Category Archives: VSL Blog

VSL keynote recordings now online

Missed one of the VSL keynote talks by Dana Scott, Christos Papadimitriou, Alex Wilkie, Franz Baader and Edmund Clarke? Never mind, you can now (re)watch all the keynote talks online:

Dana Scott · Christos Papadimitriou · Alex Wilkie · Franz Baader · Edmund M. Clarke

Dana Scott: VSL Opening
Christos Papadimitriou: Computational Ideas and the Theory of Evolution – Abstract

Alex Wilkie: The theory and applications of o-minimal structures – Abstract

Franz Baader: Ontology-Based Monitoring of Dynamic Systems – Abstract

Edmund M. Clarke: Verification of Computer Systems with Model Checking – Abstract

KR 2014 Best Paper Awards

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

[Photos] LogicLounge: Gottlob, Zach, Bloem, Cook

Meeting place for friends of logic at Heuer Coffee Bar Garden Restaurant during Vienna Summer of Logic 2014 • Insights in exactly one hour live and in public • Tribute to antique philosophical symposium

Treffpunkt für FreundInnen der Logik im “Heuer am Karlsplatz” während des Vienna Summer of Logic 2014 • Erläuterungen in exakt einer Stunde live und vor Publikum • Reverenz an antikes philosophisches Symposium

There are two more dates of LogicLounge coming up:

  • July 22: Drones with a guilty conscience: the ethics of Artificial Intelligence
    Moshe Vardi (Rice U) – Herbert Hrachovec (U Wien)
  • July 23: Female logics
    Magdalena Ortiz (TU Wien), Ruzica Piskac (Yale U) – Tanja Traxler (Der Standard)

http://vsl2014.at/logiclounge/

Photos © VSL 2014 / Photography: Nadja Meister

VCLA International Student Awards

VCLAThe 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:

Outstanding Master Thesis Award

Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award

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

Ezio Bartocci Simone Bova Michael Fink
Robert Ganian Igor Konnov Tomer Kotek
Roman Kutzmets Magdalena Ortiz Revantha Ramanayake
Mantas Simkus Daniel Weller Florian Zuleger
Véronique Cortier

[Photos] FLoC Plenary Talks

FLoC plenary talks by Véronique Cortier (Electronic voting: how logic can help?) and Orna Kupferman (From Reachability to Temporal Specifications in Game Theory)

Photos © VSL 2014 / Photography: Sara Meister

Orna Kupferman Orna Kupferman Véronique Cortier Véronique Cortier

SIGLOG Launch event 15th July

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.

2nd VSL Joint Award Ceremony

The first VSL Joint Award Ceremony last week was a huge success. Join us today at 4.30pm in Main Building, Kuppelsaal for the second Joint Award Ceremony.

VSL Joint Award Ceremony

Kurt Gödel Medal

© Münze Österreich AG

In the Award Ceremony of the FLoC Olympic Games with a laudation by Edmund M. Clarke, the teams of 9 different competitions receive Gödel medals for their contributions to the development of efficient solvers from the wide field of satisfiability solvers to automatic theorem provers and term rewriters, from declarative logic programming solvers and ontology reasoners to automated software verifiers, from programs that check models of hardware designs to solvers that automatically synthesize computer programs, and to provers that test program termination.

Werner “Jimmy” DePauli-Schimanovich is being honored for his contributions to Gödel research, for his efforts towards re-establishing Vienna as a center of logic in the second half of the past century, and for extending the outreach of formal logic and logical thinking to other disciplines.

Zhang Mingyi is awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Kurt Gödel Society for pioneering research in Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation in China especially for mathematical characterizations of various forms of non-monotonic reasoning.

Maria Magdalena Ortiz de la Fuente is receiving the EMCL Distinguished Alumni Award 2014 for her outstanding contributions to the field of Computational Logic.

The award ceremony concludes with the FLoC closing of week 2.

  • FLoC Olympic Games Award Ceremony 2
    • Fifth Answer Set Programming Competition (ASPCOMP 2014)
    • The 7th IJCAR ATP System Competition (CASC-J7)
    • Hardware Model Checking Competition (HWMCC 2014)
    • OWL Reasoner Evaluation (ORE 2014)
    • Satisfiability Modulo Theories solver competition (SMT-COMP 2014)
    • Competition on Software Verification (SV-COMP 2014)
    • Syntax-Guided Synthesis Competition (SyGuS-COMP 2014)
    • Synthesis Competition (SYNTCOMP 2014)
    • Termination Competition (termCOMP 2014)
  • Werner Depauli-Schimanovich – Lifetime Achievement Award
  • Mingyi Zhang – Lifetime Achievement Award
  • European Masters Program In Computational Logic EMCL Distinguished Alumni Award
  • FLoC Closing Week 2