in computer science by one of my PhD students. After having done so, I was struck by the thought that, at some point, I had watched an excellent, and very funny, lecture by John Cleese on creativity. Here it is, in case any of my readers wants to have a look.

Call for nominations: Presburger Award 2013

The call for nominations for the EATCS Presburger Award 2013 is out. The Presburger Award is given to a young scientist (in exceptional cases to several young scientists) for outstanding contributions in theoretical computer science, documented by a published paper or a series of published papers.

Scientists nominated for the award have to be at most 35 years old at the time of the deadline of nomination, which is the 31st of December 2012. This means that  the date of birth of researchers nominated for the Presburger Award 2013 should be in 1977 or later.

The award committee for 2013 consists of Monika Henzinger (chair), Antonin Kucera (who is one of the vice-presidents of the EATCS) and Peter Widmayer.

I hope that you will sharpen your pencils and nominate your favourite young TCS researcher for this award.

Call for nominations: EATCS Award 2013

The call for nominations for the EATCS Award 2013 is about to be published officially. However, you can already see it here.

I hope that you will consider submitting a nomination. There are many colleagues out there who would be worthy of this honour, but they can only receive the award if someone nominates them. (I know that this is a triviality, but sometimes people do not send in nominations for their favourite candidates and then wonder why they did not get the prize :-))

Expect more calls for nominations over the next few days.

Lecture on creativity by one of my PhD students

Last week, Eugen-Ioan Goriac, who is a third-year PhD student of mine, delivered a lecture on creativity as part of the Research Methodology course that I am running at Reykjavik University.

Eugen has made a video of his lecture available on YouTube. Here it is, in case it might be of interest to some of my readers.

Enjoy it!

The Feit-Thompson theorem checked in Coq!

The Feit-Thompson Theorem  is a key result in the theory of finite groups. Its original proof is 255 pages long and is perhaps the first example of a very long and highly complex proof in group theory.

At 5:46 p.m. on September 20, Georges Gonthier sent an email to his colleagues at the Microsoft Research-Inria Joint Centre in Paris announcing the completion of a six-year effort to prove the Feit-Thompson Theorem in the Coq proof assistant. The mail read, in full: “This is really the End.”

You can read more about this work here and here. 

Congratulations to Georges and his coworkers on this monumental achievement!

Invitation to becoming a member of the Italian Committees for professorships

The letter below will be sent to some mailing lists soon. I am posting it here since it is in the interests of the TCS community as a whole to be well represented in this exercise. Despite being amongst the signatories of this letter, I have no academic position in Italy. I am simply an interested observer of academic life in my home country.

Dear colleagues,

The recruitment system for academic staff at Italian universities has recently been changed. The new procedure requires that academics attain the so-called National Scientific Qualification in order to take up a position in an Italian university at the level of associate or full professor. The qualification is granted by National Committees, one for each group of disciplines. All committees are made up of five members, four affiliated to Italian universities and one affiliated to a foreign university located in an OECD country. Members from foreign universities must hold a position equivalent to that of a full professor.

We think that it would be very useful for our research community if you submitted a candidacy to become a foreign member of the National Committee. If you are interested in doing so, you can register your candidacy at

https://abilitazione.cineca.it/ocse/index.php?lang=EN

by September 24.

To submit your candidacy, you will have to include a curriculum vitae, the list of scientific publications, the selected disciplinary fields, the number of citations received by your work and your h-index. As part of this process, you will be asked to select one or more Italian Scientific fields from a scroll-down menu (choose at least 01/B1 - Informatics) and some ERC Scientific fields. (There is a scroll-down menu for that too.)

Based on this information, the Italian national agency for the evaluation of universities and research Institutes (ANVUR) will select at least four possible foreign members for each scientific group. The foreign member of each committee will then be randomly selected among those in the lists. The committee will be in service for two years, during which two rounds of evaluations will be carried out. Names and CVs of the selected candidates will be published on the ANVUR website. Members of the evaluation groups will receive an honorarium of 16,000 € for the whole period, plus expenses.

