Best PhD thesis award of the Italian Chapter of the EATCS

One of the prizes of the Italian Chapter of the EATCS is the Best Italian PhD Thesis in Theoretical Computer Science Award. This year, the committee (consisting of Vincenzo Auletta,  Ferdinando Cicalese and Carla Piazza) has unanimously decided to bestow the award on the following two young scientists:

• Michele Ciampi for his thesis "Round and Computational Efficiency of Two-Party Protocols" and 
• Luisa Siniscalchi for her dissertation "Delayed-Input and Non-Malleable Cryptographic Protocols".

Both the award recipients were PhD students at the University of Salerno working with Giuseppe Persiano and Ivan Visconti, which is remarkable.

Moreover, the award committee found that the following two theses deserved a honourable mention:

• Alessio Conte, “Enumeration Algorithms for Real-World Networks:  Efficiency and Beyond” and 
• Valeria Vignudelli, "Behavioral Equivalences  for Higher-Order Languages with Probability."

Congratulations to these young scientists. I wish them all a great career, whatever they decide to do in the future.

ICE-TCS Theory Day(s) 2018

The Icelandic Centre of Excellence in Theoretical Computer Science held its 14th annual Theory Day today. The programme is here.

Takeshi Tokuyama (Tohoku University, Japan) kicked off the day with a talk entitled Deformation of Determinants and Related Combinatorics. The talk was based on work that Takeshi did in 1986 (as a mathematics postdoc) and published in 1988. He referred to it as his "sleeping beauty" as there has been a peak of interest in that paper only  in the last ten years. Takeshi's "Weyl character formula" was even the subject of a PROMYS research project in the summer of 2013, which led to a paper that generalizes that formula to the Hall-Littlewood polynomials. The talk surveyed many interesting topics and connections with alternating sign matrices, computation of Boltzmann weights, and crystal bases.

The second half of the Theory Day 2018 was devoted to three short presentations by ICE-TCS researchers devoted to research highlights from the centre. Antonis Achilleos set himself the goal of presenting two and a half years worth of research on monitorability, carried out within the framework of the TheoFoMon project, in 15 minutes. Tigran Tonoyan presented joint work with former ICE-TCS postdoc Christian Konrad addressing the question of whether randomness helps in guessing the middle point of an on-line sequence. (Answer: It does.) Last, but not least, Christian Bean gave an overview of an ongoing project whose goal is to automate proofs of results in enumerative combinatorics. Christian presented many examples of published theorems, some of which from 2018, that can be established using their CombSpecSearcher algorithm and that were previously obtained using human ingenuity.
 
The Theory Day was preceded by a seminar by Tami Tamir (Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, The Interdisciplinary Center) on Thursday, 23 August 2018. In her talk, Tami gave an excellent introduction to the main research questions in  algorithmic game theory, introduced network formation games and discussed her work with Guy Avni and Orna Kupferman on automata formation games, where the goal of each player is given by a regular language rather than by simple reachability objectives. Tami focused on results presented in this paper, which were mostly of a negative nature. She concluded her informative and entertaining presentation by introducing her university, the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science and how they try to tackle the gender issues in computer science.

Overall, this was another good edition of the Theory Day at ICE-TCS. When we founded the centre on the 29th of April 2005, I had no idea that it would see so many installments of this event. I feel fortunate to have taken part in organizing them, to have worked with so many great colleagues in Iceland and to have met many very interesting and inspiring people along the way. Stay tuned for the Theory Day 2019, which will most likely be held in the spring of next year.
 

2018 Women@McKinsey Dissertation Award to GSSI alumna Yllka Velaj

GSSI alumna Yllka Velaj has been selected as co-recipient of the 2018 Women@McKinsey Dissertation Award (https://www.mckinsey.it/womenmckinsey-dissertation-award), which is given to a female researcher for a master or doctoral thesis on themes related to Advanced Data Analytics or Machine Learning. Yllka receives the award for her PhD thesis "Information spreading with network augmentation" that she completed at the GSSI under the supervision of Pierluigi Crescenzi (University of Florence) and Gianlorenzo D'Angelo (GSSI). The award comes with a job offer by McKinsey & Company, and with financial support to attend the Open Data Science Conference 2018, which will be held in London in the period 19-22 September 2018.

