EATCS ballot on the future of the publication of the ICALP proceedings

Today, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science started a ballot on the future of the publication of the proceedings of ICALP. This is a very important decision for the EATCS, and for the ICALP community in general. As chairman of the publication committee of the EATCS, I urge all the members of the TCS community who have a right to vote as members of the EATCS, to give this matter serious thought and exercise their right to express an opinion on whether future ICALP proceedings should be published with Springer or with LIPIcs. Note that if you attended ICALP 2011, ESA 2011 or MFCS 2011, you have the right to vote since your registration fee probably included a one-year membership of the EATCS.

Note also that the result of the  ballot will only take effect if at least 25 % of the EATCS members participate. Otherwise, the proposal of the EATCS council to recommend to the EATCS membership to go along with Springer for the next four years will take effect automatically.

The ballot on the future of the publication of the ICALP proceedings, as well as all the supporting documentation,  can be found here.  I do hope that you will take time to consider this matter and vote as soon as possible.

Assistant Professor position in Modelling and Analysis of Concurrent Systems at IMT Lucca (deadline October 31st)

Perhaps this announcement will be of interest to some of the readers of this blog. IMT Lucca is an exciting place and there will definitely be some competition for the position. 


Addendum dated 7 October: This video issued by IMT Lucca gives an enticing introduction to that academic institution. Do have a look, if you are interested in applying for this position.

The IMT Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca invites applications for an Assistant Professor position in the areas of foundations and formal specification of concurrent (distributed, mobile, autonomic) systems; quantitative and qualitative modelling and analysis of concurrent systems and design and development of software tools to support their formal analysis; applications to socio economic systems.

IMT Lucca (http://www.imtlucca.it) is a public international Graduate School and Institute of Technology that acts as a research university with the aim of forming human capital in disciplines characterized by their high potential for concrete applications. IMT strives to reach the fusion of theoretical comprehension and practical relevance. 

The Assistant Professor will be a part of the Research Unit "System Modelling and Analysis" (SysMA, http://sysma.lab.imtlucca.it/) in the Computer Science and Applications area of the Institute, and will perform research activities, tutorship and mentoring of Ph.D. students, limited teaching of graduate courses and participation in the development of the research activities of the Institute. 

Appointment compensation packages will depend on the candidates and their records of accomplishment, but are competitive on an international level. Applicants must be able to teach graduate courses in English; knowledge of Italian is not required.

The deadline for application is October 31st, 2011 12:00 pm CET.

Interested candidates must apply before the deadline by filling in the online application form at http://www.imtlucca.it/faculty/positions under "Junior Faculty Recruitment Program". They will also be asked to submit a CV, a research paper (published or working) and the name and contact details of three referees.

For further information about the position, applicants can refer to 

http://www.imtlucca.it/faculty/positions/junior_faculty_recruitment_program.php#modelling_concurrent_systems

or can contact either Rocco De Nicola or Sara Olson: researchers.opening@imtlucca.it.

LICS 2012 Test-of-Time Award

The latest issue of the LICS Newsletter (dated July 29) mentioned the appended information related to the LICS 2012 Test-of-Time Award. 

I strongly encourage the members of the LICS community to send their comments to Andre Scedrov (scedrov@math.upenn.edu), who chairs the award committee. As usual, the committee is faced with a very hard choice and they can do with some input from the community.


LOGIC IN COMPUTER SCIENCE (LICS) - TEST OF TIME AWARD

• The LICS Test-of-Time Award recognizes a small number of papers from the LICS proceedings from 20 years prior that have best met the "test of time".
• The LICS 2012 ToT Award committee consists of
• Martin Grohe,
• Prakash Panangaden,  
• Andre Scedrov (Chair), and  
• Ashish Tiwari.
• The committee will select between 0 to 3 papers  that appeared in LICS 1992 proceedings. All papers are nominated by default, but the  committee welcomes input from our community: please send your comments to  Andre Scedrov (scedrov@math.upenn.edu) which will be shared only among the committee members.  
• LICS 2012 ToT award will be presented during the business meeting at LICS 2012  to be held in Dubrovnik from June 22 to 25, 2012. 
• The list of papers from LICS 1992 is available at  http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/lics/archive/1992/index.html 
• The information about LICS ToT award and the list of past winners is available at  http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/lics/archive/test-of-time-award.html

