Computability in Europe - Chair of the Steering Committee

Starting 2013 I've been a member of the Computability in Europe conference series Steering Committee. This year, I was asked and I agreed to run to become Chair of this Committee. Consequently, at CiE 2016, I was elected and officially named on this position.

This is a big responsibility and I hope I will be able to continue in the same line the impressive work of my predecessors, Benedikt Löwe and Arnold Beckmann. Luckily, I am quite confident that the first two conferences during my term will be successful: CiE 2017 in Turku, and CiE 2018 in Kiel.

As CiE-SC Chair I also became member of the Executive Committee of the Association CiE and the representative of CiE in the board of the European Association for Computer Science Logic - EACSL.

Conferences 2016 and 2017

Here is a short update on a series of events I was or currently am involved in.

In the period October 4-10, 2016, our group is organising the Theory Days of the Automata and Formal Languages and, respectively, the Logic Group of the German Informatics Society. All the information can be found here. A major highlight of our program is the common workshop of the two groups, with five very interesting invited talks.

I served in the Program Committee of the 23rd edition of the International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval SPIRE 2016. The conference will take place in Beppu, Japan, October 18-20, 2016. The lists of invited speakers and accepted papers look really good, and the conference is accompanied by several very interesting satellite events. Please consider participating to SPIRE 2016.

I will also be part of the Program Committee of the 34th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science STACS 2017, one of the major theoretical computer science conferences in Europe. The conference takes place in Hannover, in Germany, in March 2017. The deadline is only weeks away, on September 25. Please submit your best papers to STACS!

Finally, I will also serve in the Program Committee of the 13th Computability in Europe conference, CiE 2017. The conference will take place in Turku, Finland, in June 2017. More details on this will come soon.

WORDS 2015 in Kiel - Call for Participation

10th International Conference on WORDS 2015 (the main conference dedicated to the study of combinatorics on words) takes place in Kiel from September 14 to September 17, 2015. We invite everyone who is interested in the topics and program of WORDS 2015 to register for the conference. More details are given below.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Starting Date of the Conference: September 14, 2pm.
Ending Date of the Conference: September 17, 5pm

IMPORTANT INFORMATION is to be found at the following links:
Registration Web-site, Information for Participants, Local Info.

SCHEDULE:
Invited Speakers:
Jörg Endrullis (Amsterdam), Markus Lohrey (Siegen), Jean Néraud (Rouen), Dominique Perrin (Paris), Michaël Rao (Lyon), Thomas Stoll (Nancy).
See also the list of contributed talks as well as the tentative schedule (a more detailed schedule will be published soon).
In the first day of the conference, an Open Problems (in Combinatorics on Words and Stringology) session will also be organized.

SOCIAL PROGRAM:
The social program of the conference includes an excursion and the conference dinner (supported by the organizers), as well as a couple of informal dinners.

About WORDS:
WORDS is a biannual international conference covering the mathematical theory of words (sequences of symbols) from all points of view: combinatorial, algebraic, algorithmic, as well as its applications to biology, linguistics, physics, and others. The previous WORDS conferences have taken place in Rouen (1997, 1999), Palermo (2001), Turku (2003, 2013), Montreal (2005), Marseille (2007), Salerno (2009), Prague (2011). This year we celebrate the 10th edition of WORDS.

A refereed proceedings volume, including extended abstracts of the invited talks as well as original contributions, that fulfil the high quality standards required by a formal publication in computer science, will be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. In addition, a local proceedings volume will be published, including, in the spirit of mathematics conferences, a series of less formal contributions informing on current research and work in progress.

The PROGRAM COMMITTEE, that selected the talks to be presented at the conference, consists of: Maxime Crochemore (London), Juhani Karhumäki (Turku), Dirk Nowotka (Kiel - chair), Stepan Holub (Prague), Antonio Restivo (Palermo), Manfred Kufleitner (Stuttgart), Gad Landau (Haifa), Michel Rigo (Liege), James Currie (Winnipeg), Mikhail V. Volkov (Ekaterinburg), Wojciech Plandowski (Warsaw), Luca Zamboni (Lyon).

QUESTIONS regarding the conference can be addressed to the organizers (Dirk Nowotka, Florin Manea) via E-mail:
info[at]words2015[dot]uni-kiel[dot]de

Theory Day @ Bucharest: DACS 2015

Later update: The submission deadline was extended to March 31.

The second edition of our workshop Days of Computer Science takes place as a satellite event of CiE 2015, at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest, on June 26 and 27, 2015.

Days of Computer Science (DACS 2015) is the second edition of a workshop-series interested in building a solid and modern CS-research community in Romania, closely connected to the current global research-trends. Here is a link to DACS 2014, last year's event, and here is a link to its description on this blog.

Generally, our workshop aims to attract participants from Romania and other European countries, helping to establish international collaborations between researchers working on common topics.

This year the program consists mainly in a series of very interesting invited presentations of the work of remarkable researchers (selected by the Program Committee) relevant to the topics of the workshop. Besides these, we also invite submissions, especially by researchers at early stages of their career (e.g., doctoral students, postdocs), offering them the possibility to disseminate their work in a workshop with high-quality standards.

As highlight in our program, we host a special session dedicated to the memory of Mihai Patrascu, that will include an one hour scientific lecture given by Mikkel Thorup (Copenhagen).

