ACM SIGPLAN Third Workshop on Programming Languages and Analysis for Security (PLAS 2008)

Úlfar Erlingsson has asked me to advertise this event. So, here is the CFP. Do submit! Submission Deadline: March 24, 2008.



ACM SIGPLAN Third Workshop on
Programming Languages and Analysis for Security (PLAS 2008)

Tucson, Arizona, June 8, 2008

Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN
Co-located with PLDI '08
Supported by IBM Research and Microsoft Research

http://research.ihost.com/plas2008/

Submission Deadline: March 24, 2008

Second Call for Papers

PLAS aims to provide a forum for exploring and evaluating ideas on the
use of programming language and program analysis techniques to improve
the security of software systems. Strongly encouraged are proposals of
new, speculative ideas; evaluations of new or known techniques in
practical settings; and discussions of emerging threats and important
problems.

The scope of PLAS includes, but is not limited to:

* Language-based techniques for security
* Verification of security properties in software
* Automated introduction and/or verification of security enforcement
mechanisms
* Program analysis techniques for discovering security vulnerabilities
* Compiler-based security mechanisms, such as host-based intrusion
detection and in-line reference monitors
* Specifying and enforcing security policies for information flow
and access control
* Model-driven approaches to security
* Applications, examples, and implementations of these techniques


Important Dates and Submission Guidelines

* March 24, 2008: Submission due date
* April 21, 2008: Author notification
* May 12, 2008: Revised papers due
* May 30, 2008: Student travel grant applications due
* June 8, 2008: PLAS 2008 workshop

We invite papers of two kinds: (1) Technical papers about relatively
mature work, for "long" presentations during the workshop, and (2)
papers for "short" presentations about more preliminary work, position
statements, or work that is more exploratory in nature. Short papers
marked as "Informal Presentation" will only have their abstract
printed in the proceedings. All other papers will be included in the
formal proceedings and must describe original work in compliance with
the SIGPLAN republication policy. Page limits are 12 pages for long
papers and 6 pages for short papers.

Student Travel Grants

Student attendees of PLAS can apply for a travel grant (in addition to
any PLDI grants), thanks to the generous support of IBM Research and
Microsoft Research. The application forms are on the workshop Web site.


Program Organization
* Úlfar Erlingsson, Reykjavík University, Iceland, Program Co-Chair
* Marco Pistoia, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Program Co-Chair

Program Committee
* Gilles Barthe, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France
* Bruno Blanchet, École Normale Supérieure, France
* Andy Chou, Coverity, USA
* Mads Dam, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
* Úlfar Erlingsson, Reykjavík University, Iceland
* Heiko Mantel, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
* Isabella Mastroeni, Università di Verona, Italy
* Greg Morrisett, Harvard University, USA
* Andrew Myers, Cornell University, USA
* David Naumann, Stevens Institute of Technology, USA
* Marco Pistoia, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA
* Eijiro Sumii, Tohoku University, Japan
* Dan Wallach, Rice University, USA

The Importance of Being Mobile

A comment on this post reads:

....the musical chairs that us academics play in our careers serves to disseminate our knowledge.

I agree that mobility is important in the career of most academics. Indeed, most of us have studied and worked at several institutions.

I was reminded of this comment yesterday, when I was asked to fill in a EU questionnaire on the mobility of researchers. One of the multiple-choice questions on the form read: "How often should a researcher move at different stages in her/his career?" (I was asked to answer this question since I claimed that mobility is important in the career of a researcher.) For instance, how often should one move over a four-year period at the early stages of one's career? I assumed that this question was referring to the first four years after one's PhD, and my answer off the top of my head was 1-2 times. (What I really meant was twice, but I thought 3-5 times was too much; the rationale being that one should be mobile at that crucial time in one's career, but that being overly mobile might cause too much overhead---especially if this involves changing countries. Later I looked back at my movements in the period 1991-1994 and realized that I actually moved 5 times myself.)

What is your opinion? Is mobility important at all stages of one's career? And how often should a researcher be mobile during the first four years of one's career?

Sussex[[Matthew Hennessy = goto Trinity.Continue]]

I apologize for the nerdy title for this post. I just thought that the most appropriate way to summarize the message of the post was to use a "Dpi process". Why? Because Matthew Hennessy, my former PhD supervisor and mentor, and the prime mover behind the development of Dpi has recently left my British alma mater, the University of Sussex, and joined the Department of Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin.

