[Past issues of the newsletter are available at http://www.bell-labs.com/topic/conferences/lics/ lLICS'98 WORKSHOP ON PROBABILISTIC METHODS IN VERIFICATION (PROBMIV'98) 19-20 June, 1998 (just before LICS'98), Indianapolis, Indiana. * Submission: An extended abstract (about 10-15 pages) should be mailed electronically to probmiv98@cs.bham.ac.uk as PostScript, to be received by March 15, 1998. * Topics of interest (non-exclusive) include modelling and verification of probabilistic and stochastic systems, including real-time and hybrid systems; formal models and verification techniques for randomized algorithms; semantics of probabilistic and stochastic processes; probabilistic and fuzzy logics; design of verification support tools; tool demonstrations; case studies. * Invited speakers: Rajeev Alur, Luca de Alfaro, Christel Baier, Vicky Hartonas-Garmhausen, Jeremy Gunawardena, Annabelle McIver, Prakash Panangaden, Roberto Segala, Scott Smolka, Moshe Vardi. * Panel session: Ed Clarke, CMU, Panel Chair: What tools and theory are needed in order to make probabilistic verification practical? * Program committee: Marta Kwiatkowska (Chair) mzk@cs.bham.ac.uk, Michael Huth (Co-chair) huth@cis.ksu.edu, plus invited speakers. * Organizers: Marta Kwiatkowska, Michael Huth, Christel Baier and Mark Ryan. NEW RELEASE OF STANDARD ML OF NEW JERSEY * Version 110 of Standard ML of New Jersey, a new release of the compiler conforming to the SML '97 revised definition, will be available during the week of November 25, 1997. Information on how to obtain the new release SML/NJ can be found at the URL above. ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT SYMPOSIUM ON PRINCIPLES OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES (POPL98) Call for participation * The Program and Registration information for POPL '98 and FOOL 5 (Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages) can be found at the URL above. This is the 25th POPL conference, and in honor of this anniversary there will be special invited talks by John Reynolds, Gerard Berry, and Mark Wegman, as well as a regular invited talk by Peter Lee. ASSOCIATION FOR SYMBOLIC LOGIC, 1997-98 WINTER MEETING Baltimore Convention Center, Baltimore, Maryland, January 9-10, 1998 Call for participation * All invited lectures and contributed paper sessions will be in (combined) Rooms 331 and 332 of the Baltimore Convention Center. Registration for the Joint Mathematical Meetings will be the Charles Street Lobby. The meeting of the American Mathematical Society includes a special session on History of Mathematical Logic on Wednesday, January 7, in Room 322 of the Baltimore Convention Center. * Invited speakers. Juliet Floyd, Marcia Groszek, Joel Hamkins, Dexter Kozen, Isaac Levi, Leonid Libkin, Soren Riis. * Program committee. A. Carbone, M. Detlefsen, Y. Gurevich, A. Kanamori, L. Moss, and R. Parikh (Chair). ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE LOGIC (CSL'98) August 22-28, 1998 Brno, Czech Republic Federated CSL/MFCS Conference Call for Papers * CSL is the annual conference of the European Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL). The conference is intended for computer scientists whose research activities involve logic, as well as for logicians working on topics significant for computer science. In 1998 the CSL conference will be organized as a joint event with MFCS (Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science). The federated CSL/MFCS conference will have common plenary sessions and common social program. Participants registering for one conference can attend talks of both conferences. * Invited talks. Joint CSL/MFCS plenary talks: D. Harel, W. Maass, Y. Matiyasevic, M. Yannakakis. CSL invited speakers: P. Hajek, J. Mitchell, I. Nemeti, Th. Schwentick, J. Tiuryn. MFCS invited speakers: G. Ausiello, E. Boerger, Y. Gurevich, R. Karp, T. Leighton, K. Mehlhorn, M. Nielsen, A. Pnueli, P. Pudlak, C. Stirling. * Submission. Authors are invited to submit a draft or full paper (up to 12 pages). The cover page should include title, authors, and corresponding author (name, address, phone/fax number, e-mail address). Submission forms can be from the conference web page, or by sending an empty message with Subject: submission information to csl98-subm@dbai.tuwien.ac.at. Deadline: April 15, 1998. * Program co-chairs. G. Gottlob and E. Grandjean. * Program Committee: K. R. Apt, F. Baader, A. Carbone, T. Coquand, M. Fitting, A. Goerdt, M. Kanovich, C. Lautemann, A. Leitsch, D. Leivant, G. Longo, J. Paredaens, A. A. Razborov, A. Scedrov, K. Stroetmann, A. Voronkov. CONFERENCE ON REAL NUMBERS AND COMPUTERS (RNC3) Call for papers Paris, France, April 27-28-29 1998 * Topics. Algorithms and architectures for "serial" and "on line" arithmetic. Relations between number theory, automata theory and computer arithmetic. Number systems. Floating point arithmetic. Calculability. Symbolic manipulation of numbers. Algorithms for "exact" computing. Multi-precision, interval arithmetic, stochastic arithmetic. Accuracy problems