Tuesday, March 05, 2024

GandALF 2024: Call for papers

 GandALF 2024: Call for papers


Abstract submission deadline: 7 April 2024

Paper submission deadline: 10 April 2024

Website: https://scool24.github.io/GandALF/


The Fifteenth International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification (GandALF 24) will be held in Reykjavik (Iceland) on June 19-21, 2024. This year, GandALF is part of the Reykjavik Summer of Cool Logic 2024 (SCooL 2024) and is co-located with the Twelfth Scandinavian Logic Symposium (SLSS 2024) and the Fifth Nordic Logic Summer School (NLS 2024). See https://scool24.github.io/ for information all the co-located events, 


The aim of GandALF 2024 is to bring together researchers from academia and industry who are actively working in the fields of Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification. The idea is to cover an ample spectrum of themes, ranging from theory to applications, and stimulate cross-fertilization. Papers focused on formal methods are especially welcome. Authors are invited to submit original research or tool papers on all relevant topics in these areas. Papers discussing new ideas that are at an early stage of development are also welcome. The topics covered by the conference include, but are not limited to, the following:


Automata Theory

Automated Deduction

Computational aspects of Game Theory

Concurrency and Distributed computation

Decision Procedures

Deductive, Compositional, and Abstraction Techniques for Verification

Finite Model Theory

First-order and Higher-order Logics

Formal Languages

Formal Methods for Systems Biology, Hybrid, Embedded, and Mobile Systems

Game Semantics

Games and Automata for Verification

Logical aspects of Computational Complexity

Logics of Programs

Modal and Temporal Logics

Model Checking

Models of Reactive and Real-Time Systems

Probabilistic Models (Markov Decision processes)

Program Analysis and Software Verification

Reinforcement Learning

Run-time Verification and Testing

Specification and Verification of Finite and Infinite-state Systems

Synthesis


Important Dates

Abstract submission deadline: 7 April 2024

Paper submission deadline: 10 April 2024

Acceptance notification: 10 May 2024

Camera-ready deadline: 10 June 2024

Conference dates: 19-21 June 2024

⚠ all deadlines are AoE


Publication

The proceedings will be published by Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~eptcs/). Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit a revised version of their work to a special issue of the high-quality, open-access journal Logical Methods in Computer Science.

The previous editions of GandALF already led to special issues of the International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science (GandALF 2010), Theoretical Computer Science (GandALF 2011 and 2012), Information and Computation (GandALF 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020), Acta Informatica (GandALF 2015) and Logical Methods in Computer Science (GandALF 2021, 2022, and 2023).


Submission

Submitted papers should not exceed 14 pages (excluding references and clearly marked appendices) typeset using EPTCS format (please use the LaTeX style provided at https://style.eptcs.org/), be unpublished, and contain original research. For papers reporting experimental results, authors are encouraged to make their data available with their submission. Submissions must be in PDF format and will be handled via easychair at the following address:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gandalf23 


Invited Speakers

GandALF 2024 will feature four invited talks, which will be delivered by 


  • Kim G. Larsen (Aalborg University, Denmark)

  • Other speakers will be announced in the coming weeks


Program Committee


Co-chairs 

Antonis Achilleos (Reykjavik University)

Andrian Francalanza (University of Malta)


Members

Parosh Aziz Abdulla (Uppsala University)

Valentina Castiglioni (Eindhoven University of Technology)

Aggeliki Chalki (Reykjavik University)

Laure Daviaud (University of East Anglia)

Dario Della Monica (Università degli Studi di Udine)

Giorgio Delzanno (Università degli Studi di Genova)

Léo Exibard (Université Gustave Eiffel)

Nicola Gigante (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)

Julian Gutierrez (Monash University)

Felix Stutz (University of Luxembourg)

Orna Kupferman (Hebrew University)

Martin Leucker (University of Luebeck)

Jakub Michaliszyn (University of Wroclaw)

Laura Nenzi (University of Trieste)

Paweł Parys (University of Warsaw)

Guillermo Perez (University of Antwerp)

Jakob Piribauer (TU Dresden)

Ocan Sankur (Univ Rennes, CNRS)

Ryan Kavanagh (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Patrick Totzke (University of Liverpool)

Tomoyuk Yamakami (University of Fukui)

Matteo Zavatteri (University of Padova)