The news was unexpected for many of us, even though Matthew had been contemplating a move for a while. A look at the list of academic staff members of the School of Informatics at Sussex tells me that the diaspora of the group of TCS people I shared my Sussex days with, and that Matthew was instrumental in building, is now complete.

I wish Matthew the best of luck for his life and work at Trinity. As for Informatics at Sussex, I am not so sure that they are looking forward to the results of the RAE 2008. I wish them luck too, but they have lost so many truly excellent researchers over the last few years that I feel they may need more than luck, even though they seem to have hired rather well. Time will tell.

EATCS Award 2008 to Leslie Valiant

The EATCS Award 2008 will go to Leslie Valiant. You can read the motivation prepared by the Award Committee.

The award will be assigned during a ceremony that will take place in Reykjavik (Iceland) during ICALP (July 6-13, 2008). Leslie Valiant will contribute an invited talk to the event. This is yet another reason for not missing the conference!

BTW, the deadline for submitting to ICALP is approaching. Make sure you have your submissions in by Sunday, 10 February at 23:59 GMT.

I look forward to meeting you in Reykjavík, and to enjoying a scientific feast with the conference participants. Well, probably we organizers won't have that much time to enjoy the event, but we'll try :-)

Addendum (16 February 2008): See also this post by Bill Gasarch on the Complexity Blog. (Make sure you read the beautiful comment by Janos Simon.) You might also want to read the post on bit-player, which links to a very interesting piece on Leslie Valiant's work on holographic algorithms, which was the subject of a column in American Scientist.

ACM Turing Award 2007 to Clarke, Emerson and Sifakis

Via the Geomblog, I have just learned that ACM has named Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, and Joseph Sifakis the winners of the 2007 A.M. Turing Award for their original and continuing research on model checking. You can read the ACM press release here. This is, of course, outstanding news for the concurrency-theory and the computer-aided-verification communities, and I am looking forward to inform my students about the motivations for this award next time I preach on the importance of temporal logics as specification formalisms in computer science and on model checking and implementation verification.

Normally, I feel that I would have to write a few more lines on model checking in a post like this, but, with a couple of upcoming deadlines, I am very glad to see that Ganesh Gopalakrishnan has done all the work for me on Suresh's blog :-) (Thanks to both of them!) Let me just add that the basic idea underlying model checking can be concisely and memorably summarized by means of an equation that I first saw stated in a set of slides for a talk delivered by Moshe Vardi:

model checking = graphs + logic + algorithms.

Indeed, in model checking we use automata of some kind---that is, (labelled) graphs---to represent (an abstraction of) the actual behaviour of computing systems, (temporal) logics to describe what properties we expect systems to afford, and we employ algorithms to check whether the automaton representing the behaviour of the system has the desired properties at the press of a button. (Alternatively, one can say that we check whether the automaton is a model of the formula describing the specification; hence the name model checking for this verification and validation technique.) As remarked by Ganesh in his perspective on model checking, model checking tools and techniques and now being increasingly used in many other areas apart from system verification and validation. Decision processes, reliability models, planning in AI, optimal scheduling, (on-line) model-based testing and analysis of GUIs are just a few areas of application of model checking. I expect that more will emerge in the near future.

I am particularly happy about this award because, as I hope I have convinced you with the short and oversimplified account above, model checking is an area of TCS where both volume A and volume B TCS play a fundamental role. Moreover, teams working on model checking have produced software tools that can be used to sneak in TCS ideas in first-year courses for CS and engineering students, thus awakening the students' interest in our beautiful area of scientific endeavour. What more can we ask for?

Congrats to Ed, Allen and Joseph!

Addendum (6 February 2008): Make sure you read Rance Cleaveland's guest post on the Complexity Weblog, and that you do not miss Paul Beame's very informative comment.

DBLP Complete Search

I often look at DBLP to find bibtex entries for papers and links to their electronic editions. Now that Holger Bast has produced CompleteSearch, one can use DBLP also as an after-lunch amenity to find more publication data for computer scientists and conferences/journals in the field.