Citing the explanation of her work given by Yllka in the CWI press release:

"Understanding the dynamics that regulate the diffusion of information in complex networks has been one of the main goals in the field of complex network analysis. The problem, which is also known as influence spreading or information diffusion problem, is motivated by many applications in different fields: from marketing to epidemiology, going through the study of adoption of innovations and the analysis of social networks. In my PhD thesis, I designed new efficient algorithms which use a given budget to suggest new links to be added to the network in order to maximize the diffusion of information”.

Yllka is an Italian scientist of Albanian origin. She obtained her BSc in Computer Science and her MSc in Distributed Systems and Computer Networks from the University of L'Aquila. She was a PhD student in Computer Science in the joint PhD GSSI-IMT programme at the Gran Sasso Science Institute. After one year as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chieti-Pescara, in May 2018 she joined the Networks & Optimization group at CWI in Amsterdam as a winner of the fellowship programme promoted by ERCIM - the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics.

Yllka's research interests include combinatorial algorithms, network analysis, algorithm engineering and recently also algorithmic game theory.

Congratulations to Yllka, her supervisors and the CS group at the GSSI as a whole.

Call for expressions of interest for a Full Professor Position in Algorithms at the Gran Sasso Science Institute

This call for expressions of interest for a Full Professor Position in Algorithms at the Gran Sasso Science Institute might be relevant for you or for some of your colleagues. Please distribute it as you see fit. The announcement is also here.

Gran Sasso Science Institute  Computer Science Group

Expression of Interest for a Full Professor Position in Algorithms

The Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI  http://www.gssi.it) is a new, ambitious Centre for Advanced Studies and PhD School established in L'Aquila (Italy).

The Computer Science Group at the GSSI (http://cs.gssi.it/) invites expressions of interest for a permanent position in Algorithms at the level of Full Professor.

Candidates must have an excellent publication record, a clear potential to promote and lead research activities, and a specific interest in teaching skilled, internationally-recruited students at the postgraduate level.

Applications Applicants should submit their expression of interest by sending

• a motivation letter,
• a curriculum vitae,
• a list of publications and
• a brief research statement.

Applications (and questions regarding the application process) must be submitted in electronic form, preferably by Friday, 7 September 2018, to eoi-cs@gssi.it.

Disclaimer Please note that this is not a job advertisement. Based on the received expressions of interest, the Gran Sasso Science Institute will decide whether to open an official call for a full professor position in algorithms and which selection procedure to follow.

Additional information

1. Duties: Teaching postgraduate courses, leading internal seminars and tutoring PhD students. All activities are in English.
2. Salary: The salary will be determined on a personal basis, also taking into account past positions covered abroad. An indicative figure of the gross amount for the starting (minimum) salary is 72,431 € per year. Net income may vary depending on income taxes, local taxes, retirement plan, health care deduction and tax exemptions. Professors who have held a tenured position outside Italy for more than three years (at the corresponding level) might be eligible for a partial recognition of past services, depending on specific legal constraints.

PhD positions at IMT Lucca, Italy

I have been asked to distribute the appended call for applications for PhD positions at IMT Lucca, which, as readers of this (lately rather inactive) blog might recall, is one of the Italian institutions close to my heart. If you have some strong student looking for a PhD position or you would like to embark in PhD studies yourself in one of the research areas covered at IMT Lucca, do consider this excellent opportunity. Lucca is a lovely town in Tuscany and has a very high quality of life. This (by now somewhat dated) video gives a good introduction to IMT Lucca.