Martin Zimmermann (Aalborg University)


Steering Committee

Luca Aceto – Reykjavik University (Iceland) and Gran Sasso Science Institute (Italy)

Javier Esparza – University of Munich (Germany)

Salvatore La Torre – University of Salerno (Italy)

Angelo Montanari – University of Udine (Italy)

Mimmo Parente – University of Salerno (Italy)

Jean-Fran̤ois Raskin РUniversit̩ libre de Bruxelles (Belgium)

Martin Zimmermann – Aalborg University (Denmark)


Website

https://scool24.github.io/GandALF/

Friday, February 09, 2024

EATCS Fellows 2024: Call for Nominations

The call for nominations for EATCS Fellows 2024 is out. I strongly encourage members of the EATCS to submit nominations for some of the many members of the association who would deserve this recognition. The deadline for submitting your nominations is March 7, 2024

The submission of a nomination is easy and lightweight, but it does require the writing of a strong letter of nomination (preferably two separate ones, if my previous experience as nominator is anything to go by) co-signed by several EATCS members. Note that the nominee and the nominators must be members of the EATCS. (If you are now a member of the EATCS, I strongly encourage you to join! See this web page for details on how to do so and for the benefits of becoming a member. Becoming a member of the EATCS is easy and cheap. I assure you that every cent is used by the association to support TCS-related activities and awards.)

My colleagues in the EATCS Fellows Selection Committee and I look forward to receiving your nominations, and to bestowing this accolade upon some of the nominees!

On a personal note, I'd be delighted to see several of our top-class female colleagues nominated for the role of EATCS Fellow.

Monday, January 22, 2024

World Logic Day 2024 in Tallinn

On Monday, 15 January 2024,  colleagues in Tallinn organised the Estonian event contributing to the World Logic Day 2024.  Apart from showcasing some of the exciting logic-related work that is going on in Estonia, the event featured the following three, one-hour-long invited talks:

  • Jan von Plato (U. of Helsinki), "Kurt Gödel's life and work in the light of his shorthand notebooks,"
  • Valentin Goranko (Stockholm U.), "Logics for strategic reasoning of socially interacting rational agents," and 
  • Margus Veanes (Microsoft Research), "The impact of logic in formal methods at Microsoft."
Jan von Plato's talk reported on some of the work his research group has done in the context of the ERC Advanced Grant GODELIANA, which is devoted to the study of the thousands of pages that Kurt Gödel wrote in a German shorthand that very few people in the world can decipher today. In his talk, Jan von Plato told the audience how the study of Gödel's notes reveals how Gödel became a logician and how he developed the ideas in his seminal and celebrated published output. Moreover, apparently Gödel left behind a book-length collection of finished, unpublished new results largely on set theory and intuitionistic logic. Overall, that amounted to about 2,500 pages of publishable results in a variety of fields that Gödel told to nobody and part of which was published by others later on! 

The part of those notebooks devoted to results on the foundations of mathematics is described in the recently-published book "Kurt Gödel: Results on Foundations", edited by Maria Hämeen-Anttila and Jan von Plato.   Overall, this was fascinating account of the thus-far-below-water iceberg of Kurt Gödel's scientific work. 

In his talk, Valentin Goranko offered an overview of some work on the use of formal logics to reason about collections of agents that act "rationally" to achieve individual and/or collective goals. His talk was based on a recent survey paper of his, to which I refer interested readers for information on that line of research. Here, I will limit myself to saying that the logics for strategic reasoning presented in Goranko's talk allow one to express properties such as 

"The coalition of agents A has a joint action to ensure satisfaction of its coalitional goal G in every outcome state that may result from that joint action." 
 
"For every joint action of the coalition A that ensures satisfaction of its goal G(A), there is a joint action of the coalition B that ensures satisfaction of its goal G(B)." 

Margus Veanes delivered a "tool-oriented" talk, in the sense that he surveyed a wealth of tools for computer-aided verification and validation developed at Microsoft Research that have their roots in a variety of logic-based formal methods. His talk clearly indicated the practical impact that logic has had on software development at Microsoft and elsewhere. 

I thank our Estonian colleagues for organising such an interesting event and for streaming it online.

Disclaimer: I hope that I have not misrepresented anything in the text above and encourage you to check the speakers' work to be sure. If you attended the event and would like to share your opinions on it, please do so by posting a comment!




Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Postdoctoral position in the field of cyber-physical systems at the Gran Sasso Science Institute

Catia Trubiani has one postdoctoral position funded by the Italian PRIN project "DREAM, modular software design to reduce uncertainty in ethics-based cyber-physical systems" at the Gran Sasso Science Institute - Computer Science Group. The call is available at the following link: https://applications.gssi.it/postdoc/ 

The firm deadline for application is 31 January 2024 at 3pm (Italian time). 

The Computer Science Group at the Gran Sasso Science Institute has already received excellent results in the latest national evaluation exercise in Italy. Most importantly, it provides a nurturing environment where a postdoctoral researcher can further their career and Catia Trubiani is a thoughtful mentor who provides a lot of support to everyone in her research environment. 

Spread the news and/or apply yourself!

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Eleven postdoc positions in Computer Science at the Gran Sasso Science Institute

The Computer Science group at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) in L'Aquila, Italy, has advertised 11 postdoctoral positions, nine of which are related to specific projects and two are open to applicants with a research profile connected to any of the research areas covered by the group (algorithms, formal methods and software engineering, broadly construed). See pages 3-6 of the official call for details on the specific positions and pages 8-9 for information on benefits, requirements, and the application and selection procedures. The deadline for applications is December 14, 2023 at 15:00 (Italian time zone). 

In my, admittedly biased, opinion, the CS group at the GSSI offers a welcoming and supportive research environment for young researchers of all ages. The GSSI as a whole is a place where a young researcher can thrive and have impact. 

I'd be grateful if you could spread the news amongst potential applicants or apply yourself


Tuesday, October 24, 2023

LIPIcs and International Open Access Week 2023

This week (23-29 October 2023)  is International Open Access Week 2023. The theme of this year's event is "Community over Commercialization" and its goal is to encourage "a candid conversation about which approaches to open scholarship prioritize the best interests of the public and the academic community—and which do not." You can read more here

As I mentioned in a previous post, I like to think that LIPIcs has followed the theme of this year's open access week well since its foundation and has provided an affordable and high-quality open access publication outlet to conferences in computer science. 

Since October 2017, LIPIcs has published 195 volumes with a total of 8,261 articles and approximately 143,000 pages. The LIPIcs series has grown steadily from 25 published volumes (with approximately 1,100 articles) in 2017 to 36 published volumes (with roughly 1,450 articles) in 2022. However, there is still room for some growth and I encourage the steering committees of high-quality conferences in any field of computer science that do not publish their proceedings in open access form to ask their communities whether that's in their best interests and whether they'd prefer to switch to LIPIcs. 

In my, admittedly very biased, opinion, the editorial board of LIPIcs evaluates all applications to publish in the series carefully and maintains a dialogue with the conferences in the LIPIcs community, providing feedback as needed in order to try and contribute to the healthy developments of those events. Of course, the editorial board realises that each conference knows what is best for its community, but sometimes an external opinion can help to identify weaknesses that might be developing in the way a conference is run and that are best pointed out by an external body. In any event, the keyword is "dialogue" and we all benefit from an open exchange of opinions in all facets of our work and life. 

This coming October 31 will mark the end of my third and last two-year term as chair of the editorial board of LIPIcs. From November 1, Meena Mahajan will be the chair of that board. I wish Meena the best of luck for her new role, even though she doesn't need any luck. I have no doubt that, with the support of the editorial board, she will continue to foster community over commercialisation and increase the impact that LIPIcs has on the computer science community.  

If you are reading this blog post and your conference publishes its proceedings with LIPIcs, I'd be very grateful if you could post your opinions on LIPIcs and a testimonial with your experience of working with LIPIcs either as comments to this article or by sending me a piece of text that I can use as a guest post on this blog. 

On behalf of everyone involved in LIPIcs, I thank the computer science community for its support!

Friday, October 20, 2023

Interview with the CONCUR 2023 Test-of-Time Award recipients

I just saw that an interview with the recipients of the CONCUR 2023 Test-of-Time Award is available here. I am very happy to see the work by Vincent Danos and Jean Krivine repoted in their article "Reversible Communicating Systems", published at CONCUR 2004, recognised with this prestigious award and that someone interviewed the award recipients. Enjoy!