The best contributions to the 14th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning are awarded prizes in two categories.

The 2014 Ray Reiter Best Paper Prize

The best paper of the conference receives the 2014 Ray Reiter Best Paper Prize sponsored by the Artificial Intelligence Journal which goes to:

Leonid Libkin

for his paper entitled

Certain Answers as Objects and Knowledge

(presented today at 2:30pm in EI7)

The 2014 Marco Cadoli Student Paper Prize

The best paper of the conference whose main author is a student receives the 2014 Marco Cadoli Student Paper Prize. It is sponsored by KR Inc. and goes to:

Elena Botoeva, Roman Kontchakov, Vladislav Ryzhikov, Frank Wolter and Michael Zakharyaschev

for their paper on

Query Inseparability for Description Logic Knowledge Bases

The award ceremony will take place today (Wed July 22nd) following the

Great Moments in KR invited talk by
Sheila McIlraith entitled “Situation Calculus: The last 15 years”

at 6:30pm in EI7.

More information on: www.kr.org/KR2014

The Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms announces the first edition of the

VCLA International Student Awards

and calls for the nomination of authors of outstanding scientific works in the field of Logic and Computer Science, in the following two categories:

In both categories, the work must make an original contribution to a research field that can be classified as part of Logic in Computer Science, understood broadly as the use of logic as a tool that enables computer programs to reason about the world. The main areas of interest include:

• Databases and Artificial Intelligence: Answer-Set Programming, Datalog, query languages, novel database-theoretical methods, logic programming, description logics, knowledge representation and reasoning, argumentation, planning, preferential reasoning.
• Verification, ranging from model checking, program analysis and abstraction to new interdisciplinary areas such as fault localization, program repair, program synthesis, and the analysis of biological systems.
• Computational Logic, proof theory, cut elimination, proof mining, interpolants, automated deduction, non-classical logics, computational complexity, SAT, QSAT, CSP.

The degree must have been awarded no earlier than November 1st, 2012. Students that obtained the degree at the Vienna University of Technology are excluded from nomination. The committee will select a winner for each category. The winners will be invited to Vienna to present their project and participate in a festive award ceremony. Additionally, the Outstanding Master Thesis Award category is accompanied by a prize of 1,200 Eur, and the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award by a prize of 800 Eur. The decisions of the committee are not appealable.

More information and nomination instructions: http://logic-cs.at/award/

Important dates:
Nomination deadline: November 15, 2014 (AoE)
Notification of the committee’s decision: Mid January, 2015
Award ceremony: Spring 2015

Award committee

Guest post by Prakash Panangaden

The Association of Computing Machinery has chartered a new special interest group (SIG) focussed on logic and computation. The new group, called SIGLOG, was chartered in April and was announced to the community at an event on the 15th of July at FLoC. There were about 100 people in attendence and the SIGLOG Chair (Prakash Panangaden) gave a brief presentation of the new group, its structure, aims and contributions to the logic and computation community. At the end of June membership stood at 111 and it is hoped that the group will grow to at least 200 by the end of July. The eventual target membership for the group is 500.
Information about SIGLOG can be found at siglog.org where there is a Chair’s statement and a link to the page to join SIGLOG.

SIGLOG publishes an electronic newsletter for its members quarterly; the first issue was released on 1st July. This newsletter will feature columns on Automata, Complexity, Security, Semantics and Verification. Volunteers are requested to help with the running of SIGLOG and the newsletter. In particular there was interest expressed by some of those present in joining the SIGLOG education committee. There will be another event on the 22nd of July run by Rajeev Alur.

International Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE)
Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Reasoning
presented to

Robert L. Constable

in recognition of his pioneering research in automated reasoning, such as his seminal contributions to the foundations of computational type theory; the creation of Nuprl, the first constructive type theory based theorem prover; the development of the correct-by-construction programming paradigm; and their applications to verification and synthesis of computer systems, including distributed computing.

Presented at

IJCAR 2014
The 7th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning
July 19, 2014

Maria Paola Bonacina
President of CADE Inc.

The IJCAR 2014 best paper award will be given to

Approximations for Model Construction

by
Aleksandar Zeljic, Christoph M. Wintersteiger, and Philipp Rummer

The paper presents a new way to integrate approximation techniques into automated reasoning procedures and proves its usefulness for the important case of floating-point arithmetic.