UPCOMING DEADLINE: August 3^rd, 2018 at 12:00 pm CEST

MORE INFORMATION: http://phd.imtlucca.it

We are pleased to inform you about the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca's two PhD Programs and their specialized tracks

Cognitive and Cultural Systems PhD Program

• - Analysis and Management of Cultural Heritage (AMCH)
• - Cognitive, Computational and Social Neurosciences (CCSN)

Systems Science PhD Program

• - Computer Science and Systems Engineering (CSSE)
• - Economics, Networks and Business Analytics (ENBA)

• No tuition fees, free room and access to IMT Canteen
• A grant of €15,300 gross/year

Candidates can apply if they obtain their (minimum) 4-year undergraduate degree NO LATER than October 31st, 2018

Child care at STOC 2018

Ilias Diakonikolas and David Kempe (STOC 2018 Local Arrangements Chairs) have asked me to post the following announcement, which will be of interest to potential STOC 2018 participants. Kudos to the STOC 2018 local arrangement chairs for organizing the first STOC providing subsidized, pooled childcare.

We are pleased to announce that we will provide pooled, subsidized child care at STOC 2018. The cost will be $40 per day per child for regular conference attendees, and $20 per day per child for students. For more detailed information, including how to register for STOC 2018 childcare, see

http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2018/childcare.html

Ilias Diakonikolas and David Kempe (local arrangements chairs)

ERC Advanced Grants to TCS Researchers

The ERC has announced the latest batch of ERC Advanced Grant recipients. The list of TCS and cryptography researchers who have been honoured with this prestigious accolade includes Peter Bürgisser (hat tip to Artur Czumaj), Jean-Sebastien Coron, Joan Daemen, Herbert Edelsbrunner, Javier Esparza, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Stefano Leonardi and Peter Sewell. Congratulations to all of the grant recipients!

Feel free to suggest additions to the list in the comments section.

Eight four-year PhD positions in Computer Science at the Gran Sasso Science Institute

The Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), based in l’Aquila, Italy, has just issued a call for eight four-year PhD positions in Computer Science. The yearly amount of the scholarship is of € 16,159.91 gross. (An additional 50% on monthly basis may be awarded for research period abroad if approved by the GSSI.) In addition, the following facilities and benefits apply:

• all PhD students will have free accommodation at the GSSI guest house and, starting from the second year, another accommodation or a financial substitute of 350,00 Euros gross/month (to obtain the contribution, the students would have to present a rental agreement in L’Aquila);

• all PhD students will have free luncheon vouchers (1 per day, working days, except school closures, missions, other situations contemplated by the GSSI rules);

• all PhD students will have tuition fees waived;

• all PhD students will be covered by insurance against any accident and/or injury that may occur while carrying out their PhD activities.

For further details see the call for applications at

http://www.gssi.infn.it/phd/docs/2018/CallPhDXXXIV.pdf.

The deadline for applications is the 20th of June, 2018, at 6 pm (Italian time zone).

Ful professorship at Aalborg University

I have been asked to advertise this full professor position at Aalborg University.  For what it may worth, I strongly recommend CS@Aalborg as I working place. 

FULL PROFESSORSHIP AT AALBORG UNIVERSITY
At the Technical Faculty of IT and Design, Department of Computer Science, a permanent Full Professorship in Computer Science is open for appointment starting August 1, 2018 or soon thereafter. The position is enabled by a generous grant from the Poul Due Jensen Foundation and supports the focus areas “Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems” and “Big Data and Artificial Intelligence”.

APPLICATION DEADLINE
Mon Apr 02 00:00:00 CEST 2018

JOB DESCRIPTION
The objective of the position is to strengthen the department’s activities on combining theory and applications in the area of distributed, embedded, and intelligent systems.  Here, current research and teaching span topics such as semantic theories; algorithms and tools for verification and validation; model-driven development, analysis and optimization; and probabilistic models and algorithms for decision making and machine learning.

The position includes funding to recruit an assistant researcher within the research field of the professorship. The assistant researcher position is for four man-years and is funded by the Poul Due Jensen Foundation.