We hope that you will consider submitting your candidacy.

All the best,
Luca Aceto, Rocco De Nicola, Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini

Research Methodology in Computer Science

Our autumn semester starts on Monday and I will be teaching the Research Methodology course for master students in computer science and software engineering. This is a 15-week course and I am looking forward to the challenge of keeping the students interested and busy over 30 course sessions. (I have taught short courses on this topic at master and PhD level at different institutions, but this is a substantially larger endeavour.)

At the end of the course, my students are expected to be able to

• Explain research, research methodologies, and research in Computer Science; 
• Select a research subject and conduct a research project;  
• Write technical reports, papers, theses, and proposals effectively;  
• Give good presentations;  
• Read and review a technical paper properly; 
• Explain professional ethics: allocation of credit, authorship issues, conflict of interest and misconduct in science.

I am compiling a list of resources available on the web related to these aspects of our job and will make them available in due course. What publicly available presentations, videos and essays would you recommend that I include? Are there any courses similar to this one that you think I should look at?

CadiaPlayer GGP Champion Again!

I am proud to announce that the general-game-playing agent CadiaPlayer, developed at my own department by Yngvi Björnsson, Hilmar Finnsson, Stefán Freyr Guðmundsson and Stephan Schiffel, won this year's General Game Playing competition hosted at the AAAI conference, thereby reclaiming the title it lost in 2009.  On its road to the title it defeated among others the winners from the previous two years. As a winner of the competition CadiaPlayer also played an exhibition match consisting of three games against a human player --- Chris Welty from IBM --- and won convincingly.

With this title CadiaPlayer has become the most victorious GGP agent ever, and the only agent so far to win the competition three times.

Congratulation to the CadiaPlayer team!

PhD positions at IMT Lucca (reprise)

I am happy to post a revised version of the call for PhD positions at IMT Lucca that I received today from Alberto Lluch Lafuente and Rocco De Nicola. Distribute the announcement as you see fit.

 
The Institute for Advanced Studies IMT Lucca - Italy (http://www.imtlucca.it/) announces 36 PhD scholarships providing about €13,600 EUR gross yearly plus accommodation and full board. Deadline for application is September 26, 2012.

IMT Lucca (Italy) is an Institute for Advanced Studies and an International Graduate School that acts as a research university with the aim of forming human capital in disciplines characterized by their high potential for concrete application. IMT strives to reach the fusion of theoretical comprehension and practical relevance.

PhD programs are taught exclusively in English. The PhD Program includes a Track in Computer, Decision and Systems Science with a specific Curriculum in Computer Science. The track is coordinated by Rocco De Nicola and aims at preparing researchers and professionals with a wide knowledge of the theoretical foundations of computer science and informatics, control systems and optimization, image analysis, and management science.

The curriculum in Computer Science focuses on languages, models, algorithms, and verification methods for modern distributed systems. PhD students following the curriculum in Computer Science will perform their activities in collaboration with the SysMA research unit (http://sysma.lab.imtlucca.it/) on system modelling and analysis. This research unit focuses on formal languages, models, methodologies and tools to support the development of correct software systems with high quality in terms of predictability, security, efficiency, usability, re-usability, maintainability, and modularity.

We hope that you might consider applying

http://www.imtlucca.it/phd/call_for_applications/

If you are not personally interested, please help us signaling these opportunities to colleagues and collaborators. For further information please contact Alberto Lluch Lafuente or Rocco De Nicola.

Samson Abramsky discusses the legacy of Turing

Readers of this blog might be interested in this podcast by the Royal Society in which Samson Abramsky discusses the legacy of Turing. Samson is one of the editors of The foundations of computation, physics and mentality: the Turing legacy, a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A devoted to "the richness of Alan Turing’s intellectual legacy in the modern conception of computation."

Enjoy!