October 2011 issue of the BEATCS Concurrency Column

I have just submitted the material for the October 2011 issue of the BEATCS Concurrency Column. This instalment of the column consists of a double bill:

• Interval Temporal Logics: a Journey by Dario Della Monica, Valentin Goranko, Angelo Montanari and Guido Sciavicco. [PDF]
• Assertional and Behavioral approaches to concurrency by Uri Abraham. [PDF]

The first piece is a survey  devoted to interval temporal logics. The article presents the main developments in the study of interval temporal logics over the past 10 years (a field of research to which the authors have contributed substantially) and outlines some landmark results on expressiveness and (un)decidability of the satisfiability problem for the family of interval logics. The authors give us a guided tour of this body of work, which, to my mind, deserves to be better known within the concurrency-theory community.

The second contribution is a a piece by Uri Abraham in which he compares two proofs of the mutual-exclusion property for the well known algorithm by Peterson: an assertional proof and a behavioural one. The article outlines a framework within which the behavioural approach can be formalized in a way that retains the intuitive content of the behavioural reasoning.

This is my last issue as editor of the Concurrency Column. I have been editing the column for the last eight years, and I feel that it is time to step down. The column will benefit greatly from a fresh perspective on the world of concurrency theory and I look forward to reading the pieces that will appear in future issues.I thank the contributors to the Concurrency Column over the last eight years and all my readers.

12 PhD positions in Computer Science and Engineering at IMT Lucca

Courtesy of Rocco De Nicola, here is an exciting opportunity for excellent students, which I am happy to advertise.

The institute for advanced studies IMT Lucca (Italy) announces 12 PhD positions in Computer Science and Engineering. The deadline for applications is September 28, 2011.

IMT (http://www.imtlucca.it/) is a research institute located in Lucca (Italy); courses are taught exclusively in English.

The PhD Program (https://www.imtlucca.it/phd_programs/computer_science_engineering/) coordinated by Rocco De Nicola aims at preparing researchers and professionals with broad training in the foundations of informatics as well as in applications to a variety of cutting-edge systems and disciplines.

A number of PhD students will be selected for working within the the two newly founded Research Unit:

SysMA (http://sysma.lab.imtlucca.it/

)
lead by Rocco De Nicola doing research on concurrent (distributed, mobile, autonomic) systems modelling and analysis
and
Dysco (http://dysco.lab.imtlucca.it/)
lead by Alberto Bemporad doing research on control and optimization technologies.

In addition, students will be selected to work on topics related to medical imaging, and imaging for the life sciences
http://users.eecs.northwestern.edu/~stsaft/#Openings

We hope that you may consider applying for and/or signaling these opportunities to colleagues and collaborators.

======= DETAILS ON THE ADVERTISED POSITIONS =======
6 IMT scholarship (12.423 EUR after taxes) plus accommodation and free meals (lunch and dinner).
1 MIUR scholarship (12.423 EUR after taxes) plus free meals (lunch and dinner).
5 positions to be funded with internal projects or third-party scholarships (negotiable salary) that come with a research budget of 3.000 EUR offered by IMT and free meals (lunch and dinner).

For further information please visit
http://www.imtlucca.it/phd_programs/call_for_applications/index.php
and/or contact the sender of this mail.

PhD positions at the University of Camerino, Italy

Emanuela Merelli has asked me to circulate the following announcement of eight PhD positions at the University of Camerino, Italy. The deadline for applications is very close, but perhaps some readers (or some of their students) might want to apply. 

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

We kindly remind you that  the PhD call for applications at University of Camerino is still open. See

http://www.unicam.it/laureati/dottorato/call.asp

There are 8 fellowships available for the Doctoral Study Programme in Information Science and Complex Systems. See

www.cs.unicam.it/merelli/PhD-Informatica.pdf

The deadline is approaching, 26 August 2011.

2011 CNRS Silver Medal to Jean Goubault-Larrecq

Jean Goubault-Larrecq receives the 2011 CNRS Silver Medal. The web site with the list of medal winners states that:

La Médaille d'argent du CNRS distingue un chercheur pour l'originalité, la qualité et l'importance de ses travaux, reconnus sur le plan national et international.

So, Jean is recognized for the originality, the quality and the importance of his research work. Congratulations to Jean for the award, and to LSV as a whole for yet another achievement.

The silver medal for mathematics went to François Loeser.

