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.