The formal announcement including information about qualification requirements may be found at http://www.stillinger.aau.dk/vis-stilling/?vacancy=953383

You may obtain further professional information from Professor Kim Guldstrand Larsen, phone +45 2217 1159, email: kgl@cs.aau.dk. 

Cs at aalborg university
The Department of Computer Science at Aalborg University is ranked #1 in Denmark according to the Leiden Ranking.

The research at the department features a broad range of synergistic activities within research and education in the general area of computer science, including curiosity-driven research and targeted research in collaboration with industrial partners, as well as traditional university education, with a unique problem- and project-based focus, and continued education and knowledge dissemination. For more information see www.cs.aau.dk.

Noam Nisan receives the EATCS Award 2018

I just saw that the EATCS Awards Committee consisting of Artur Czumaj, Christos Papadimitriou and Jean-Eric Pin (chair) has selected  Noam Nisan as the recipient of the EATCS Award 2018 "for his decisive influence on a range of areas in computational complexity theory and for algorithmic mechanism design, an elegant and rigorous computational theory that aptly informs economics."

The laudatio for the award, which will be presented to Noam at ICALP 2018 in Prague, is available here. Congratulations to Noam!

Most Influential POPL Paper Award 2018: "Multiparty asynchronous session types" by Kohei Honda, Nobuko Yoshida and Marco Carbone

I heard the great news that the paper Multiparty asynchronous session types by the late Kohei Honda, Nobuko Yoshida and Marco Carbone has received the Most Influential POPL Paper Award 2018. See

http://www.sigplan.org/Awards/POPL/.

This award is given annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL) held 10 years prior to the award year. The papers are judged by their influence over the past decade.

The citation for the award is available from the above-mentioned web page, but I repeat it here for ease of reference:

Session types are a type-based framework for codifying communication structures and verifying protocols in concurrent, message-passing programs. Previously, session types could only model binary (two-party) protocols. This paper generalizes the theory to the multiparty case with asynchronous communications, preventing deadlock and communication errors in more sophisticated communication protocols involving any number (two or more) of participants. The central idea was to introduce global types, which describe multiparty conversations from a global perspective and provide a means to check protocol compliance. This work has inspired numerous authors to build on its pioneering foundations in the session types community and has initiated many applications of multiparty session types in programming languages and tools. It has also influenced other areas of research, such as software contracts, runtime verification and hardware specifications.

Congratulations to the authors of the paper and to the concurrency community at large, whose work over the last ten years contributed to this award and, most importantly, to significant scientific advances that are now embodied in programming languages and tools that are already having practical impact (see the work with Cognizant, Red Hat, and VMWare on Scribble, and with the OOI), and that I believe will find increasing application in years to come. 

Five Postdoctoral positions in Computer Science at Gran Sasso Science Institute

Five Postdoctoral positions in Computer Science at
Gran Sasso Science Institute in L'Aquila (Italy)
http://www.gssi.it/
Deadline:  2 March 2018 at 6 p.m. (Italian time zone)

The Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI, http://www.gssi.it/), a recently established international PhD school and a centre for advanced studies in computer science, mathematics, physics and social sciences offers 18 postdoctoral research positions, five of which are dedicated to computer science and more specifically to themes that are strongly connected to the pillars of the PhD program in computer science:

- Algorithmic foundations of social and computer networks.
- Software systems and services.
- Specifications and analysis of concurrent reactive systems

The research grants are awarded for two years and their yearly amount is € 36.000,00 gross.

Candidates who are preparing their doctoral thesis are eligible to apply; however, they must have obtained their PhD degree before taking up their appointment with GSSI. Selected candidates are expected to start their appointments no later than 1 November 2018.

The application must be submitted through the online form available at www.gssi.it/postdoc/ by 2 March 2018 at 6 p.m. (Italian time zone).

Each application should include the following material:

- the CV of the applicant,

- a research statement,

- up to 3 publications and

- the name and email of two references.

For more information, please consult the Call for Applications at www.gssi.it/postdoc/ or write an email to info@gssi.it.