Do you want to know who has published the most in, say, Theoretical Computer Science? Look here, and you'll find that Grzegorz Rozenberg has published a whopping 62 (!) papers in that journal. What about Information and Computation? A look at this page yields that Sanjay Jain is the top scorer with 19 papers. (That researcher also has 20 TCS papers.) Top scorer for JACM is Seymour Ginsburg with 23 papers, with Christos Papadimitriou second with 21 entries. A look at the page for LICS reveals that Moshe Vardi has published 22 papers in that conference, and he is way ahead of the rest of the pack.

I'll stop here, since I do not want to spoil the fun you might have playing with this new feature. Well done, Holger!

Advice for (Prospective) Graduate Students

A topic that is being increasingly covered in TCS blogs is that of giving advice to (prospective) graduate students and beginning researchers. (See, for instance, here, here or here.) This is a welcome development, and a very good way of using the medium for the benefit of an important component of our research community. (After all, young researchers are the future of research, aren't they?) In fact, I have no problem in admitting that I enjoy reading those blog posts or anything similar myself. I feel that I am still learning on the job every day, and that those pieces of advice remind me of things that I should keep in mind, but that I tend (consciously or unconsciously) to "forget". After all,

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. (Erica Jong)

The latest few words of advice on research for graduate students I read have been penned down by Fan Chung. She addresses mostly combinatorialists, but what she says applies equally well to theoretical computer scientists at large. I like the fact that she stresses the collaborative nature of the research enterprise, and that she embraces one of my favourite hobby horses, viz. the Hardy-Littlewood rule: authors are alphabetically ordered and everyone gets an equal share of credit. She adds:

The one who has worked the most has learned the most and is therefore in the best position to write more papers on the topic.

(I had never thought in these terms myself, but yes that's true.) She also writes:

If you have any bad feeling about sharing the work or the credit, don't collaborate. In mathematics, it is quite okay to do your research independently. (Unlike other areas, you are not obliged to include the person who fund your research.) If the collaboration already has started, the Hardy-Littlewood rule says that it stays a joint work even if the contribution is not of the same proportion. You have a choice of not to collaborate the next time. (If you have many ideas, one paper doesn't matter. If you don't have many ideas, then it really doesn't matter.) You might miss the opportunity for collaboration which can enhance your research and enrich your life. Such opportunity is actually not so easy to cultivate but worth all the efforts involved.

I could not agree more. I will add Fan Chung's advice to the list of links I suggest to all my students and colleagues. Maybe you'd like to do so too.

Wolf Foundation Prizes for 2008

The Wolf Foundation has released the list of awardees of the Wolf Prizes 2008. Pierre Deligne and Phillip Griffiths, both of the Institute for Advanced Study, and David Mumford of Brown University, will share the 2008 Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics. (I note that the third of these mathematicians seem to be doing research with a high computational content these days!)

Claudio Abbado is one of the two recipients of an award in the arts. I did a quick-and-dirty Google search and it seems that none of the main Italian newspapers has devoted an article to this prize. Sadly, I am not surprised.

Concurrency Column for the February Issue of the BEATCS

I have just posted the concurrency column that will appear in the February 2008 issue of the Bulletin of the EATCS. This installment of the concurrency column is devoted to a double bill, as it offers the following two contributions:

• Part 1: Dynamic Spatial Logics: A Tutorial Survey by Luis Caires. [PDF]
• Part 2: Applying Concurrency Research in Industry: Report on a Strategic Workshop by Luca Aceto, Jos Baeten, Wan Fokkink, Anna Ingolfsdottir and Uwe Nestmann. [PDF]
  

The first piece is a survey devoted to spatial logics contributed by Luis Caires, one of the prime movers behind the development of this exciting kind of specification logics. Since the original work of Pnueli, (temporal) logics have been a prime formalism for the description of the behaviour of concurrent systems. Spatial logics are specification logics for describing the behaviour as well as the spatial structure of concurrent systems. Despite being only a fairly recent addition to the family of specification formalisms for concurrent computation, spatial logics are already the subject of a large literature reporting on a substantial body of non-trivial results. Luis Caires’s survey gives us a highly readable and welcome bird’s-eye view of this fast-moving subject.