Accepted papers at ESA 2011 and MFCS 2011; CFP for FSTTCS

The list of accepted papers for ESA 2011 is here. (My colleague Magnús Halldórsson was the PC chair for ESA 2011.) Ditto for MFCS 2011.

The submission deadline for FSTTCS is just two weeks away. The call for papers is here. The list of invited speakers for the event is stellar:

• Susanne Albers (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)
  
• Phokion G. Kolaitis (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, USA)
  
• John C. Mitchell (Stanford University, USA)
  
• Madhu Sudan (currently at Microsoft Research New England, and on leave from MIT, USA )
  
• Moshe Vardi (Rice University, USA)
  
• Umesh V. Vazirani (Univ. of California, Berkeley, USA) 

Do submit! 

LICS 2011 Test-of-Time Award

The LICS 2011 Test-of-Time award was given yesterday to 

• Patrice Godefroid and Pierre Wolper for their paper A Partial Approach to Model Checking, 
• Dale Miller and Joshua Hodas for their paper Logic Programming in a Fragment of Intuitionistic Linear Logic and 
• Dexter Kozen for his paper A Completeness Theorem for Kleene Algebras and the Algebra of Regular Events.
  

This year's award was given to papers presented at LICS 1991 that have stood the test of time and have had considerable impact since their publication. (Source: Prakash Panangaden)

Congratulations to all the award recipients!

FPSAC 2011

I have received the following short report on FPSAC 2011 from Henning Úlfarsson, which I post with pleasure. Sources within my extended family told me that the conference was very well attended. The lecture hall was packed and it was nearly impossible to get close to the posters. The lure of Iceland as a conference location strikes again :-)

The 23rd International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics, FPSAC 2011, was held in Reykjavik, Iceland on June 13-17, on the premises of the University of Iceland. This year's conference was dedicated to the memory of Philippe Flajolet, who passed away recently, and was very influential in the field of algebraic and analytic combinatorics. (An obituary for Philippe Flajolet may be found here.)

The conference featured 10 invited speakers, 27 talks, 53 poster presentations as well as an afternoon of software demonstrations. The topics ranged from various aspects of combinatorics to applications such as shallow water waves and genome arrangements.

More information can be found on the website http://combinatorics.is/.

Videos of talks by Friedman and Macintyre

There has been a fair amount of discussion recently on the FOM mailing list on whether the consistency of Peano Arithmetic is a legitimate mathematical problem in present day mathematical  culture. This discussion has been sparked by the talk Foundational Concerns and Mathematical Concerns that Angus Macintyre gave at the New Trends in Logic meeting. The video of Angus' talk is here. Perhaps some of the readers of this blog will want to have a look and reach their own conclusions. The person who asks most of the questions to Angus Macintyre is Harvey Friedman, whose own talk at the Vienna meeting can be seen here.

I have to say that Angus Macintyre kept his cool and maintained his thread admirably during his talk.

The videos of all the lectures may be found here, including the one delivered by Thierry Coquand when he received one of the prizes for 2008.

Jan Bergstra turns sixty

Jan Bergstra turns 60 today. Jan is one of the concurrency theorists whose work has had a lot of influence on mine, as well as on that of many others. However, his research interests are much broader and his research so far gives excellent examples of the power of algebraic tools and ideas in TCS.

According to Jan's Wikipedia entry, his main theoretical research programmes are:

• a systematic study of specification methods for abstract data types (starting in 1979, with John V. Tucker);
• the invention, development and application of process algebras, especially ACP (starting in 1984, with Jan Willem Klop, Jos Baeten and others);
• Module Algebra (starting in 1986, together with Paul Klint and Jan Heering);
• Program Algebra (starting in 1998, with Marijke Loots).

This gives a pretty fair reflection of the main thrusts in Jan's research work, and match pretty closely the topics covered by the five papers he has published in the JACM.

Apart from his scientific work, Jan Bergstra has had considerable influence on computer science in the Netherlands via his research and organizational activities. As an example of the impact he has had on CS in the NL, I limit myself to mentioning here that he has supervised over 40 PhD students, many of whom have become academic computer scientists (according to Wikipedia, at least 12 at professorial level).

As a recognition of his work, on May 18 this year, Jan has been inducted into the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

I wish Jan many happy returns for his 60th birthday and many more years of seminal scientific activity.