in various fields (geometry, physics, etc), and proposed solutions. * Organization Committee. Jean-Marie Chesneaux, Fabienne Jezequel, Jean-Luc Lamotte, Jean Vignes. * Program Committee. Jean-Paul Allouche, Rene Alt, Jean-Claude Bajard, Jean-Claude Berges, Vasco Brattka, Jean-Marie Chesneaux, Martin Hotzel Escardo, Christiane Frougny, Peter Kornerup, David Lester, Pierre Liardet, Dominique Michelucci, Jean-Michel Muller, Nathalie Revol. * Submissions. Deadline: January 1, 1998. You can submit a full paper (not an abstract) to RNC3@lip6.fr. Please request a pattern LaTeX file from the above URL address but send a postscript file. If you cannot use LaTeX, send 4 copies of a printed version to Jean-Marie Chesneaux, Laboratoire LIP6, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, 4 place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France. THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION-THEORETIC APPROACHES TO LOGIC, LANGUAGE, AND COMPUTATION Call for papers Hsi-tou, Taiwan, 16-19 June, 1998 * Invited speakers. David Beaver, Nick Chater, David Israel, Michiel van Lambalgen, Greg Mulhauser. * Topics. Foundations and applications of various approaches to the study of information, for example, Shannon-Weaver communication theory, Barwise-Seligman Channel theory, Situation Theory, Dynamic Semantics, Dretske's semantic theory of information. Information-based approaches to the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of natural language. Information-based approaches to philosophy of mind, consciousness studies, and epistemology. Information-theoretic approaches to cognitive psychology. Information-theoretic approaches to induction and learning. Probabilistic methods in epistemology and logic. Theory change, including Belief Revision and Bayesian approaches * Submission. Authors are invited to submit a detailed abstract of a full paper of at most 10 pages by e-mail to ITALLC98@coli.uni-sb.de, using `ITALLC98 Submission' as the subject line. The cover page should include title, authors and contact details of the corresponding author. Submission of postscript files is strongly encouraged. The deadline for submissions is December 15, 1997. * Program committee. Patrick Blackburn (Chair), Nick Braisby, Lawrence Cavedon, Sheila Glasbey, Atsushi Shimojima. INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON FORMAL METHODS IN COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN (FMCAD'98) November 4 - 6, 1998, Palo Alto, CA, USA Call for Papers * Topics. Hardware verification techniques based on model checking, theorem proving, and related or hybrid methods. Correct by construction approaches to hardware design, such as synthesis and transformation. Hybrid approaches that integrate synthesis and verification or different verification techniques. Integration of formal methods with CAD tools, such as for synthesis, simulation, design exploration, and testing. Formalized reasoning techniques supporting hardware- and system-level description languages. Case studies and application of formal methods in industry. * Submission. 18-page, 12-point font (with abstract) for papers, and 7-page, 12-point font abstract for tutorials and tool demos. Submit by April 20, 1998 via the FMCAD web-page http://lal.cs.byu.edu/fmcad/. * Invited speakers. Ken McMillan, Carl Seger, Richard Platek, Amir Pnueli. * Program committee. Ganesh Gopalakrishnan (co-chair), Phillip Windley (co-chair), Mark Aagaard, Randy Bryant, Jerry Burch, Albert Camilleri, Eduard Cerny, Shiu-Kai Chin, Ching-Tsun Chou, Francisco Corella, Limor Fix, Masahiro Fujita, Steve German, Tom Henzinger, Ramin Hojati, Alan Hu, Warren Hunt, Steve Johnson, Carlos Delgado Kloos, Thomas Kropf, Tim Leonard, Tom Melham, Carl Pixley, Mary Sheeran, Tom Shiple, Jens Skakkebaek (local arrangements), Mandayam Srivas, John Van Tassel, Ranga Vemuri. LETTER FROM JAN KOMOROWSKI * I am asking the Logic in Computer Science community for help in preparing a course on logic for computer science students at my school of engineering (at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim). Your input consisting of a suggested curriculum, textbook and, especially, proposals of applications is most welcome. Pointers (http addresses) to existing courses are very appreciated. The students will have taken propositional logic in the prerequiste course. Applications should be computer-based uses of logic showing logic at real work. Our students are very good, the best in the country, but the teaching is (has been) mostly application oriented with little theory of computing training, if any. They will accept complex stuff provided the instructor can motivate them with good applications. * Please send your replies by email: Jan.Komorowski@control.lth.se BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT Goal-Directed Reasoning in Clausal Logic with Equality by M. Moser CS Press, Germany, 1997 ISBN 3-931757-02-1 * The most successful approach for an efficient handling of equality is paramodulation restricted by orderings. Unfortunately, this