This paper was selected by the IJCAR 2014 Program Committee.
International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR)

The Association for Symbolic Logic presents two of its major awards at this year’s Logic Colloquium at the Vienna Summer of Logic.

The Karp Prize, named for Carol Karp, is awarded every five years for connected body of research, most of which has been completed in the time since the previous prize was awarded. The 2013 Karp Prize is shared between Moti Gitik (Tel Aviv University), Ya’acov Peterzil, (University of Haifa), Jonathan Pila (University of Oxford), Sergei Starchenko (University of Notre Dame), and Alex Wilkie (University of Manchester).

Moti Gitik is being honored for his definitive work on the Singular Cardinals Hypothesis. His earlier work determined the exact consistency strength of the failure of the Singular Cardinals Hypothesis. His deep understanding led to a counterexample to the PCF conjecture, for which he is being awarded his share of the Karp prize. Matt Foreman will discuss Gitik’s work at 3 pm on Saturday.

Kobi Peterzil, Jonathan Pila, Sergei Starchenko, and Alex Wilkie shared the other half of the 2013 Karp Prize for their efforts in turning the theory of o-minimality into a sharp tool for attacking conjectures in number theory, which culminated in the solution of important special cases of the André-Oort Conjecture by Pila. The award lecture was given by Matthias Aschenbrenner on Tuesday, his slides are online.

The Gödel Lecture is an invited address delivered each year, alternating between the ASL Annual Meeting and the Logic Colloquium. The ASL Committee on Prizes and Awards is charged with selecting the Gödel Lecturer based on outstanding contributions to logic through research and scholarship.

The 2014 Gödel Lecturer is Julia F. Knight (Notre Dame University). She is being honored for her work on model theory and recursion theory. Julia Knight has been among the main contributors, if not the main one, to the area of computable structure theory. Her work continues to be extremely influential in the area. She is also well-known for her theorems on the upward closure of degree spectra of non-trivial structures. Her work with Ash and Slaman on generic copies of structures became a standard tool that has been used to solve a whole variety of problems.
Knight will speak at 5:30 pm on Saturday.

Guest post for RTA-TLCA

Sylvain Schmitz received the RTA-TLCA Best Paper Award for solving by his paper “Relevance Logic is 2-ExpTime-Complete” a problem open for 25 years. The proof uses reductions to and from coverability in branching vector addition systems.

Łukasz Czajka received the RTA-TLCA Best Student Paper Award for “A Coinductive Confluence Proof for Infinitary Lambda-Calculus”. Łukasz avoids the use of ordinals and metric convergence, making the proof thus better suitable for formalisation in a proof-assistant.

The awards were handed over during the RTA-TLCA dinner at a Viennese “Heurigen” on July 17.

RTA = Int. Conf. on Rewriting Techniques and Applications
TLCA = Int. Conf. on Typed Lambda Calculi and Applications

Design and production of awards: Barta Pokale, http://www.barta-pokale.at

Guest post by Anuj Dawar (President of the EACSL)

The Ackermann Award is given by the European Association for Computer Science Logic annually since 2005 to an outstanding doctoral dissertation in the area of Logic in Computer Science. The tenth Ackermann award will be presented on Friday, 18 July, at 17.00 in Hörsaal 1.

The winner of the 2014 Ackermann Award is Michael Elberfeld for his thesis “Space and Circuit Complexity of Monadic Second-Order Definable Problems on Tree-Decomposable Structures”. He will present a lecture on his thesis work at the ceremony.

Wie stapelt Bill Gates seine Pfannkuchen? Wie verpackt man die Geschichte der Logik in Comics, und was hat Sex mit Algorithmen zu tun? Über 100 Leute hörten heute in der LogicLounge am Karlsplatz Christos Papadimitriou und Helmut Veith. Mehr davon ab morgen:

http://vsl2014.at/public-events/
https://www.facebook.com/events/311078059050577/

The pancake sorting problem

How does Bill Gates sort a stack of pancakes? How to present the history of logic in a comic, and what has sex got to do with algorithms? Over 100 people attended today’s LogicLounge with Christos Papadimitriou und Helmut Veith. More LogicLounge starting tomorrow:

http://vsl2014.at/public-events/
https://www.facebook.com/events/311078059050577/