The second contribution is a strategic report on applying concurrency research in industry. This non-technical article is one of the outcomes of the Workshop on Applying Concurrency Research in Industry, colocated with CONCUR 2007 in Lisbon, which I co-organized on behalf of IFIP WG1.8 “Concurrency Theory”. The essay tries to distil the contents of the presentations delivered at the workshop, and of the ensuing discussion, for the benefit of the concurrency community as a whole. I thank all the participants in the workshop for their contribution to the event. Special thanks go to the invited speakers (Vincent Danos, Hubert Garavel, Jan Friso Groote and Kim G. Larsen) for making the trip to Lisbon to share their considerable experience on this topic with us, and to Rance Cleaveland, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Moshe Vardi and Frits Vaandrager for providing their answers to the questions that the audience asked the invited speakers at the workshop.

I hope that you will enjoy these contributions, and that you will feel enticed to contribute to the ongoing discussion within the concurrency theory community.

Last, but not least, do contact me if you'd like to contribute a piece to the column!

Using Model Checkers in "Intro to OS" Courses

The advent of mature model-checking tools has made algorithmic model-based verification much more accessible to the average computer scientist/engineer. So much so that we can now teach first-year students to use model-checking tools by sweeping essentially all of the theory behind them under the carpet. See, for example, the very recent experience report:

Roelof Hamberg and Frits Vaandrager. Using Model Checkers in an Introductory Course on Operating Systems. Technical Report ICIS-R07031,
ICIS, Radboud University Nijmegen, December 2007.

I strongly recommend reading this report to anybody with even a passing interest in formal methods. It is well written, content rich, and presents material that can inspire many of us in the lecture room. I myself wish that the paper had been posted last August, when I was planning (at the last minute) a second-year course on Operating Systems. I would have used the authors' tips and teaching material then. Not to mention great quotes like:

“Programs are not released without being tested; why should algorithms be published without being model checked?” (Leslie Lamport)

Last November, on the spur of a sudden moment of inspiration, I did use the Uppaal model checker in a one-week intensive course on operating systems for engineering students, and the results were very encouraging.

Frits and his coauthor have done all of us a great service by making their material available on the web, and by sharing their experience with the rest of us. Let's expose our students to easy-to-use model checkers like Uppaal from the first year of the studies in CS and Engineering. This will also a increase the impact of research in formal methods. Several of the students taking my one-week course wrote in their course evaluation that they were glad to have been exposed to Uppaal, and that they think they will use the tool again in their future studies on, e.g., control systems. This indicates that, once students have seen how useful model checkers are, they will be enticed to use them later on when facing similar problems. Last, but not least, the mathematically inclined students may be motivated to carry out independent studies and (under)graduate research in formal methods and other areas of theoretical computer science.

Quoting from the concluding section of the paper:

“Why should algorithms be explained without the use of a model checker?”

Indeed, why not? It will be a good day for the construction of reliable software systems when our students will routinely simulate and analyze concurrent algorithms using model checkers. For the moment, let's share our teaching experiences following the example set by Frits and his coworker, and let's make model checking and logic permeate our undergraduate education as much as possible.

Author Contributions, Redux

Some time ago, I pointed out an article with a very detailed account of the authors' contributions. Here is another similar case I have just seen, via Galileo. (Look at the acknowledgements.) This makes me wonder whether it is standard practice in the medical literature to list what each of the authors contributed to a paper. Is it?

Knuth and Me (Guest Post by Sergey Kitaev)

Guest post by Sergey Kitaev, a very good colleague of mine from the combinatorics group at Reykjavík University.

To show the significance of Donald Knuth in my life, it would probably be enough to indicate that he introduced in 1969 the area of “permutation patterns” which is the field of my main research interest in combinatorics that I’m dealing with almost every day. However, while thinking on the subject, it comes to mind the personal communications with Knuth at Mittag-Leffler Institute at the beginning of 2005. In particular, after attending my talk on partially ordered generalized patterns, Knuth decided to include a result of mine in volume 4 of “Art of computer programming.” It is remarkable that Knuth was collecting information for this volume for over 40 years! However, this was not the thing I was offered Knuth’s famous $1.28 reward for. Unlike most other rewards, this one was not directly related to mathematics – I let Knuth know the middle name of Alexandr Kostochka that he recorded in his name database both in English and Russian (Knuth is able of writing things in Russian which he learned in college, and I find this to be impressive). In any case, stupidly enough, I refused taking the check from Knuth, which would be a nice souvenir as I realized later on; I simply told Knuth that it was a great pleasure for me to be helpful for him …

Addendum. A (permutation) pattern is a permutation of a totally ordered set. An occurrence of a pattern P in a permutation p is a subsequence of letters of p whose relative order is the same as that of the letters in P. As an example, the permutation 461352 has three occurrences of the pattern 321, namely the subsequences 432, 632 and 652.