Random thoughts on conference presentations

1. When giving an invited talk at a general TCS conference, do not assume that everyone in the audience is interested in the technicalities of your subject. Focus on the main message, tell the story of the ideas and why you think they are important. Give everyone something to take home. 
2. Do not assume that you do not need to introduce the setting for your work because someone else has done it before or on an earlier conference day. Not everyone will have attended the talks where the background and motivation were presented.
3. Do not run over time.
4. Never speak with your hands on your mouth, even if it feels good :-)
5. Do not let your voice drop to an inaudible level as your sentence progresses. Dare to speak slowly and loudly.
6. Ask yourself: How many slides do I really need for a 20-minute talk? Most of us will only use a few, and those should convey the message of the talk at a suitable level of abstraction.
   

The advice we give others is the advice we ourselves need.

ICALP 2012: Days 3-5

At long last, here are some of my notes from the main events that took place during the last three days of ICALP 2012. There were several excellent talks at Track B (which is the one I attended) and I hope to find the time to discuss some of my favourite papers at some point.

Day 3 was given the best of starts by Gilles Dowek's invited talk entitled A theory independent Curry-de Bruijn-Howard isomorphism. (The slides are here and the abstract is here.) IMHO, Gilles pitched his talk at precisely the right level for a general conference in TCS like ICALP and my impression was that he gave each attendee something to take home, regardless of their area of expertise.

Gilles introduced the seminal Curry-de Bruijn-Howard isomorphism, which was in fact originally proposed by Brouwer, Heyting, and Kolmogorov, who suggested to de fine constructive proofs as algorithms. He surveyed the principles behind the plethora of existing proof processing systems and the principles that led to the development of the universal proof checker Dedukti. Oversimpliying, Dedukti is based on what Gilles called Hilbert and Ackermann’s paradise: one logic and many theories. The logic is the lambda-Pi-calculus proposed by Harper, Honsell and Plotkin. However, theories are represented using rewrite systems, rather than using axioms. Indeed, according to Gilles, "Axioms suck!" (from the point of view of efficiency).

Overall, I enjoyed the talk by Gilles a lot. It was a pity that it was not as well attended as it should have been.

At the start of day 4, Dan Spielman gave an excellent talk on using graph theory to solve linear equations. The talk was entitled Algorithms, Graph Theory, and the Solution of Laplacian Linear Equation and the Laplacian was the main character in the story that Dan recounted with verve and clarity. For further reading on this topic, Dan himself suggested this article by Erica Klarreich at the Simon's Foundation. In passing, Dan also described a method for obtaining "obscenely accurate solutions to a problem by solving a simpler one". 


I had had the pleasure to hear Dan deliver a talk on smoothed analysis when he was a co-recipient of the Gödel Prize 2008 in Reykjavík and I watched the video of his talk at the latest ICM. IMHO, the invited talk at ICALP 2012 confirmed him yet again as one of the very best speakers around. 


Day 4 at ICALP 2012 was also devoted to the awards of the Gödel Prize 2012 and of the EATCS Award. As you surely know already, the Gödel Prize went to three seminal papers in the field of Algorithmic Game Theory. Christos Papadimitriou delivered a talk on behalf of the recipients of the Gödel Prize, who were all . present at the conference apart from Noam Nisam. Christos explained the intellectual roots of the concept now known as the price of anarchy and of algorithmic mechanism design. Moreover, he asked the question: What makes an idea spread? His answer was that an idea spreads if it gives young researchers an opportunity to show how smart they are! 


Christos concluded his talk by being a prophet of doom. (I am using his own words here.) He reminded the people in the audience that, for people like me, the "Hello World" program was Max, a program for finding the largest entry in an array of integers, say. The world has changed. Computation has changed. The inputs to our programs are selfish agents who are interested in the outcome of our computation. Vickrey is the new Max :-)

The EATCS Award went to Moshe Vardi (laudatio), who delivered a presentation entitled  A Logical Revolution. In the talk, Moshe described how logic has one from irrelevance to relevance in our field. The key lessons in this rise of logic are the importance of algorithms, heuristics and tools. One of the key insights is that one should not be scared of worst-case complexity: It always barks, but it does not always bite! Efficient in the field of logic in computer science means exponential. "Exponential is the new polynomial." 

