[Past issues of the newsletter are available at http://www.bell-labs.com/topic/conferences/lics/ FOURTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING (CP98) Pisa, Italy, October 26-30, 1998 * Scope. The conference is concerned with all aspects of computing with constraints including: algorithms, applications, environments, languages, models, systems. Contributions are welcome from any discipline concerned with constraints, including: artificial intelligence, combinatorial algorithms, computational logic, concurrent computation, databases, discrete mathematics, operations research, programming languages, symbolic computation. Papers that bridge disciplines or combine theory and practice are especially welcome. * Conference Chair: Francesca Rossi. * Program Co-Chairs: Michael Maher and Jean-Francois Puget. * Workshop Chair: Roland Yap. * Program Committee: Peter van Beek, Christian Bessiere, Alexander Bockmayr, Alex Brodsky, Yves Caseau, Philippe Codognet, Rina Dechter, Yves Deville, Boi Faltings, Maurizio Gabbrielli, Ian Gent, Nevin Heintze, Manolis Koubarakis, Jimmy Lee, Alan Mackworth, Kim Marriott, Wim Nuijten, Catuscia Palamidessi, Francesca Rossi, Helmut Simonis, Barbara Smith, Peter Stuckey, Ralf Treinen, Michel Van Caneghem, Dirk Van Gucht, Makoto Yokoo. * Organizing Committee: A. Borning, J. Cohen, A. Colmerauer, E. Freuder (chair), H. Gallaire, J.-P. Jouannaud, J.-L. Lassez, U. Montanari, A. Nerode, V. Saraswat, G. Smolka, R. Wachter. * Invited Speakers: Joxan Jaffar and Patrick Prosser. * Paper submissions. Authors should submit abstracts by April 20 and original full papers of no more than 15 pages by April 24. Submission should be done by sending two emails to cp98@ilog.fr. The first email should have subject: CP'98 abstract followed by the paper title; the body should contain the title, authors and a short abstract of the paper in plain text. This email must be sent by April 20. The second email should have subject: CP'98 paper followed by the paper title; the body should contain a postscript file. For authors who are unable to submit electronically, five paper copies can be mailed to one of the program chairs. In that case the package should arrive no later than April 24. * Proceedings: Will be published by Springer-Verlag in its LNCS serie. Moreover, a special issue of the journal Constraints (Kluwer) is planned, based on selected papers. * Workshops. Satellite workshops will be organized on Friday, October 30. Workshop proposals can be submitted to the workshop chair by March 27, 1998. The details can be found in the call for workshop proposal, which can be seen on the CP98 web page. 1998 IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON FOUNDATIONS OF COMPUTER SCIENCE (FOCS'98) Palo Alto, California, November 8-11, 1998 Call for papers * Topics. Algorithms and data structures, complexity theory, computational algebra and geometry, computational biology, cryptography, databases, machine learning, algorithmic graph theory and combinatorics, applications of logic, parallel and distributed computation, probabilistic computations, computer architectures, and robotics. * Submission. An abstract not exceeding 10 pages must be received by the program chair, Rajeev Motwani, (Gates Computer Science Building, 4B, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-9045, U.S.A) by 16:59 EST May 4, 1998. Electronic submission will be possible. See the URL above for further details. * Machtey award. This prize will be given to the best paper written solely by one or more students. An abstract is eligible if all authors are full-time students at the time of submission. This should be indicated in the submission letter. The program committee may decline to make the award, or may split it among several papers. * Program Committee. Miklos Ajtai, Mihir Bellare, Allan Borodin, Edith Cohen, Sally Goldman, David Karger, Jon Kleinberg, Rajeev Motwani (chair, Seffi Naor, Christos Papadimitriou, Toni Pitassi, Dan Spielman, Eli Upfal, Emo Welzl, David Williamson, and Frances Yao. * Further information. See the URL above. ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART SYMPOSIUM ON PRINCIPLES OF DATABASE SYSTEMS (PODS'98) Call for participation June 1-3, 1998, Seattle, Washington * Invited speaker. Ronald Fagin. * Tutorials. S. Chaudhuri, J. Vitter, J. Klavans. * See the URL above for further information. WORKSHOP ON CONSTRAINT DATABASES (CDB'98) in conjunction with ACM SIGMOD/PODS '98 May 31, 1998 Seattle, Washington, USA Call for participation * Invited speakers. Dirk Van Gucht, Victor Vianu, Jean-Louis Lassez, Sridhar Ramaswamy. * See the URL above for further information. BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT Formal Hardware Verification - Methods and Systems in Comparison Thomas Kropf (Ed.) Springer Verlag, LNCS State-of-the-Art Survey 1287, 1997, ISBN 3-540-63475-4 * This state-of-the-art monograph presents a coherent survey of a variety of methods and systems for formal hardware verification. It emphasizes the presentation of approaches that have matured into tools and systems usable for the actual verification of nontrivial circuits. All in all, the book is a representative and well-structured survey on the success and future potential of formal methods