LICS 2017

2nd Logic Mentoring Workshop
Sunday 18 June 2017, Reykjavik

Overview

The Logic Mentoring Workshop (LMW) will introduce young researchers to the technical and practical aspects of a career in logic research. It is targeted at students, from senior undergraduates to graduates, and will include talks and panel sessions from leaders in the subject.

LMW '17 builds on the resounding success of the first edition held last year. It will be co-located with the Logic in Computer Science 2017, the premier international forum on theoretical and practical topics in computer science related to logic. It will take place on June 18 in Reykjavik before the main conference and other workshops.

Speakers

Luca Aceto (Reykjavik University)
Agata Ciabattoni (Technische Universität Wien)
Yuri Gurevich (University of Michigan, Microsoft Research)
Valeria de Paiva (Nuance Communications)
Prakash Panangaden (McGill University)

Panellists

As part of LMW, there will be a question and answer session comprising of the following panellists:

Valentin Blot (Queen Mary University)
Catuscia Palamidessi (Inria Saclay)
~~Alexandra Silva (University College London)~~ Agata Ciabattoni (Technische Universität Wien)

Program

9:00 - 9:15	Welcome and introduction
9:15 - 10:15	Yuri Gurevich. Logic in computer science, engineering, industry and mathematics.
10:15 - 10:45	Coffee break.
10:45 - 11:30	Luca Aceto. Unveiling the Ivory Tower: The academic's art of work.
11:30 - 12:30	Valeria de Paiva. Weapons of Math Construction: Proofs for programs and personal assistants.
12:30 - 14:00	Lunch break.
14:00 - 15:00	Prakash Panangaden. Research Collaborations.
15:00 - 15:30	Agata Ciabattoni. How to Reach Heaven: Different career paths.
15:30 - 16:00	Coffee break.
16:00 - 17:--	Panel session.
18:00 -	Pub

Venue

The workshop will be held in room V1.02 at Reykjavik University (map). A detailed plan can be found here (see page 3).

Scholarships

We are no longer accepting applications for scholarships.

Important dates

Deadline for scholarship applications: ~~31 March, 2017~~.
LMW: ~~18 June, 2017~~.

Useful resources

The following are some links on resources for research skills that were mentioned during the workshop. We hope that you will find them useful! Also, you can find slides from the various talks in the next section below.

Teaching Teaching and Understanding Understanding.
How to write, referee, give talks etc..
Research skills (click button).

Please let us know if there is anything else you would like us to upload here!

Abstracts and slides

Luca Aceto. Unveiling the Ivory Tower: The academic's art of work. (slides)

What does the work of an academic consist of? In this talk, I will give you my answer to this question, offering some advice on how to try to survive and tell the tale. The presentation will build on my own personal experience and on suggestions I was lucky to receive from my mentors when I was a junior researcher.

Agata Ciabattoni. How to Reach Heaven: Different career paths. (slides)

How to become a faculty member? Based on my personal experience I will describe possible ways and give some advice. Special emphasis will be given to the art of writing project proposals.

Yuri Gurevich. Logic in computer science, engineering, industry and mathematics.

In the software industry, engineers do formal logic day in and day out, even though they may not and often do not realize that. As a rule, they have not studied logic. Instead, they spent a lot of time studying calculus which they use rarely, if ever. I'll try to illustrate why logic is so relevant and why it is hard for software engineers to pick it up.

I will speak also about logic applications in computer science and mathematics.

Finally, science is more vulnerable than it seems to be. I'd like to say a few words about that and about the responsibilities that every new generation of scientists assumes.

Valeria de Paiva. Weapons of Math Construction: Proofs for programs and personal assistants. (slides)

This talk is a very personal take on how I navigate being a woman doing mathematical research in computer science in Silicon Valley, CA, USA. I will describe how I got where I am now and why I like it. In particular I will described how the Curry-Howard Correspondence, an under-appreciated gem relating proofs in mathematical logic to morphisms in category theory and to programs in programming languages such as Haskell, Agda, ML, Scala or F#, unifies my research. This research is truly multidisciplinary, allowing me to move from Logic to Algebra to Programming Languages, with extensions to Computational Linguistics, AI and Lexicography. Then I will discuss some of the challenges: from the mansplaining of everyday, to the narrowness of "innovation versus invention" in the work place.

Prakash Panangaden. Research Collaborations.

Throughout one's working life one has many collaborations that, for better or worse, will shape one's career. Unlike fields like medicine or experimental physics where research is carried out by large teams, in theoretical computer science collaborations are in small groups and are very fluid. How does one choose with whom to work? What pitfalls are there? What should be the relation between senior and junior researchers? What are reasonable expectations for how your research collaborators should behave? An important special case of this is choosing one's thesis supervisor but of course this is only the beginning. I will try to illuminate these questions with illustrations from my own career. I have been extraordinarily lucky in being able to work with wonderful collaborators over the years but not everything has been straightforward.