Prospective candidates are also welcome to contact Luca Aceto (luca.aceto AT gssi.it) or Michele Flammini (michele.flammini AT gssi.it). 

PhD positions at the School of Computer Science, Reykjavik University

The School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University is advertising PhD scholarships. See https://en.ru.is/scs/ph.d-studies/ for details.

The Icelandic Centre of Excellence in Theoretical Computer Science is one of the research centres within the school and is seeking PhD candidates in the following fields: logic and concurrency (contacts: Anna Ingolfsdottir and Luca Aceto), algorithms and distributed computing (contacts: Eyjólfur Ingi Ásgeirsson and Magnús Már Halldórsson), combinatorics and automated proofs (contact: Henning Ulfarsson), types and programming-language semantics (contact: Tarmo Uustalu).

Call for nominations for the 2018 Alonzo Church Award

Catuscia Palamidessi asked me to post the call for nominations for this year's Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation. I encourage all members of the community to nominate their favourite paper or small group of papers in logic and computation published within the past 25 years.


The 2018 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation
Call for Nominations
Introduction
An annual award, called the Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation, was established in 2015 by the ACM Special Interest Group for Logic and Computation (SIGLOG), the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), the European Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL), and the Kurt Gödel Society (KGS). The award is for an outstanding contribution represented by a paper or by a small group of papers published within the past 25 years. This time span allows the lasting impact and depth of the contribution to have been established. The award can be given to an individual, or to a group of individuals who have collaborated on the research. For the rules governing this award, see: http://siglog.org/awards/alonzo-church-award/.
The 2017 Alonzo Church Award was given jointly to Samson Abramsky, Radha Jagadeesan, Pasquale Malacaria, Martin Hyland, Luke Ong, and Hanno Nickau for providing a fully-abstract semantics for higher-order computation through the introduction of game models, see: http://siglog.org/winners-of-the-2017-alonzo-church-award/.
Eligibility and Nominations
The contribution must have appeared in a paper or papers published within the past 25 years. Thus, for the 2018 award, the cut-off date is January 1, 1993. When a paper has appeared in a conference and then in a journal, the date of the journal publication will determine the cut-off date. In addition, the contribution must not yet have received recognition via a major award, such as the Turing Award, the Kanellakis Award, or the Gödel Prize. (The nominee(s) may have received such awards for other contributions.) While the contribution can consist of conference or journal papers, journal papers will be given a preference.
Nominations for the 2018 award are now being solicited. The nominating letter must summarise the contribution and make the case that it is fundamental and outstanding. The nominating letter can have multiple co-signers. Self-nominations are excluded. Nominations must include: a proposed citation (up to 25 words); a succinct (100-250 words) description of the contribution; and a detailed statement (not exceeding four pages) to justify the nomination. Nominations may also be accompanied by supporting letters and other evidence of worthiness.
Nominations should be submitted to catuscia@lix.polytechnique.fr by March 1, 2018. 
Presentation of the Award
The 2018 award will be presented at ICALP 2018, the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming. The award will be accompanied by an invited lecture by the award winner, or by one of the award winners. The awardee(s) will receive a certificate and a cash prize of USD 2,000. If there are multiple awardees, this amount will be shared.
Award Committee
The 2018 Alonzo Church Award Committee consists of the following five members: Thomas Eiter, Javier Esparza, Catuscia Palamidessi (chair), Gordon Plotkin, and Natarajan Shankar.

First-year computer science students at the GSSI publish paper at ICSE 2018

The paper "FAST Approaches to Scalable Similarity-based Test Case Prioritization" by Breno Miranda (UFPE, Brazil), Emilio Cruciani (GSSI, Italy), Roberto Verdecchia (GSSI, Italy, and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL) and Antonia Bertolino (ISTI - CNR, Italy) has been accepted as a technical research paper at ICSE 2018, the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE is the flagship conference in Software Engineering and is very selective its technical-research-paper track is the most prestigious one within the conference.

