New Papers

Two new papers that I have co-authored are available on Arxiv:

"Detecting Unary Patterns" (SPIRE 2017, new title: Detecting One-Variable Patterns), written together with Dmitry Kosolobov and Dirk Nowotka, proposes an efficient algorithm that locates in a text all the instances of a pattern that includes strings of letters and one-repeated variable (that can be replaced, uniformly, by any string of letters); the repeated variable can appear also reveresed.
This paper was started last year, when Dmitry visited us in Kiel, and put on Arxiv a while ago. However, since then it went through many changes and reached the current (nicer) form. It improves some of the algorithms presented in the papers from STACS 2014 (written together with Pawel Gawrychowski and Dirk Nowotka) and STACS 2015 (written together with Markus Schmid, Robert Mercas, and Henning Fernau).

"The Hardness of Solving Simple Word Equations" (MFCS 2017), written together with Joel Day and Dirk Nowotka, shows that the satisfiability of some very simple word equations is NP-complete. In word equations, we equate two strings (called sides) that contain variables and strings of letters. We want to check whether there is a way to assign (uniformly) strings of letters to the variables, such that the two sides become equal. In our simple case, each variable occurs at most once in each side and the order of the variables occurring in both sides is the preserved (the variables can be, however, separated by potentially distinct constant factors). Surprisingly, solving such simple equations, even when the sides contain exactly the same variables, is NP-hard. By considerations regarding the combinatorial structure of the shortest solutions of the more general quadratic equations we obtain that the satisfiability problem for regular-ordered equations is in NP. Finally, we also show that a related class of simple word equations, that generalises one-variable equations, is in P.
This paper was the result of the work Joel and I started recently on word equations and closes some of the open problems left in the paper from DLT 2016, written together with Markus Schmid and Dirk Nowotka. The paper published on Arxiv is a "cleaner" version of the paper we submitted, with some type-o-s and imprecisions fixed.

Both these papers are part of my current DFG-research project, on algorithms and combinatorics of words.

Still Kiel

In 2011 I started working in Kiel, as a researcher in the Dependable Systems Group lead by Dirk Nowotka. In 2012 I decided to stay in the same group, while working on my own DFG-funded project. Recently, my research (on algorithms and combinatorics on words) was funded for another two years by the DFG, so I will continue working in the Kiel University at least until October 31st, 2018.

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.

WORDS 2015 in Kiel - Preliminary Announcement

10th International Conference on WORDS 2015, Kiel, Germany, September 14-18, 2015
Web-site: http://words2015.uni-kiel.de/

IMPORTANT DATES:
Submission deadline: April 17, 2015
Notification of authors: May 27, 2015
Deadline for final versions: June 10, 2015

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.

Please mark the conference dates in your agendas for 2015.

CONFIRMED INVITED SPEAKERS: Jörg Endrullis (Amsterdam), Jean Néraud (Rouen), Michaël Rao (Lyon), Thomas Stoll (Nancy). Another two invited speakers are still to be announced.

For WORDS 2015, we are looking for original contributions on combinatorics on words, in the form of extended abstracts, for publication in a refereed proceedings volume.

In the tradition of the previous WORDS conferences, authors are also invited to submit high level contributions, which might not meet the requirements of the proceedings volume, for publication in a local abstract-booklet.

The PROGRAMME COMMITTEE, that will select the papers 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 organisers (Dirk Nowotka, Florin Manea) via E-mail: info[at]words2015[dot]uni-kiel[dot]de

Romanian Theory Day

Final Update: The workshop took place on September 15 and 16, and according to the feedback we received from the participants it was successful. Thanks to all who contributed to the success of DACS 2014, and I am looking forward to the next edition.

Update 2: The list of accepted papers is online.

Update 1: The submission deadline for the workshop was extended to July 14, 2014, 23:59 EET.

Theory Day in Computer Science 2014 (DACS-2014) is the first in a series of workshops that (hopefully) will take place yearly in Romania, focused on presenting to a mostly-Romanian audience new results on various topics related to Theoretical Computer Science. This year’s workshop takes place on the 16th of September at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest, and it is affiliated to the 11th International Colloquium on Theoretical Aspects of Computing - ICTAC 2014.