The initial motivation for studying pattern avoiding permutations came from its connections with container data types in computer science. In 1969 Don Knuth pioneered this work by showing that the stack sortable permutations are exactly the 231-avoiding permutations.

A Free Journal-Ranking Tool

The latest issue of Nature feutures a news item reporting on a freely-available tool that can be used to generate citation statistics for papers, journals and countries. The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database. This platform takes its name from the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, developed by SCImago, a Spanish data-mining and visualization group. This indicator is based on Google PageRank. This tool is a competitor to Thomson's Web of Science, and covers more journals (15,000 in lieu of 9,000) and 20-45% more records than the Web of Science.

The availability of this tool, as well as of Google Scholar of course, puts Thomson under some pressure. I think that this is welcome pressure. To see why, you might wish to read this editorial. Basically, the "impact factor" is one of the Gods of modern-day academia, together with "leadership" and a few other criteria not necessarily related to scholarship. It has "a strong influence on the scientific community, affecting decisions on where to publish, whom to promote or hire, the success of grant applications, and salary bonuses. " However, as claimed in the editorial, "members of the community seem to have little understanding of how impact factors are determined, and, to our knowledge, no one has independently audited the underlying data to validate their reliability." This is obviously undesirable.

I think that, for good or for worse, impact-factor-based evaluation of our research output is here to stay. However, when making decisions based on impact factor, citations and what not, I hope that deans, employers, funding agencies and rectors will consult several different sources and compare the results that they get. Moreover, I do hope that good, old-fashioned evaluation of the quality of one's work will not disappear altogether to be replaced by purely quantitative indicators.

For the moment, let's play with our new toy. In case you are interested here are the rankings of countries in computer science: all subjects, computational theory and mathematics, TCS (but as a subcategory of mathematics), logic (as a subcategory of mathematics) and mathematics as a whole.
Draw your own conclusions.

The Theoretic Centre of Computer Science

The latest issue of SIGACT News features a very entertaining piece entitled The Theoretic Center of Computer Science by Michael Kuhn and Roger Wattenhofer. This article is a "printed version of a frivolous PODC 2007 business meeting talk, held by the second author". It speculates on the central conferences and researchers in computer science, with emphasis on theory, and makes for excellent after-lunch reading. I recommend it to the readers of this blog.

In this post, I'd like to offer a couple of comments on the list of most central authors in computer science. First of all, how do Michael Kuhn and Roger Wattenhofer determine how central an author is? Here is the relevant excerpt from the paper.

Analogously to the construction of the Erdos number, we base our method on the co-author-graph. We then create the induced subgraph for each region of interest (PODC, STOC/FOCS/SODA, and computer science). For PODC, for example, this graph would only contain authors that have at least one PODC paper, and so on.

Other than in the construction of the Erdos number, we do not rely on shortest paths, but rather on the PageRank idea: We start several short random walks at different nodes of the graph, and count how often each author gets visited. This idea is then extended to time dependent centrality, by starting the random walks only at authors that have published in the last five years.

What are the results of this approach? Table 1 on page 62 of the paper gives the most central authors for computer science as a whole. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli (another Italian expat) tops the all-time list, and Noga Alon is the runner-up. Without doubt, the list contains only major players, and concurrency theorists will be happy to see Moshe Vardi at #7 on the list of most "central" authors in computer science. Some analysis of this table is provided in the paper. Here are a couple of quick thoughts and questions from yours truly.

• Computer scientists working in the area of databases feature prominently in the all-time most central authors in CS. Indeed, a look at the list of researchers with the largest number of entries in DBLP, the data set used by the authors, shows that some of the most prolific authors in CS work in that area. Could it be that people publish more and have more coauthors in the field of databases, broadly construed, than in other areas of CS?
  