The paper contributes to the classic area of software testing, which is one of the approaches developed by computer scientists to increase their confidence that computing systems actually do what they were designed to achieve. Since the number of tests that can be performed on a computing system is enormous, test-case prioritization is a crucial element in any practical testing framework. In that approach, one prioritizes test cases so that they can detect faults more efficiently using the available limited resources.

The paper to be presented at ICSE 2018 is the first that applies techniques from data mining to test case prioritization. In particular, it shows that the use of ideas from locality-sensitive hashing, a technique stemming from research in TCS that has been employed to great effect in approximate similarity searches in audio and video data, amongst others, leads to effective test prioritization in practice, when one needs to select tests effectively amongst millions of possible ones.

Antonia Bertolino is a member of the Scientific Board for the PhD programme in Computer Science at the GSSI. Breno Miranda is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Brazil and is one of Antonia Bertolino's former PhD students. Emilio Cruciani and Roberto Verdecchia just started their second year as PhD students in computer science at the GSSI and the paper to be presented at ICSE 2018 builds on their project for the first-year Software Testing course held in early 2017 at the GSSI by Antonia Bertolino. The project itself arose from a question asked by the students during the lectures. This is what inspiring, research-based teaching can produce when there is intellectual chemistry between lecturers and students.

Congratulations to the authors (and to the computer science group at the GSSI)!

Tenure-track positions in CS at Reykjavik University

We are aggressively recruiting new tenure-track faculty in Computer Science to Reykjavík University (https://en.ru.is/scs/). Theoretical computer science is one of the focus areas mentioned in the call. This is a link to further information:

http://radningar.hr.is/storf/ViewJobOnWeb.aspx?jobid=3111

Whereas Reykjavík University is relatively small, I believe we can offer junior faculty attractive opportunities and an independent career path. Reykjavík is a great place for families to live, has a vibrant cultural scene and is attractive to people who enjoy the outdoors.

I would very much appreciate your help in getting this job announcement seen by interested potential candidates.

A letter to Franklin Foer (guest post by Frits Vaandrager)

Frits Vaandrager has sent the appended letter, which I am posting with his kind permission, to the journalist Franklin Foer. (The letter is also available here.)

Frits wrote to me saying that:

Franklin Foer published an interesting book, World without Mind, that was named a "Notable book of 2017" by the New York Times. According to Foer,  computer scientist started to use the term "algorithm" because of "status anxiety", as a form of name dropping by programmers to suggest that they were also serious scientists. In my letter to Foer I give some historic evidence that this framing is utterly incorrect, but I'd be interested in the views of colleagues from the TCS community on this matter.

Please share your views on this matter as comments to this post. It is important to put the record straight and I am glad that Frits took the time to write a cogent letter to Mr. Foer. Thank you!

Dear Mr Foer,

With much interest I have read your book “World without mind”. I agree with many of your conclusions! But as a computer scientist who has been working on algorithms for more than 30 years, I am also deeply troubled by one paragraph in your book: 

“For the first decades of computing, the term “algorithm” wasn’t much mentioned. But as computer science departments began sprouting across campuses in the 60s, the term acquired a new cachet. Its vogue was the product of status anxiety. Programmers, especially in the academy, were anxious to show that they weren’t mere technicians. They began to describe their work as algorithmic, in part because it tied them to one of the greatest of all mathematicians – the Persian polymath Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, or as he was known in Latin, Algoritmi. During the 12th century, translations of al-Khwarizmi introduced Arabic numerals to the west; his treatises pioneered algebra and trigonometry. By describing the algorithm as the fundamental element of programming, the computer scientists were attaching themselves to a grand history. It was a savvy piece of name-dropping: See, we’re not arriviste, we’re working with abstractions and theories, just like the mathematicians!”

 

Do you have historic sources for these strong statements? 