The main goal of the workshop series is to build a solid and modern TCS community in Romania, closely connected to the current global research-trends. Ideally, our workshop will also attract, either as invited speakers or authors of contributed papers, participants from other European countries, helping to establish international collaborations on common topics. So far, this only reflects in the composition of the Program Committee, but the submission deadline for contributed papers is still one month away: 1st of July 2014.

This year we have two well-recognised Romanian researchers as invited speakers: Ion Petre - Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland, and Robert Mercas - Kiel University, Germany. Also, Gabriel Istrate from the West University of Timisoara has a tutorial in the first day of the workshop.

Coming back to contributed papers, we look for three types of submissions: original papers, surveys, and informal presentations. While the first two types are self-explanatory, informal presentations should address work-in-progress, review some recent results, as well as present open problems.

Last, but not least, we will try to keep the registration fee at a very low level, so that every interested person can come.

Please visit the webpage of our workshop for more details on when, where and how to submit and participate!

NCMA 2014

The deadline for this year's NCMA is just days away: May 4, 2014. Update: the deadline was extended to May 13, 2014.

NCMA is the acronym of the Workshop on Non-Classical Models of Automata and Applications, which reaches this year its sixth edition. The workshop will take place in Kassel, in the centre of Germany, at the end of July (28,29 July 2014).

As usual, we are mainly looking for works on different aspects of non-classical models of automata and grammars. Submissions on the following topics (but not limited to them) are welcome:
-- formal models inspired by Linguistics, Bio-Computing, Text Processing, Document Engineering, Self-Assembly, etc.,
-- bio-inspired models of automata and generative devices,
-- cellular automata,
-- forgetting automata and restarting automata,
-- automata with additional resources,
-- regulated rewriting/automata,
-- networks of automata or generative devices,
-- models of cooperation and communication,
-- quantum automata.

Note that this year the workshop also looks for short papers, on work in progress. The deadline for these papers is 8 june 2014.

So, please submit your latest paper on the above topics to NCMA 2014!

Computability in Europe - Steering Committee

Computability in Europe is one of my favourite conferences: I attended the conference six times, each time having an accepted paper, and I enjoyed each of these participations a lot. Among the things I like, the mixture between theoretical computer science and mathematics comes first, but I also appreciated the very good selection of invited speakers, the special sessions, as well as the satellite workshops.

That's why I was very happy and honoured when, this summer, I was invited to be part of the Steering Committee of the Computability in Europe Conference Series. Of course, I accepted this invitation. I can only hope that, in this new position, I will be able to contribute to the development of this (still young) conference into a major theory conference.

Faculty of Science @ Unibuc - 150 years

The year 2013 marks the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Faculty of Sciences, one of the initial three faculties of the University of Bucharest. The faculty was founded in 1863, joined the University of Bucharest in 1864 (when the University was founded), and in 1866 it was split into the Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the Department of Physical and Natural Sciences. To cut the history short, the faculty went through many further splits and changes, until it became in 2001 the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science (FMI).

With this occasion, my colleagues from FMI are organising, from August 29 to September 1, an anniversary conference, taking place between. The programme of the conference consists in talks given by researchers from all over the world, some of them with remarkable careers, that graduated from FMI (or its ancestor-faculties). I strongly recommend any of the readers of this post (that are in Bucharest in that period) to attend the conference.

I was much honoured to be also invited to give a talk at this conference, in the computer science track. In my talk, entitled Hidden structures in words, I will present parts of my current work on combinatorics and algorithmics on words, including the results of my recent papers from STACS 2013 and CiE 2013.

I am ending this post looking forward for the talks given by the others invited speakers, as well as hoping to meet some of the Romanian readers of this post at the conference.

Update: The official programme of the (entire) conference can be found at this link. The programme of the computer science track of the conference can be seen here. There is also a document containing all the abstracts of the talks.

NCMA 2013: Deadline Approaching

The submission deadline for NCMA 2013 is next week: 26 May 2013.

