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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jean van Heijenoort: Kaleidoscope

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

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

Guide for Application to Obtain an Italian National Scientific Qualification

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

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

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

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

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

Call for nominations: Gödel Prize 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Cleese on creativity

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

Call for nominations: Presburger Award 2013

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

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

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

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

Call for nominations: EATCS Award 2013

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

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

Expect more calls for nominations over the next few days.

Lecture on creativity by one of my PhD students

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

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

Enjoy it!

The Feit-Thompson theorem checked in Coq!

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

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

You can read more about this work here and here. 

Congratulations to Georges and his coworkers on this monumental achievement!

Invitation to becoming a member of the Italian Committees for professorships

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

Dear colleagues,

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

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

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

by September 24.

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

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

We hope that you will consider submitting your candidacy.

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

Research Methodology in Computer Science

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

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

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

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

CadiaPlayer GGP Champion Again!

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

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

Congratulation to the CadiaPlayer team!

PhD positions at IMT Lucca (reprise)

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

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

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

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

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

We hope that you might consider applying

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

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

Samson Abramsky discusses the legacy of Turing

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

Enjoy!

Random thoughts on conference presentations

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

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

ICALP 2012: Days 3-5

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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


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

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

ICALP 2012: First two days

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

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

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

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

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

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

LICS Test-of-Time Awards 2012

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

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

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

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

Congratulations to the award recipients!

PhD Positions at IMT Lucca

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

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

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

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

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

Best paper awards at ICALP 2012

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

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

The best student papers are:

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

Congratulations to all the award recipients!

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

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

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

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

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