Much of computer science is rooted in the work of mathematicians and logicians such as Turing, Church and von Neumann. These researchers used the word “algorithm” already before computers were built, see for instance p349 of Alonzo Church’s 1936 paper “An unsolvable problem of elementary number theory”. Together with Turing’s 1936 paper “On computable numbers, with an application to the entscheidungsproblem”, this paper forms the basis for the so-called Church-Turing thesis, which in turn laid the foundation of theoretical computer science. The computer science pioneers definitely knew the term “algorithm”!!

The term “algorithm” was maybe not used so often by computer scientists during the initial years (often they used terms such as “effective procedure” or “computable function”), but that certainly changed in 1958 with the influential work on ALGOL (short for Algorithmic Language), a family of imperative computer programming languages. The researchers who worked on Algol e.g. Bauer, Backus, Dijkstra, Perlis, Naur, van Wijngaarden & McCarthy were established scientists who definitely did not suffer from “status anxiety”. Backus, Dijkstra, Perlis, Naur and McCarthy later received the Turing award, the major prize for computer science research, for their groundbreaking research.

In order to appreciate the wonderful scientific work on algorithms, I can recommend you, for instance, to read the book Algorithmics – The spirit of computing by David Harel. I hope that, after studying this book, you will be also convinced that the fact that programmers used the term algorithm is not a form of name dropping. The work on algorithms since the advent of computers very much fits into the tradition of the work started by great scientists like Euclides and al-Khwarizmi.

Scientific knowledge may always be used for both good and bad things. Like you, I am very concerned about the use of algorithms by Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon. But I disagree with any suggestion that there is no science behind computer science algorithms!

Looking forward to your reaction, with best regards,

Frits Vaandrager

Professor of Computer Science at Radboud University

Nijmegen, December 4, 2017

Two and a half months at the Gran Sasso Science Institute

About two and a half months have passed since I started working at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI). I still have much to learn about the functioning of the Italian university system (and even of the GSSI), and it is already clear that there will be many of its aspects that I will probably never learn. However, my impression so far is that the level of bureaucracy in Italy is definitely higher than that in the countries where I have previously worked.

On page 88 of this interesting article, the historian Rogers Hollingsworth writes:

"One of the factors influencing creativity at the level of the nation state is the institutional environment in which scientists conduct research. I code scientific institutional environments as ranging from weak to strong. Weak institutional environments exert only modest influence (1) on the appointment of scientific personnel of research organizations, (2) in determining whether a particular scientific discipline will exist in a research organization, (3) over the level of funding for research organizations, (4) in prescribing the level of training necessary for a scientific appointment (e.g., the habilitation), and (5) over scientific entrepreneurship (e.g., the norms of individualism that socialize young people to undertake high-risk research projects). Strong institutional environments are at the opposite end of the continuum on each of these characteristics. Weak institutional environments have tended to facilitate greater scientific creativity in a society than strong institutional environments..."

(The emphasis is mine.) According to the above description, the Italian scientific institutional environment can only be classified as strong, for good or for worse. Fortunately, the GSSI is a centre for advanced studies and an international PhD school. Even though it has to follow the Italian law, with all its quirks, it is more nimble and less rigid  than the average Italian university. Moreover, most of the bureaucracy is hidden to the junior members of our faculty, such as the assistant professors, who can largely concentrate on the scientific work.
 
I have always appreciated the work that Italian researchers have been carrying out over the years, but what I have seen so far has increased my esteem for them even more. In spite of the extremely rigid system within which they are forced to operate, they manage to be productive and to maintain a strong commitment to their research work, achieving a high level of scientific production, both in quality and in quantity. The GSSI hosts a number of top-class academics in its four fields of research (computer science, mathematics, physics and social sciences) and this creates a stimulating environment for faculty and students alike.

The computer science group at the GSSI is still too small, but it seems to me that it punches well above its weight. Its members are very dedicated and have done an amazing job since the beginning of the GSSI adventure. (It was a humbling learning experience for me to present their achievements to the Scientific Advisory Board of the GSSI last Monday.)