Coming back to the main program, this year's list of invited speakers consists of:

Alexandru Baltag (Amsterdam)

Ștefan Ciobâcă (Iași)

Radu Curticapean (Saarbrücken)

Cătălin Dima (Paris)

Cezara Drăgoi (Paris) - tutorial

Radu Ionescu (Bucharest)

Marius Minea (Timișoara)

Daniela Petrișan (Nijmegen)

Alexandru Tomescu (Helsinki)

I am very happy to have such amazing speakers, and I thank all of them for accepting to come and give talks at our workshop!.

As said, for DACS 2015 we welcome submissions presenting original research results on the topics of the workshop. The accepted papers, as well as extended abstracts of the invited talks, will be published in the proceedings volume that will appear as an issue of the Annals of the University of Bucharest.

The topics of interest for DACS 2015 include, but are not restricted to: Algorithms and data structures, Computability and computational complexity, Knowledge representation, reasoning and logic, Formal verification, Data and text mining, Reasoning under uncertainty, Algebraic specification, Formal languages and automata theory, Machine learning, Cryptography, Combinatorics and algorithmics on words, Non-classical and graded logics, Natural language and speech automatic processing, Computational biology, bioinformatics and bio-inspired computing. Submissions on any other related topics are welcome.

We invite full research papers of up to 12 pages (Annals of the University of Bucharest style). Proof omitted due to space constraints may be put into an appendix, to be read by the reviewers at their discretion. Submit here.

As our higher goal is to allow the Romanian community easy access to quality research, this year the participation to the workshop is free of any charge. However, for logistic purposes, we ask the persons that wish to participate to the workshop to register prior to the event by sending an e-mail to theory-day@fmi.unibuc.ro with the name and affiliation.

Note the important dates: Submission deadline: 23rd of March 2015, 23:59 EET
Notification: 17th of April 2015
Camera-ready version: 24th of April 2015
Deadline for Registration: 12th of June 2015

Organising this workshop would not have been possible without the help of my colleagues from the Program Committee:

Denisa Diaconescu (Bern) – chair

Radu Gramatovici (Bucharest)

Georgiana Ifrim (Dublin)

Gabriel Istrate (Timișoara)

Ioana Leuștean (Bucharest)

Robert Mercas (London)

Marius Popescu (Bucharest)

... as well as the local Organising Committee:

Adela Georgescu (Bucharest)

Marius Popescu (Bucharest) – chair

Andrei Sipoș (Bucharest)

For questions about the workshop details please write e-mail to: theory-day[at]fmi.unibuc.ro

CiE 2015 in Bucharest - Call for Papers

COMPUTABILITY IN EUROPE 2015: Evolving Computability, Bucharest, Romania, June 29 - July 3
Web-site: http://fmi.unibuc.ro/CiE2015/

IMPORTANT DATES:
Extended Submission Deadline: 21 January 2015
Notification of authors: 9 March 2015
Deadline for final revisions: 6 April 2015

CiE 2015 is the 11-th conference organized by CiE (Computability in Europe), a European association of mathematicians, logicians, computer scientists, philosophers, physicists and others interested in new developments in computability and their underlying significance for the real world. Previous meetings in the CiE conference series have taken place in Amsterdam (2005), Swansea (2006), Siena (2007), Athens (2008), Heidelberg (2009), Ponta Delgada (2010), Sofia (2011), Cambridge (2012), Milan (2013) and Budapest (2014).

For CiE 2015, we are looking for fundamental and theoretical submissions. In line with other conferences in this series, CiE 2015 has a broad scope and provides a forum for the discussion of theoretical and practical issues in Computability with an emphasis on new paradigms of computation and the development of their mathematical theory.

We particularly invite papers that build bridges between different parts of the research community.

For topics covered by the conference, please visit http://fmi.unibuc.ro/CiE2015/topics.html

FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES:
CiE 2015 has received funding from ASL (Association for Symbolic Logic) and EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science) that allows students who are members of ASL or EATCS and want to attend CiE 2015 to apply for travel funds or a reduction of the early registration fee. Preference will be given to presenters of accepted papers. Applications for ASL travel grants have to be addressed directly to ASL, with a strict deadline of March 28, 2015. Applications for EATCS travel grants have to be sent to cie2015[at]fmi[dot]unibuc[dot]ro prior to the early registration deadline.

CiE 2015 will host invited talks from the following:
TUTORIAL SPEAKERS: John Reif (Duke Unversity), Steve Simpson (Pennsylvania State University).
PLENARY SPEAKERS: Ann Copestake (University of Cambridge), Mircea Dumitru (University of Bucharest, Public Lecture), Pawel Gawrychowski (Warsaw University), Julia Knight (University of Notre Dame), Anca Muscholl (Universite Bordeaux), Gheorghe Paun (Romanian Academy), Alexander Razborov (University of Chicago and Steklov Mathematical Institute), Vlatko Vedral (University of Oxford).

CiE 2015 will also host SPECIAL SESSIONS on Representing streams, Automata, logic and infinite games, Reverse mathematics, Classical computability theory, Bio-inspired computation, History and philosophy of computing.
The speakers of the special sessions are listed at http://fmi.unibuc.ro/CiE2015/sessions.html

The PROGRAMME COMMITTEE cordially invites all researchers (European and non-European) in computability related areas to submit their papers (in PDF format, max 10 pages using the LNCS style) for presentation at CiE 2015.

The submission site https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cie2015 is open. For more submission instructions consult http://fmi.unibuc.ro/CiE2015/submission.html

The conference proceedings will be published by LNCS, Springer Verlag.