in proving the correctness of circuits. The various chapters describe the respective approaches supplying theoretical foundations as well as taking into account the application viewpoint. By applying all methods and systems presented to the same set of IFIP WG10.5 hardware verification examples, a valuable and fair analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the various approaches is given. * Contents. Symbolic Trajectory Evaluation (Scott Hazelhurst Carl-Johan H. Seger) * Verification with Abstract State Machines Using MDGs (E. Cerny, F. Corella, M. Langevin, X. Song, S. Tahar, and Z. Zhou) * Design Verification Using Synchronized Transitions (Jurgen Staunstrup) * Hardware Verification Using PVS (M. Srivas H. Ruess D. Cyrluk) * Verifying VHDL Designs with COSPAN (Kathi Fisler Robert P. Kurshan) * The C@S- System (K. Schneider T. Kropf) * Further Information: http://goethe.ira.uka.de/hvg/lncs1287/ SENIOR RESEARCH ASSISTANT Department of Computer Science, University of Wales Swansea * Applications are invited for the post of Senior Research Assistant in the Department of Computer Science to work on an EPSRC project on Model Theoretic Methods in Complexity and Verification under the supervision of Dr A Dawar. Applicants should possess or be close to completing a PhD degree in Computer Science or Mathematics. The appointment will be for 1 year at a commencing salary of up to 16927 GBP per annum. * Further details and application forms (2 copies) must be obtained from the Personnel Departmaent, University of Wales Swansea, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP, U.K, to which office they should be returned by Friday 27 March 1998. Informal enquiries may be addressed to: Dr Anuj Dawar, Department of Computer Science, University of Wales Swansea, Swansea SA2 8PP. Tel: 01792 205678 ext. 4805, Fax: 01792 295708, e-mail: a.dawar@swansea.ac.uk. REAL NUMBER COMPUTATION (RealComp'98) LICS'98 Affiliated Workshop June 19-20, 1998 Indianapolis, Indiana, USA First Announcement * Aims and Scope. The meeting aims to present an introduction to the interdisciplinary area of Real Number Computation. The subject is understood in a broad sense and covers various different fields like Recursion Theory, Interval Analysis, Computer Arithmetic, Semantics of Programming Languages and Numerical Analysis. All talks will be accessible to graduate students in any area of computer science, logic and mathematics. The workshop is also meant to provide researchers from the various different communities an opportunity to meet and exchange ideas. * Speakers. George Corliss (Milwaukee), Abbas Edalat (London), Martin Escardo (Edinburgh), Reinhold Heckmann (Saarbruecken), Ulrich Kulisch (Karlsruhe), David Matula (Dallas), Jean-Michel Muller (Lyon), Peter Potts (London), Dana Scott (Pittsburgh), Philipp Sunderhauf (London), Klaus Weihrauch (Hagen). * Organisers. Abbas Edalat, Achim Jung, Dana Scott, Philipp Sunderhauf. 7TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DATABASE THEORY (ICDT'99) January 10-12, 1999, Jerusalem, Israel * ICDT is a biennial international conference on theoretical aspects of databases and a forum for communicating research advances on the principles of database systems. Initiated in Rome, in 1986, it was merged in 1992 with the MFDBS symposium series initiated in Dresden in 1987. ICDT aims to attract papers of high quality, describing original ideas and new results on theoretical aspects of all forms of database systems and database technology. While special emphasis is put on new ideas and directions, papers on all aspects of database theory and related areas are welcome. * Program Committee: Gustavo Alonso, Catriel Beeri, Anthony Bonner, Peter Buneman (co-chair), Marco Cadoli, Sophie Cluet, Guozhu Dong, Ronald Fagin, Erich Gradel, Gosta Grahne, Marc Gyssens, Yannis Ioannidis, Alon Levy, Alberto Mendelzon, Guido Moerkotte, Shelly Qian, Kenneth Ross, Timos Sellis, Eric Simon, Dan Suciu, S. Sudarshan, Michael Taitslin * How to submit: Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract of the paper they intend to present in the conference. The abstract should describe the main ideas and results of the paper, their relevance and novelty, in sufficient detail for the program committee to assess the contribution and significance of the paper. The abstract should contain at most 10 pages, with normal spacing and fonts. From past experience, the pc chairs advise against "short" abstracts, of less than 6 pages. The program committee reserves the right to reject any abstract exceeding the limits above, without reading it. Electronic submissions are encouraged. * Submission Deadline: June 19, 1998. * Organizers: Catriel Beeri (co-chair), Peter Buneman (co-chair), Tova Milo (Local Organization) PhD POSITION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BERN, SWITZERLAND * Within a research project supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation a PhD position will be available in the theoretical computer science and logic group of the Institute for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from May 1, 1998, until April 30, 2000. Depending on the progress of the work an extension for two more years may be possible. * General requirements: A degree