Both award presentations were excellent and were given a long round of applause from a packed audience. 


The last invited talk at ICALP 2012 was delivered by Kohei Honda. Kohei´s talk was entitled Session types and distributed computing. It described the origins of the notion of session type and how sessions types find application in the NSF Ocean Observation Initiative. This represents one of the most impressive applications of notions from concurrency theory outside computer science. Kohei is also one of the prime movers behind the programming language Scribble. His talk was a fitting finale to an excellent ICALP conference.

Thanks again to Artur Czumaj and his team for arranging an excellent conference in the beautiful setting of the University of Warwick.

ICALP 2012: First two days

ICALP 2012 is taking place at the University of Warwick. The programme is action packed, with many highlights and prizes. There are three tracks with 123 selected papers (71 for track A, 30 for track B and 22 for track C) out of 432 submissions (248 for track A, 105 for track B and 79 for track C). The acceptance rate was therefore around 28.5%. In addition, there are five invited talks and on day two David Harel delivered a Turing talk.

The conference is being attended by 210 participants (146 regular and 64 students).

There is so much going on that it is hard to give a detailed report on the scientific activities. I will thus limit myself to a few short remarks on some of the highlights of the first two days of the conference.

• The first two invited talks were delivered by Stefano Leonardi (Sapienza University of Rome) and Berthold Vöcking (RWTH Aachen). Both speakers focussed on algorithmic aspects of auctions. Stefano's talk was entitled On Multiple Keyword Sponsored Search Auctions with Budgets, while the talk by Berthold dealt with Randomised Mechanisms for Multi-Unit Auctions. 
• Leslie Ann Goldberg delivered a very inspiring talk on her joint paper with Mark Jerrum The Complexity of Computing the Sign of the Tutte Polynomial (and consequent #P-hardness of Approximation), which received the best paper award for track A. Leslie brilliantly conveyed her enthusiasm for this amazing polynomial even to a layman like me, and gave us a glimpse of the rich mine of information that the Tutte polynomial contains about a graph. (W. T. Tutte also figured prominently during the very instructive excursion to Bletchley Park we enjoyed yesterday.)
• Manfred Kufleitner presented his joint work with Volker Diekert, Klaus Reinhardt and Tobias Walter that received the best paper award for Track B. Their truly remarkable result settles a long-standing open problem in formal language theory and may be found in the paper Regular Languages are Church-Rosser Congruential.  
• Tuesday saw an excellent Turing talk by David Harel on three strands of his research over the years that have been influenced by Turing's work.  I enjoyed it a lot and I finally got a chance of hearing David Harel deliver one of his trademark talks. 
• The Presburger award went to Venkatesan Guruswami (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh) and Mihai Patrascu (AT&T Labs). Venkat gave a talk that highlighted the web of connections that arise in his work and how tools from one area can find application in another one. He ended his talk was quoting the title of a talk by Avi Widgerson, namely "Depth through breadth". Mikkel Thorup gave a heartfelt presentation, describing Mihai Patrascu's work and personality. Several participants took photos for the Cheers to Mihai! web site. 
• The EATCS general assembly lasted until 8.50pm. Kurt Mehlhorn gave a very entertaining and thought-provoking report from the PC chairs. He said, amongst other things, that the submission data show that Track A researchers like to work in pairs or triples, Track B people like to work in pairs and that Track C papers are typically co-authored by a group of people. 
• ICALP 2014 will be held at the IT University in Copenhagen with Thore Husfeldt as general chairs. SWAT 2014 will take place just before ICALP and you will be able to enjoy the Copenhagen Jazz Festival too!

The conference is being organized by Artur Czumaj and his team. Kudos to them for having done a truly excellent job. Thanks to all of them!

I will try to post a telegraphic report on the rest of the conference as soon as I have a little time. I hope that other ICALP participants will share their opinions on the conference and their short reports as comments to my quarter-baked posts. 