We are looking for papers on (but not limited to) the topics:
-- formal models inspired by Linguistics, Bio-Computing, Text Processing, Document Engineering, Self-Assembly, etc.,
-- bio-inspired models of automata and generative devices,
-- cellular automata,
-- forgetting automata and restarting automata,
-- automata with additional resources,
-- regulated rewriting/automata,
-- networks of automata or generative devices,
-- models of cooperation and communication,
-- quantum automata.

So, if you just finished writing a nice paper related to one of these topics, please submit it to NCMA 2013!

NCMA 2012: Deadline

Just a quick reminder, for those interested. The submission deadline for NCMA 2012 is getting closer: 13 May 2012.

Update: The submission deadline was moved to 29 May 2012.

DCM: Deadline

Those of you interested in submitting papers to DCM 2012 should note that the submissions deadline is one week away: 15 April 2012.

NCMA 2012: Call for Papers

The second workshop announced in a previous post, namely the 4th International Workshop on Non-Classical Models of Automata and Applications (NCMA 2012), has issued its Call for Papers; the topics of interest are available on the workshop's web-page. Here is a short preview:

Researchers are invited to submit papers concerning original contributions on non-classical models of automata and applications and related subjects for NCMA 2012. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on different aspects of different variants of non-classical automata models.

Topics of NCMA 2012 include, but are not limited to:
Bio-inspired Automata;
Cellular Automata;
Restart- ing/Forgetting Automata;
Automata with Additional Resources;
Automata Networks, Cooperation, and Communication;
Quantum Automata;
Other Formal Models (Inspired by: Linguistics; Bio-Computing; Text Processing; Document Engineering; Self-Assembling).

NCMA 2012 will take place after DLT 2012 and before MFCS 2012. It is held in Fribourg, Switzerland.

Please feel encouraged to submit your paper to NCMA 2012! Note that the submissions deadline is 13 May 2012.

DCM 2012: Call for Papers

Following the announcements in the previous post, please note that the Call for Papers for the 8th International Workshop on Developments in Computational Models was published on the workshop's site. Here is a short preview:

Topics of interest include all abstract models of computation and their properties, and their applications to the development of programming languages and systems:
- quantum computation, including implementations and formal methods in quantum protocols;
- probabilistic computation and verification in modeling situations;
- chemical, biological and bio-inspired computation, including spatial models, self-assembly, growth models;
- general concurrent models including the treatment of mobility, trust, and security;
- information-theoretic ideas in computing;
- infinitary models of computation;
- comparisons of different models of computations.

The proceedings will be published electronically in the series "Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science" (EPTCS) as post-proceedings after the workshop.

All papers have to be prepared using the EPTCS macro package which can be downloaded here. Papers can have up to 12 pages in EPTCS style.

Papers have to be submitted via our easychair site in PDF format before the deadline of 15 April 2012.

Once more, I encourage any of you working on some of the topics in this call for papers to submit papers to DCM 2012.

DCM and NCMA

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.

Kiel

After finishing my Humboldt Research Fellowship in Magdeburg, I have decided to continue my stay in Germany. Luckily, I was offered and I accepted a temporary position (starting 1st of November) in the Computer Science Department at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel, in the group of Dirk Nowotka. The main focus of my research will be in the area of algorithmic combinatorics on words, which coincides with my latest research interests. News on what exactly I do will come as soon as I obtain some results!

Fun Stuff

I think that all of us heard about the dangers of plagiarism in the scientific world, but, on the other hand, none of us really met such a case. I came across a plagiarism discussion only once (paper 17 from this list), but I didn't really follow all the details.

However, I recently found out (credits: Dominik Freydenberger) about a famous case of plagiarism: Danut Marcu. This guy, who has a PhD from my Alma Mater, plagiarized hundreds of papers, becoming one of the most prolific authors in Graph Theory. Finally, he was caught and banned by many journals, but it is really funny to see how he tricked so many reviewers.

On a serious note, I would be curious to find out if his PhD supervisor knows about it. I am pretty sure that this way of publishing started during his doctorate years, and maybe his thesis is based on some stolen results. I would be also curios to hear the reaction of my faculty/ university about this guy (maybe cancel his PhD title?).

Later Edit: It seems that this is an old page of Danut Marcu. He states that

Each mathematician, from every part of the world, any time, is a friend of mine, as well as, any kind person.

This explains a lot :)