comparable to a Swiss or German diploma in computer science or mathematics; good knowledge of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic. Among other things, this project deals with various forms of abstract computations and their relationship to perspicuous logical formalisms, in particular applicative theories and structures. Higher type computations and general type systems are also of great interest. * Applicants should sent their CV to: Gerhard Jaeger, IAM, Univerity of Bern, jaeger@iam.unibe.ch SEVENTH INTERNATIONAL AMAST CONFERENCE January 5 - 9 , 1999, Amazonia, Brazil. Call for Papers * Topics. Software technology: systems software technology, application software technology, concurrent and reactive systems, formal methods in industrial software development, formal techniques for software requirements, design. Programming methodology: logic programming, functional programming, object paradigms, constraint programming and concurrency, program verification and transformation, programming calculi, specification languages and tools, formal specification and development case studies. Algebraic and logical foundations: logic, category theory, relation algebra, computational algebra, algebraic foundations for languages and systems, theorem proving and logical frameworks for reasoning, logics of programs. Systems and tools (for system demonstrations or ordinary papers): software development environments, support for correct software development, system support for reuse, tools for prototyping, validation and verification, computer algebra systems, theorem proving systems. * Submission. We invite prospective authors to submit electronically previously unpublished papers of high quality. Papers should be between five and fifteen pages in LNCS style. Ten page papers are ideal, and papers longer than fifteen pages may be rejected without detailed refereeing. Submission of Papers: June 15, 1998 * AMAST General Chair: Maurice Nivat (France) * Programme Chair: Armando Haeberer (Brazil) * Programme Committee. Vangalur Alagar, Egidio Astesiano, Gabriel Baum, Chris Brink, Walter Carnielli, Rocco De Nicola, Jose Fiadeiro, Marcelo Frias, Kokichi Futatsugi, Dov Gabbay, E. Hermann Haeusler, Paola Inverardi, Michael Johnson, Richard Jullig, Rafael Lins, Michael Lowry, Carlos Jose Pereira de Lucena, Roger Maddux, Thomas Maibaum, Michael Mislove, Ugo Montanari, Peter Mosses, Istvan Nemeti, Anton Nijholt, Daltro Nunes, Fernando Orejas, Don Pigozzi, Ruy de Queiroz, Charles Rattray, Teodor Rus, Giuseppe Scollo, Michel Sintzoff, Douglas Smith, Andrzej Tarlecki, Paulo Veloso, Martin Wirsing. TYPED LAMBDA CALCULI AND APPLICATIONS (TLCA'99) l'Aquila, Italia 7 - 9 April 1999 Call For Papers * Topics. The TLCA series of conferences aims at providing a forum for the presentation and discussion of recent research in an area which was originally a rather restricted field but has now considerably expanded. The following list of topics is non-limitative: Proof-theory: Cut-elimination and normalization, Linear logic, etc, Semantics: Denotational semantics, Game semantics, etc, Operationality: Abstract machines, Parallel execution, etc, Typing: Subtypes, Type assignment systems, etc, Programming: Proof search, Type checking, etc. * Program Committee. S. Abramsky, T. Coquand, J.-Y. Girard (Chair), R. Hindley, J.-L. Krivine, J. Reynolds, S. Ronchi, A. Scedrov, T. Streicher, M. Takahashi, P. Urzyczyn. * Submission. Original contributions should be sent by E-mail (Postscript files only) to tlca99@iml.univ-mrs.fr, and a short abstract should be sent as a separate E-mail; it should use only standard ASCII characters. Hard copy (6 copies) is also acceptable, to the address: Jean-Yves Girard, Institut de Mathematiques de Luminy, 163 Avenue de Luminy, case 907, 13288 Marseille cedex 9, France fax: (+)-33-491269655. All submissions must be received by Sept. 4, 1998. Papers should not exceed 15 pages. * Further information. tlca99.aquila@univaq.it or the URL above. WORKSHOP ON PRINCIPLES OF ABSTRACT MACHINES in conjunction with the Joint International Symposia SAS'98 and PLILP/ALP'98 Pisa, Italy, 14-18 September 1998 Call for papers * Topics. Relation to programming language semantics, relation to program analyses (or non-standard semantics), comparison of implementation techniques, just-in-time compilation, garbage collection, internet programming (e.g. security, fault-tolerance), analyses of abstract machine programs, compiling other languages to JVM, hybrid languages, concurrency. * Submission. The submission deadline is June 19. Papers must describe original, previously unpublished work, and must not be simultaneously submitted for publication elsewhere. They must be written in English, must not exceed 10 pages (Springer LNCS format, excluding references and figures), and must contain a cover page containing the following: a 200-word abstract, keywords, postal and electronic mailing addresses, and phone and fax numbers of one of the authors. Submission is electronic (up to exceptions) via e-mail to diehl@cs.uni-sb.de. * Organizers. Stephan Diehl (Saarbruecken, Germany) diehl@cs.uni-sb.de, Peter Sestoft (Copenhagen, Denmark) sestoft@dina.kvl.dk. * Program Committee. Michael Franz, Michael Hanus, Pieter Hartel, Peter van Roy.