ACM SIGLOG chartered

After a journey of many years, ACM SIGLOG is now officially chartered and will play an important role in spreading the gospel of the intimate connections between logic and computation and in their further developments.  Congratulations to all the people who worked very hard over the last seven years to make this happen!

Prakash Panangaden is the first SIGLOG  chair and together with his team is working on getting the web site up and running and the SIGLOG Newsletter in shape for the first issue. 

As a member of the research community and as current president of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science, I wish SIGLOG the best of luck and look forward to a fruitful cooperation between the EATCS and SIGLOG. 

For the moment I would like to encourage my readers to join SIGLOG officially.

The link is:

 https://campus.acm.org/public/qj/gensigqj/siglist/gensigqj_siglist.cfm


One can join SIGLOG without joining the ACM.

Accepted papers for ICALP 2014

The list of accepted papers for ICALP 2014 is now available here. The PC chairs told me that the quality of the submissions was very good and the scientific programme for the conference looks mouth-watering. Apart from the contributed papers and the excellent invited speakers, there will also be three award presentations. The conference dinner also promises to be a cultural highlight and the Copenhagen Jazz Festival will be in full swing.

There is going to be a lot going on in Copenhagen for TCS buffs this summer, which makes it one of the two places to be. (The other is Vienna.) 

I hope to see many of you at what will be a memorable ICALP. Thanks to Thore Husfeldt and his team for all the sterling work they are doing!

First EATCS Young Researcher School on Automata, Logic and Games

In the year 2013, the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) established a series of Young Researcher Schools on TCS topics. The first such school is devoted Automata, Logic and Games, and it will be held in Telc, Czech Republic, from July 27 to August 1, 2014.

The programme consists of five Basic Tutorials (four hours each) devoted to fundamental subjects, and eight Advanced Lectures (2 hours each) focussed on recent results and specific topics.

Basic Tutorials
---------------

- Probabilistic Model-Checking
  Christel Baier (Dresden)

- Logic and Databases
  Phokion G. Kolaitis (Santa Cruz)

- Games and Synthesis
  Nir Piterman (Leicester)

- Logic and Automata
  Wolfgang Thomas (Aachen)

- Timed Automata
  Wang Yi (Uppsala)


Advanced Lectures
-----------------

- The Unbounding Quantifier
  Mikolaj Bojanczyk (Warsaw)

- Robustness in Timed Systems
  Patricia Bouyer-Decitre (Cachan)

- A Logic-Based Approach to Cloud Computing
  Jan Van den Bussche (Hasselt)

- Regular Automata and Monadic Theory
  Didier Caucal (Paris)

- Stochastic model checking - A continuous time perspective
  Holger Hermanns (Saarbruecken)

- Synthesis of Recursive Programs
  Martin Lange (Kassel)

- Infinite-State Probabilistic Systems
  Richard Mayr (Edinburgh)

- Prophetic Automata
  Thomas Wilke (Kiel)

See  http://eatcs-school.fi.muni.cz/  for further details.

Adam W. Marcus, Daniel A. Spielman and Nikhil Srivastava to receive the Pólya Prize 2014

According to the web site for the prize, Adam W. Marcus, Daniel A. Spielman and Nikhil Srivastava will receive the Pólya Prize 2014.

The George Pólya Prize, established in 1969, is given every two years, alternately in two categories: (1) for a notable application of combinatorial theory; (2) for a notable contribution in another area of interest to George Pólya such as approximation theory, complex analysis, number theory, orthogonal polynomials, probability theory, or mathematical discovery and learning.

There does not seem to be a press release on the SIAM web site, but this should not prevent us from congratulating Adam, Dan and Nikhil for receiving this award. Congrats!