• The list of most central authors does not include any Turing award winner, as far as I can tell at first sight. Does this mean that Turing award winners are not central? Of course not! To my mind, this just means that an analysis of the collaboration graph favours prolific authors with lots of coauthors. Consider, by way of example, two giants of CS research like Tony Hoare and Robin Milner, who are not even in the list of top 1000 CS authors. (Neither are Stephen Cook, Don Knuth, Gordon Plotkin or Leslie Valiant to name but a few giants, by the way :-)) By modern standards, their "number of papers" is not outstanding. However, their ideas and writings have had, and still have, enormous impact on computer science research. All of what I have done myself, for instance, is built on their original work, which has kept many computer scientists busy for about thirty years. (Of course, Robin and Tony are not responsible for the noise I have generated myself :-)) These tables are a fun read, and they do tell us something worthwhile about the players in our subject. However, as the authors point out themselves, "Without doubt the future will teach our evaluations a lesson, ultimately revealing in which direction computer science evolves, and maybe even discover the most influential computer scientist. After all, research is not about how many papers we write, or how many citations they get, but rather, what the best contributions are."
• I think that the right-hand side of Table 1 is strongly influenced by the phenomenon of name ambiguity. Consider, for instance, Wei Wang, who is ranked as #2. When I saw that Wei Wang has 86 DBLP entries for 2006, I asked myself the question: "Who is Wei Wang"? This Google search return over 1.8 million entries! It seems to me that Wei Wang is a (very large) disciple of Bourbaki or Lothaire :-)
  
• Table 2 on page 62 is a veritable who's who in the FOCS/STOC/SODA branch of TCS. It has a truly amazing number of Israeli computer scientists (six out of ten on the "all-time" list, and four out of ten on the "last-five-years" list, I believe).

Enjoy!

AMS Prizes 2008

Via the Geomblog, I see that the list of AMS prizes for 2008 is out.

First of all, let me join the chorus of congratulations for Shlomo Hoory, Nati Linial and Avi Wigderson, who have been awarded the Levi L. Conant Prize for the best expository article in the Notices or the Bulletin of the AMS in the last 5 years. They received this prize, which is a great recognition for TCS research within the mathematical community, for their article Expander graphs and their applications in the Bulletin of the AMS.

As Nati Linial says in his response for the prize

I believe that the full potential impact of combinatorics on the rest of mathematics is only starting to reveal itself and the study of expander graphs can give us some idea of the true power of these connections.

Combinatorial research is also honoured with the Leroy Steele Prize for seminal contribution to research going to Endre Szemeredi for the paper On sets of integers containing no k elements in arithmetic progression, Acta Arithmetica XXVII (1975), 199–245. I love these words in Szemeredi's response:

This award could not have occurred were it not for the fundamental work of
other mathematicians who developed the field of additive combinatorics and
established its relations with many other areas. Without them my theorem is only
a fairly strong result, but no “seminal contribution to research”.

Calling his theorem a "fairly strong result" is really faint praise, but I like the fact that Szemeredi points out that a result becomes a seminal contribution to research when it used by other researchers to obtain fruits that were considered beforehand too high on the tree of knowledge to be picked.

The prize booklet makes for some interesting reading. Wearing my Italian expatriate's glasses, I note in particular the two awards to Italian mathematicians (Alberto Bressan and Enrico Bombieri) , both of whom work in the US.

I look forward to seeing who will be the recipient of the EATCS award for 2008.

The Dangers of Blogging

In this entertaining TED talk, Yossi Vardi issues a word of warning for the male bloggers out there, and addresses the "local warming" problem.

I know that this post is somewhat different in nature from my typical ones, but it's the first day of term and a little after-lunch entertainment was called for :-)

Enjoy!

Science Magazine's Breakthroughs of the Year 2007

Anders Claesson just alerted me to the fact that Solving Checkers has been listed by Science magazine in tenth position in the list of breakthroughs of the year 2007. See here.

My colleague Yngvi Björnsson from the School of Computer Science at Reykjavík University was a member of the team behind this breakthrough. Congratulations to Yngvi and his colleagues at Alberta.

A Good Example from Canada

I recently became aware of the Canada Research Chairs programme. That programme has been running since the year 2000, and aims at establishing 2000 research professorships—the so-called Canada Research Chairs—in universities across Canada by 2008. The Canada Research Chairs programme invests $300 million a year to attract and retain some of the world's most accomplished and promising minds.

I encourage the readers of this blog to have a look at the web site for the programme. There is a lot of interesting material there, and I cannot help but think that many countries would be well served by setting up a similar programme to attract the best possible scientists in all disciplines. Now, this is something well worth lobbying for in the coming year, isn't it?