Addendum dated June 23: A special issue of Theoretical Computer Science devoted to the festschrift in honour of Jan Bergstra, edited by I. Bethke, A. Ponse and P.H. Rodenburg, is now available.

Rector Corradini, I Presume

This is not news anymore, but I am happy to report that Flavio Corradini was elected rector of the University of Camerino (Italy) on June 8. To the best of my knowledge, Flavio is now the youngest rector of an Italian university, and the first concurrency theorist to become rector of an Italian university. I wish him the best of luck for his new role, and hope that he will be able to continue doing some (theoretical) computer science.

Jos Baeten new general director of CWI

On June 1, I congratulated Jos Baeten for officially becoming the new chair of IFIP WG 1.8. Now, more congratulations to Jos are in order. Indeed, today the General Board of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) confirmed Jos' appointment as the new general director of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam. I learned the news from Jos himself, who is here in Reykjavik to attend Discotec 2011 and to deliver an invited talk at PACO.

The appointment of Jos as general director of CWI is excellent news for concurrency theory, and volume B TCS at CWI and in the Netherlands as a whole. In a way, it is also the "return of SEN 2", It is a bit ironic that Jos, who was one of the early directors of the very successful SEN 2 project, which was closed in 2008, returns now as general director of the whole institute. This may be seen as a case of "SEN 2 strikes back."

In any event, congratulations to Jos. I wish him a very successful term as director of CWI, which is one of the hotbeds of TCS research in the world. I look forward to seeing how CWI will develop under his expert leadership.

New Chair for IFIP WG 1.8

Jos Baeten has formally taken over the chairmanship of IFIP WG 1.8 on Concurrency Theory. I say "formally" because Jos has acted as de facto chair of the working group for some time already, since I decided not to run for a second term as chair.

Congratulations to Jos! I wish him the best of luck for his work as chairman of WG 1.8.

Accepted Papers for CONCUR 2011

I noticed that the list of accepted papers for CONCUR 2011 is available here. As usual, there are several interesting papers to look at. I just hope to have the time to do so. As someone said once: "Fermate il mondo! Voglio scendere!" ("Stop the world! I want to get off!")

Hubert Garavel received the Gay-Lussac Humboldt Research Award

These are good days for concurrency theory and computer-aided verification, at least judging by the awards bestowed on members of our community.

Yesterday I mentioned that the Presburger Award 2011will go to Patricia Bouyer. Holger Hermanns has now made me aware of the fact that Hubert Garavel recently received the Gay-Lussac Humboldt Research Award. (Thanks Holger!) Hubert is the fourth French scientist in the field of computer science to be awarded this prize. You can read more about the award to Hubert here. For the few readers who might not know his work, here I just limit myself to mentioning that Hubert is a pioneer in formal methods and verification tools for critical industrial systems. He is perhaps best known for being the prime mover behind the development of CADP, which is a popular toolbox for the design of communication protocols and distributed systems. CADP has been developed now for over twenty years, reflecting the very strong commitment to tool development based on elegant and useful theory that underlies Hubert's work.

Congratulations to Hubert and to Holger, who will be his host in Germany.

I note in passing that the awards to Hubert and Patricia offer further, albeit circumstantial, support on the strength of French TCS research.

Presburger Award 2011 to Patricia Bouyer-Decitre

The Presburger Award 2011 will go to Patricia Bouyer-Decitre.  See here for the details.

Patricia has contributed important results to the theory and applications of timed automata, a fundamental model of real-time systems.  In 2007 she received CNRS Bronze medal, awarded for outstanding achievements by a junior researcher.

I am very happy that this award went to Patricia. I had the pleasure of doing some work together with her at the very beginning of her career, and she has gone from strength to strength.

Congratulations to Patricia!

ERC Advanced Grant to Glynn Winskel

I just saw that Glynn Winskel has been awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council for the period 1/05/2011-30/4/2016. The grant is for the project Events, Causality and Symmetry---the next generation semantics. (Extended Synopsis.)

This grant recognized one of the key players in the theory of concurrency over the last 20 years. Glynn's work on event structures, amongst other things, has had a lot of influence within my research community and it is good to see that this model plays a key role in the funded proposal. Glynn was also the director of BRICS, a research centre that had an enormous influence on TCS research in Europe and beyond.

Congratulations to Glynn!

Accepted papers for CALCO and TARK

The list of accepted paper for CALCO 2011 is here. The list of selected papers for TARK XIII is also available.