variant of paramodulation is only compatible with a bottom-up procedure where starting from a given set of clauses, new clauses are derived. With respect to the crucial search space problem, however, goal-directed approaches have various advantages as they only allow inferences to be applied to the current goal. Up to now, no practical solutions for the efficient handling of equality in a goal-directed setting have been found. The topic of this book is an efficient approach for goal-directed and ordering-restricted reasoning in clausal logic with equality. In order to attain completeness under these conditions, the goal-directed calculus needs to be combined with restricted bottom-up inference rules. The completeness proof of the new calculus and its refinements is based on a new and powerful approach, covering different proof paradigms. Using this approach, it becomes possible to derive new correlations between the new calculus and other bottom-up and goal-directed approaches. BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT The Action-as-Implication Paradigm by B. Fronhoefer CS Press, Germany, 1997 ISBN 3-931757-91-9 * The Linear Connection Method is a restriction of the classical Connection Method for the purpose of plan generation. Its basic idea is to formalize actions as implications. The main part of the book deals with the logic underlying this approach. The author shows that the mentioned restriction corresponds to a Horn-clause-like logic which is obtained through a restriction of the contraction rules in a suitable sequent system for classical logic. On the way to this result a broad investigation yields matrix characterizations (in the sense of the Connection Method) of the multiplicative fragments of Contraction-Free Logic, Linear Logic, and Relevance Logic. The method of investigation is by translation of sequent derivations into matrices and back. For this purpose the Connection Method has been redeveloped for non-normal form matrices with multi-occurrences of literals and matrices are considered together with arbitrary sets of connections. In the last chapter a proof search algorithm for the Linear Connection Method is presented, which is compared on benchmarks with the Situation Calculus and the planning system UCPOP. RESEARCH GRANT AT DRESDEN UNIVERSITY Postgraduate program "Specification of discrete processes and systems of processes by operational models and logics" http://orchid.inf.tu-dresden.de/gk-spezifikation/www-entry.html * Everbody who has a PhD degree in relevant areas, is invited to apply for this research grant. Please send your curriculum vitae including a list of publications to Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Heiko Vogler, Dresden University of Technology, Dept. of Computer Science, D-01062 Dresden, Germany. * Further information. See the URL above. ESSLLI-98 WORKSHOP ON PROBABILISTIC LOGIC AND RANDOMISED COMPUTATION August 17 - 21, 1998, Saarbrueken, Germany Call for papers * Topics. Philosophical foundations of probability, probabilistic logics, probabilistic proof systems, probabilistic proof checking, probabilistic knowledge representation, probabilistic games, randomised automata, randomised algorithms, semantics of probabilistic languages, probabilistic non-determinism, probabilistic reasoning, fuzzy and belief systems, inexact matching, constraints and probability, Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods, practical applications, randomised optimisation (e.g. simulated annealing, genetic algorithms). * Organisers. Alessandra Di Pierro and Herbert Wiklicky. * Submission. Papers should be submitted in the form of an extended abstract of no more than 4000 words (8-10 pages) in length, and must include the e-mail address of all authors and a 200-300 word abstract. Deadline is February 15, 1998. To submit a paper, please send a postscript file to adp@cs.city.ac.uk or herbert@cs.city.ac.uk. * Further information. See the URL above. WORKSHOP ON GENERIC PROGRAMMING June 18th 1998, Marstrand, Sweden Call for papers * Generic programming is about making programs more adaptable by making them more general. Generic programs often embody non-traditional kinds of polymorphism; ordinary programs are obtained from them by suitably instantiating their parameters. In contrast with normal programs, the parameters of a generic programs are often quite rich in structure. For example they may be other programs, types or type constructors, or even programming paradigms. * The workshop will be on June 18th, 1998, directly following the Mathematics of Program Construction conference to be held in Marstrand Sweden. We cordially invite all those with an active interest in this important new area to submit a short position paper on their work to one of the organizers. Deadline for submission to the workshop is Feb. 16, 1997. * Organizers. are as follows: Roland Backhouse (co-chair), Tim Sheard (co-chair), Johan Jeuring, Oege de Moor, Bernhard Moeller, Jose Oliveira, Barry Jay, Robin Cocket, Karl Lieberherr, Fritz Ruehr.