If you do not have time to look at the web site I linked to above, here is my executive summary of the programme.

• Each eligible degree-granting institution in Canada receives an allocation of Chairs. For each Chair, a university nominates a researcher whose work complements its strategic research plan and who meets the program's high standards.

  Three members of a college of reviewers, composed of experts from around the world, assess each nomination and recommend whether to support it.

• Universities are allocated Chairs in proportion to the amount of research grant funding they have received from the three federal granting agencies: NSERC, CIHR, and SSHRC in the three years prior to the year of the allocation.

• There are two types of Canada Research Chair:

  Tier 1 Chairs, tenable for seven years and renewable, are for outstanding researchers acknowledged by their peers as world leaders in their fields. For each Tier 1 Chair, the university receives $200,000 annually for seven years.

  Tier 2 Chairs, tenable for five years and renewable once, are for exceptional emerging researchers, acknowledged by their peers as having the potential to lead in their field. For each Tier 2 Chair, the university receives $100,000 annually for five years.
  

As you can see, there is a strong financial incentive to attract people to these endowed chairs!


• Chairholders are also eligible for infrastructure support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to help acquire state-of-the-art equipment essential to their work.

• If an institution's performance decreases relative to other institutions to the extent that the next recalculation of Chair allocations results in that institution's allocation being reduced, the Chairs Secretariat will reclaim, as appropriate, one or more of its unoccupied Chairs. Should all of the institution's Chairs be occupied, the secretariat will negotiate with the university on how best to reclaim the lost Chair(s).

Of course, the success of a programme like this one should be measured by the quality of the people who take up the chairs. (Italy has a similar programme already in place. You can read about it in a short article in Nature, with commentaries in the blog posts "The Runaway Brains" and "Brain Drain and Brain Gain".) You can look up the chairholders in all disciplines here. A quick browse through the names of the Canada Research chairholders in Information Technology and Mathematics makes me pretty sure that you'll find outstanding people in your area of interest.

Wouldn't it be great if we could convince our own ministries for education, university and research to set up a Research Chairs programme along the Canadian lines? Let's see what the new year will bring, but I do not hold my breath. I am already doing so waiting for the result of the pending research grant applications .

I wish a happy and productive 2008 to all readers of this blog.

Workshop on Women in TCS

The department of CS at Princeton University is hosting a "Women in Theory" student workshop in Princeton on June 14-18, 2008. See http://www.cs.princeton.edu/theory/index.php/Main/WIT08 for more details and list of confirmed speakers. (Via in theory.)

I am happy to see an initiative like this. In fact, I believe that we should have more events that highlight the achievements of women in TCS and that offer prospective students role models that they can look up to.

During my student days in Pisa, I thought that it was very natural for CS classes to be attended by roughly an equal number of men and women. I also followed a good number of classes where lecturers or TAs were female members of staff. Back then, I never thought that computer science was a male-dominated subject, and I had no reason to think so. Only much later, did I realize that what I thought was the norm was, in fact, an exception and, by the time I taught a class in Aalborg that was being attended by only one female student out of about 50 registered students, the lack of women in CS was not a surprise to me any more.

It is still my impression that Italy has a fairly substantial number of female (theoretical) computer scientists---at least compared to countries in Northern Europe. People often ask me for the reasons behind this phenomenon, and I am always at a loss to try and explain it.

Do any of you have a good explanation why countries like France and Italy seem to suffer less than others from the lack of women in subjects like CS? Could it be that things are getting worse there too?

Computer Scientist: 21st Century Renaissance Man

The period from January till May each year is when faculty at the School of Computer Science at Reykjavík University try to make a determined effort to entice students to study our lovely discipline. (I know, we should do so all the year round, but somehow our good intentions do not become good deeds on a regular basis by themselves :-()

As part of our 2008 campaign, I have coauthored a short essay entitled Computer Scientist: 21st Century Renaissance Man. There is nothing particularly new in it, but I hope that it is readable and that it carries the message that CS is much more than most laypeople believe it is. Maybe some of you will find it useful for your own PR campaigns. Feel free to use it, if you think it may help.

You can draw some more inspiration from the items in our suggested-reading list. More essays of general interest may be found here. See also the excellent survey collection at Theory Matters.