LICS Test-of-Time Awards 2012

Prakash Panangaden has informed me that the LICS Test-of-Time Award for 2012 has gone to the following two papers:

• Thomas A. Henzinger, Xavier Nicollin, Joseph Sifakis and Sergio Yovine. Symbolic Model Checking for Real-Time Systems. 
• Jean-Pierre Talpin and  Pierre Jouvelot. The type and effect discipline.

The first article has received a huge number of citations for a LICS paper (1172 according to Google Scholar). It develops a thorough theory of symbolic model checking for timed CTL over finite automata with real-valued clocks.  It presents an algorithm that computes the set of states that satisfy a formula symbolically as a fixed point of a functional on state predicates, without constructing the state space. For this purpose, the authors introduce T_mu, a mu-calculus on computation trees over real-numbered time that has been studied by other researchers in further developments, and investigate its expressive power relative to that of timed CTL. Overall, this has been an influential contribution for the fragment of the CAV community dealing with real-time systems.

The second paper has been recognized an an important contribution to the theory of types and has received 331 citations  according to Google Scholar. The type and effect discipline is a framework for reconstructing the principal type and the minimal effect of expressions in implicitly-typed polymorphic functional languages that support imperative constructs.

Congratulations to the award recipients!

PhD Positions at IMT Lucca

IMT Lucca has issued its call for applications for admission to the IMT Ph.D. Program beginning in January 2013. Readers of this blog (or their students) might be interested in the track called Computer, Decision, and Systems Science, whose director is Rocco De Nicola.

The raw data about this call for PhD applications are as follows:

• 36 Ph.D. positions are covered by scholarships in the gross amount of 13,638.47€ /year.
• A limited number of additional positions without scholarships may also be offered.
• Ph.D. students will have tuition fees waived.
• Ph.D. students who are granted a scholarship have free accommodation in shared double rooms in the School residence halls (with the exception of students whose permanent residence is within 30km of IMT).
• Ph.D. students will have free access to the canteen services.
• Ph.D. students are covered by insurance against any accident and/or injury that may occur while they carrying out their Ph.D. activities.

For more information about IMT, I encourage you to look at their excellent recruitment video. IMT is growing and promises to become a hotbed of research at the intersection of computer science, control theory, economics and statistical physics. At least, the level of ambition is high.

Let me add, as icing on the cake, that Lucca is a lovely little town, which is close to many other beautiful Italian cities. Encourage good students to apply for the advertised positions!

Best paper awards at ICALP 2012

The preliminary version of the detailed programme for ICALP 2012 is now available here. While skimming through the programme, I learnt that the best paper awards for the conference will go to the following papers:

• Leslie Ann Goldberg and Mark Jerrum. The Complexity of Computing the Sign of the Tutte Polynomial (and consequent #P-hardness of Approximation). Best paper for Track A. 
• Volker Diekert, Manfred Kufleitner, Klaus Reinhardt and Tobias Walter. Regular Languages are Church-Rosser Congruential. Best paper for Track B.
• Piotr Krysta and Berthold Vöckin. Online Mechanism Design (Randomized Rounding on the Fly). Best paper for Track C.

The best student papers are:

• Anastasios Zouzias. A Matrix Hyperbolic Cosine Algorithm and Application. Co-recipient of the best student paper for Track A.   
• Shelby Kimmel. Quantum Adversary (Upper) Bound. Co-recipient of the best student paper for Track A. 
• Yaron Velner. The Complexity of Mean-Payoff Automaton Expression. Best student paper for Track B.
• Leonid Barenboim. On the Locality of NP-Complete Problems. Best student paper for Track C.

Congratulations to all the award recipients!