It is clear that our group needs to grow, but we want to do so well. If you work in one of the research areas that we cover, at their intersection or in sister ones, and you think you'd be interested in working in L'Aquila with our faculty, do drop one of us a line, sending your CV and an expression of interest. We are keen to recruit strong researchers at all levels who can help us build the best international research centre in computer science we can. I can vouch that the computer science group at the GSSI provides young researchers with early-career autonomy in a nurturing environment, which isn't very common in Italy (as far as I know), and with the opportunity to become involved in the supervision of doctoral students. There are also resources for inviting collaborators and organizing thematic events, amongst other things.

It will be interesting to see how the computer science group will develop at the GSSI over the coming year. 

Reykjavik University: A THE top-500 university

Reykjavik University is in the top 500 universities in the world, according to the THE rankings. See here for details about my Icelandic workplace.

This is the first time RU appears on the list, which is an excellent result for a young and specialized university.

Even though all rankings should be taken with a pinch of salt, this is a remarkable achievement for a small university in a tiny country. Congratulations to my colleagues at Reykjavik University, who made this achievement possible with their work in research, teaching and service to the academic community.

Computer Science at the Gran Sasso Science Institute

I recently advertised a call for four PhD positions in computer science at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) in L'Aquila, Italy. That post included a link to a web site with some information about the GSSI. However, some potential applicants, and colleagues in general, might be interested in knowing more about the CS group in this new institute, without having to browse through a series of web pages. I therefore decided to collect some relevant information on CS@GSSI in this blog post in the form of a FAQ, hoping it may be of help to students and computer science researchers who might wish to consider working at the GSSI.

1. What is the GSSI? The GSSI is a recently established university in Italy. It is an institute for advanced study and an international PhD school, having English as its official language. It is located in L'Aquila, Italy, in the beautiful Abruzzo region. It focuses on astroparticle physics, computer science, mathematics and urban studies.
2. What areas of CS are covered at the GSSI? Information on research at CS@GSSI may be found here. In short, CS@GSSI is based on three main areas, namely the algorithmic study of computer and social networks (as covered, for instance, by ICALP Track A and Track C), specification and analysis of reactive systems, and software engineering techniques for building usable and easily maintainable distributed applications. 
3. Who works at CS@GSSI? CS@GSSI is still in its infancy and has ambitious growth plans in the short to medium term. In the area of algorithms, Michele Flammini, Gianlorenzo D’Angelo (recipient of the “Best Italian Young Researcher in Theoretical Computer Science” award for 2016 of the Italian Chapter of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science) and Mattia D’Emidio have been the first researchers working at GSSI. Rocco De Nicola (whose main affiliation is at IMT Lucca) has been the director of the CS programme and has spearheaded the work in formal methods, together with Omar Inverso. I joined the GSSI as a professor today. Work in software engineering has been carried out by Ludovico Iovino, Catia Trubiani and people in the high-profile research group in SE at the University of L'Aquila led by Paola Inverardi. Former GSSI postdoc Ivano Malavolta is now an assistant professor in Data-Driven SE at VU Amsterdam, and is jointly supervising some students at GSSI.
4. Apart from the faculty at GSSI, with whom can PhD students interact at CS@GSSI? CS@GSSI has a vibrant guest lecturer programme, with frequent visits by top-class researchers from all over the world, as well as affiliated faculty. See here for the details. (Look for "Scientific collaborators" and "Lecturers from other institutions".)
5. How is the scientific environment at CS@GSSI? The group runs a seminar series and has already hosted conferences and workshops. See here for some information. It will soon organize SAGT 2017 at GSSI. Other events are in the works.
6. How many PhD students in CS are there? What do the graduates do after their PhD? CS@GSSI hosts about 30 PhD students at all times. You can see the list of current students here. The institute is only about three years old, so only some of the first batch of students have graduated or are about to do so. Of those, all of them have found postdoctoral positions at institutions in Italy. Two GSSI students who just submitted their theses will join Jukka Suomela's group at Aalto University from January 2018.

If you have any further questions, please post a comment to this post, so that I can keep the FAQ up to date and as informative as possible.