This year I was invited to be part of the Program Committee of two workshops. So, I think it is a good idea to advertise them here...
The first one is the 8th International Workshop on Developments in Computational Models, and will take place in June, in Cambridgde, as a satellite event of the Turing Centenary Conference CiE 2012. The call for papers is yet to be posted, and the important dates were not yet announced. However, a great list of invited keynote speakers was already posted. The aim of the workshop (that was six time a satellite event of ICALP, and in 2010 a satellite event of FLoC) remains, as stated on the DCM workshop series site:
... to bring together researchers who are currently developing new computational models or new features for traditional computational models, in order to foster their interaction, to provide a forum for presenting new ideas and work in progress, and to enable newcomers to learn about current activities in this area.I strongly encourage everybody working in the area of computability (either conventional or unconventional) to submit papers to DCM 2012, and everybody else to consider spending a day in Cambridge listening to the talks of this workshop. I also strongly encourage you all to consider participating at the host conference, CiE 2012, which promises to be a great event! The second one is the 4th International Workshop Non-Classical Models of Automata and Applications, and will take place in August, in Fribourg, Switzerland. As in the former case, the details were not yet posted. However, the idea behind the workshop is to atract...
... researchers working on different aspects of different variants of non-classical automata models in order to exchange and develop novel ideas. A deeper and interdisciplinary coverage of this particular area may gain new insights and substantial progress.Thus, if you are interested in new developments in the area of non-classical-automata theory please consider submitting a paper or only participating at NCMA 2012. Compared to the DCM workshop, it seems to me that this one is addressed more to researchers working closer to language-theory. The topics of the conference will surely include bio-inspired, cellular, or quantum automata, restarting automata, networks and cooperating automata, but also other any other relevant work on emerging language-theoretic models. I will conclude this post by telling you my personal experience with these two workshops, hoping that it will convince some of you to attend them. I had a paper at DCM 2005, but, unfortunately, I was not able to participate at the event; one of my co-authors gave the talk, and told the rest of us that he had a great experience. However, I have some nice scientific memories related to this workshop, as the results presented there and those contained in the follow-up paper, which was invited to a special issue of the Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, are among my favourites (although, they were greatly improved ever since). On the other hand, I participated myself at NCMA 2011, in Milano, a satellite event of DLT 2011. Taking place for two days, in a wonderful location, the workshop had some nice talks that gave birth to interesting discussions. The social event was also very pleasant. After the workshop, some authors (including my co-authors and me) were invited to submit follow-up papers to a special issue of the RAIRO journal. To conclude, I was happy that I participated at the workshop, both from the scientific and the personal points of view.