The scientific programme for ICALP 2012 looks really action packed. The invited speakers are:

• Gilles Dowek (INRIA Paris)
• Kohei Honda (Queen Mary London)
• Stefano Leonardi (Sapienza University of Rome)
• Daniel A. Spielman (Yale)
• Berthold Vöcking (RWTH Aachen)
• Alan Turing talk: David Harel (The Weizmann Institute of Science)

During the conference, there will be presented three special awards: EATCS/ACM SIGACT Gödel Prize 2012, EATCS Award 2012, and EATCS Presburger Award 2012.

• EATCS and ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) awarded the Gödel Prize 2012 to three groups of researchers for their contributions to understanding how selfish behavior by users and service providers impacts the behavior of the Internet and other complex computational systems. The papers were presented by Elias Koutsoupias and Christos H. Papadimitriou, Tim Roughgarden and Éva Tardos, and Noam Nisan and Amir Ronen.
• The Presburger Award Committee 2012, consisting of Monika Henzinger, Antonin Kucera, and Stefano Leonardi (chair), has unanimously decided to propose Venkatesan Guruswami (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh) and Mihai Patrascu (AT&T Labs) as joint recipients of the 2012 EATCS Presburger Award for young scientists. (pdf)
• The EATCS Awards Committee consisting of Leslie Ann Goldberg, Friedhelm Meyer auf der Heide and Eugenio Moggi (chair), has unanimously decided to give the 2012 EATCS Award to Moshe Vardi (Rice University). (pdf)

The main conference will be preceded by a series of workshops taking place on Sunday, July 8.

Accepted papers at ICALP 2012

The list of papers that have been selected for the three tracks of ICALP 2012 is now available. The preliminary programme is also on line. This looks like an action-packed ICALP, with a plethora of interesting invited talks, award sessions and good-looking papers. I look forward to the conference.

EATCS and Presburger Awards for 2012

It is award time for the EATCS.

The EATCS Award for 2012 will go to Moshe Vardi. (The award is given to acknowledge extensive and widely recognized contributions to theoretical computer science over a life long scientific career.) You can read the laudatio here.

The Presburger Award Committee 2012 has unanimously decided to propose Venkatesan Guruswami (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh) and Mihai Patrascu (AT&T Labs, New York) as joint recipients of the 2012 EATCS Presburger Award for young scientists. See here for the details.

Congratulations to all the recipients of the two awards! 

Fifth Talk in the Alan Turing Year at Reykjavík University

The fifth talk in the Alan Turing Year at Reykjavík University was delivered this afternoon by my colleagues Yngvi Björnsson and Kristinn R. Thórisson. The talk was entitled Alan Turing's Contributions to Artificial Intelligence: Can Machines Think? and has been organized in collaboration with CADIA and IIIM. This was a thought-provoking and very enjoyable scientific event. In case you are interested the audio and the slides of the talk are here in .avi format. (Note: For technical reasons only the audio of Kristinn's presentation is available.)

In his presentation, Yngvi introduced the field of AI, its subbranches (applied AI, strong AI and cognitive AI) and highlighted Turing's main contributions to the field. On the other hand, Kristinn presented a critique of the Turing Test. Kristinn is a firm supporter of strong AI and his position on this matter can be summarized as follows. (I hope that I am not misrepresenting his views too much.)

1. The standard divide-and-conquer approach that we use in science to understand phenomena is not going to help us understand "intelligence", at least not if applied in the same way as has been done so far in AI, namely by using it in a reductionist way to remove features that are central to the phenomenon of intelligence.
2. The Turing Test was a very premature attempt at devising a test for the phenomenon of intelligence that forced upon much constructionist AI research the view that "intelligence is X, where X is some very simple manifestation of natural intelligence."

Overall, I left the talk with plenty to muse on, assuming I will have the time and the brains for this activity.

Reading material:

• “Computing machinery and intelligence” by Alan Turing (1950) (hosted by Hugh Loebner)
• The Turing test entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

PC-chair-authored papers at conferences

Perhaps it is just me, but I feel that there has been an increase in the number of papers (co-)authored by PC chairs selected for presentations at conferences. This seems to happen mostly at "specialist" conferences. I have noticed a similar trend for special issues of journals, to which guest editors are often allowed to submit contributions. In that case, the submission is handled by a member of the editorial board as an ordinary paper submitted to the journal.

Is it just me? If not, do you think that this is a good development?

Assistant professor position at Chalmers University of Technology

I have been asked to spread the news about this position. It looks like a very exciting opportunity for an ambitious young scientist.

We're looking for a talented and ambitions Assistant Professor in Information and Communication Technology at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden.

The position includes at least 80% research time and prestigious
status of Area of Advance at Chalmers:
http://www.chalmers.se/en/areas-of-advance/ict/Pages/default.aspx

The area of security is well in scope of the position. Please, help
spread the word!

Application deadline: May 1, 2012

Further info and application link:
http://web1.reachmee.com/i003/chalmers/se/vacdetail.aspx?commadseqno=502&postback%20=%20vacancies.aspx

J.E. Littlewood's take on "research strategy"

I really enjoyed reading the post Are You Working too Hard?, watched the linked videos and read some of the accompanying material from Uri Alon's web site. Whenever I stumble across this kind of material, I tend to go back to one of my favourite sources of inspiration related to the academic's art of work, namely the delightful piece The Mathematician's Art of Work by J.E. Littlewood. In that piece, "with a good deal of diffidence", Littlewood tries to give "some practical advice about research and the strategy it calls for."  Here is a summary of his advice.

• On days free for research, Littlewood recommends working at most five hours with breaks about every hour (for walks perhaps). Littlewood claims that without breaks one acquires the habit of slowing down unconsciously.
• Either work all out or rest completely. It is too easy to fritter a whole day away with the intention of working but never getting properly down to it.
• For a week without teaching duties, take one afternoon and the following day off. The day off should stay the same each week. 
• Take three weeks of holiday at the beginning of each vacation. This period is necessary and sufficient for recovering from the severest mental fatigue. 
• Morning work is far better than work done at other times of the day. From a certain point onwards, following severe concussion in 1918, Littlewood never worked after 6.30pm.
• Try to end your day's work in the middle of something; in a job of writing out, stop in the middle of a sentence. This will help warming up the morning after. 
• An ominous symptom of overwork is an obsession with the importance of work, and filling every moment to that end.

How would your work pattern compare to these pieces of advice? In my case, the answer would not be pretty and I feel that the same applies to many of my closest colleagues. The obsession with the importance of work has been there for a while and ........

Accepted papers for LICS 2012

The list of accepted papers for LICS 2012 is now out.

The first thing to note is that the PC for LICS 2012 has selected 61 submissions for presentation at the conference. By way of comparison, there were 37 papers that were presented at LICS 2011 (modulo counting mistakes I might have made.) This increase in the number of selected papers follows one of the changes that LICS 2012 promised to implement:

In response to concerns about LICS becoming overly selective with a too-narrow technical focus, the program committee will employ a merit-based selection with no a priori limit on the number of accepted papers.

Does this higher number of selected papers imply a "decrease in the quality of the conference programme", whatever that may mean? I have not read the papers yet, but a quick look at the list of selected papers and a brief look at the introduction of some of those available on line seem to indicate that this installment of LICS will be at least as strong as the others. Time will tell. My gut feeling is that this will be a very exciting conference.

I hope that someone attending the conference will be willing to send me a report for this blog. Let me know if you are interested in sending me a short report from LICS 2012.

Holding LICS in Croatia will be an interesting experiment. LICS 2012 will be hosted by the University of Dubrovnik, in Dubrovnik, which is a lovely town along the Adriatic sea. The location and the quality of the conference programme should entice many colleagues to attend the event. Unfortunately, the early registration fee looks pretty hefty to me: $450 for ACM, IEEE or ASL members and $600 for non-members are a lot of money at a time when travel money is scarce. (By way of comparison, the registration fee for ICALP 2011 in expensive Zurich was roughly €334.)

Last, but not least, it will be interesting to see which papers will receive the LICS Test-of-Time Award for 2012. Do you have any predications you'd like to share in the comment section?