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Event Announcement
Conference in Honor of Jean-Yves Girard 60th's Birthday

Communicated by LICS
 
Location: Henri Poincaré Institute, Paris
Date: September 10-12, 2007
URL: http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/jyg60/index-en.php

The journées Jean-Yves Girard are one of the two events which celebrate Jean-Yves Girard's deep achievements in Mathematics and in Computer Science, and the pervasive influence of his ideas in those disciplines and beyond.

They will take place immediately after Jean-Yves Girard's birthday and they follow the companion workshop of Sienna (may 17-20 2007).

The choice of invited speakers illustrates the wide range of scientific interests of Jean-Yves Girard over thirty-five years, from the complexity of proofs to quantum mechanics, from system F to the geometry of computation, from denotational semantics to Von Neumann algebras.



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Call for Submissions
Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Special Issue on Computational Logic-Based Systems

Communicated by Francesca Toni
 
Deadline: July 15, 2007
URL: http://users.encs.concordia.ca/~bentahar/CLbA-JAAMAS.htm

The use of formal methods in general and computational logic in particular has gained an increasing interest within recent research into distributed artificial intelligence. Computational logic provides a rigorous framework for specifying, developing, and verifying autonomous interacting agents and multi-agent systems. As a consequence, over the last decade, computational logic has been playing a fundamental role in developing powerful and verifiable agent-based systems. 

This special issue aims at providing a platform for researchers to present innovative and mature results in specifying, developing and verifying computational logic-based agents and multi-agent systems. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following topics:
 We encourage submissions of high quality, original papers, which are not simultaneously submitted for publication elsewhere. Papers should be formatted according to the journal style, and not exceed 20 pages including figures, references, etc. The papers must be submitted via the journal web submission route, with the special issue option selection.



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Software Announcement
New Release of PAKCS (Version 1.8.0)

Communicated by Michael Hanus
 
URL: http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~pakcs/

Dear Colleagues,

I like to announce the availability of a new major release of PAKCS. The new version 1.8.0 is available for downloading via the usual web page
http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~pakcs/
This version subsumes the numerous improvements of the previous minor releases. In addition, it has a change in the code generation so that does no longer perform eta-expansion (i.e., translation of all equations to first-order rules).
This has some consequences to the implementation of I/O actions that have been changed accordingly. Moreover, the implementation of dynamic web pages (library HTML) is substantially changed (cool down, only the implementation, not the interface).

Please have a look at the release notes for more details: http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~pakcs/RELNOTES.html

Have fun and let me know any problems, suggestions etc,

Michael



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Symposium and Forum Announcement
MIT Information Quality Industry Symposium

Communicated by Peter Aiken
 
URL: http://mitiq.mit.edu

The MIT IQ Industry Symposium is designed to help organizations address data quality issues through discussions among practitioners, vendors, and academicians.  In addition to presentations and workshops, the Symposium will include topics such as vendor presentations, product announcements, and consultancy methods that
will complement the annual International Conference on Information Quality at MIT (see http://mitiq.mit.edu).



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Forum Announcement
List of Open Problems in Typed Lambda Calculi and Applications

Communicated by Luca Paolini

URL:  http://tlca.di.unito.it/opltlca/

The List (modeled after the  RTA LOOP) is now made available at the URL above. It aims at collecting unresolved questions (and other relevant information, e.g. about solutions and related results) in the subject areas of the TLCA (Typed Lambda Calculi and Applications)  series of conferences. The initial list consists of 21 problems dated from 1958 to 2007.

Everyone is invited to submit new problems, solutions and comments to tlca@mimuw.edu.pl or to any of the  three editors:

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Book Announcement
Programming in Haskell

 Communicated by G. Hutton
 
Title: Programming in Haskell
Reference: Graham Hutton Cambridge University Press, 2007, ISBN 0-521-69269-5
 URL: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/book.html

Haskell is one of the leading languages for teaching functional programming, enabling students to write simpler and cleaner code,  and to learn how to structure and reason about programs. This introduction is ideal for beginners: it requires no previous  programming experience and all concepts are explained from first principles via carefully chosen examples.  Each chapter includes  exercises that range from the straightforward to extended projects, plus suggestions for further reading on more advanced topics. The  presentation is clear and simple, and benefits from having been  refined and class-tested over several years.  The result is a text that can be used with courses, or for self-learning.

Features include: freely accessible powerpoint slides for each chapter; solutions to exercises, and examination questions (with solutions) available to instructors; downloadable code that's  fully compliant with the latest Haskell release.

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Forum Announcement
Prolog Standardization Discussion Forum

Communicated by Paulo Moura

URL: http://prolog.logtalk.org/

I'm setting up public Prolog standardization discussion forums at:
http://prolog.logtalk.org/
The forums are open to all people willing to contribute to improve the current Prolog standards and standardization proposals.

My hope is that by making the current standardization process more open and public we can attract more interested parties and more feedback on the current proposals. The current model of using mailing lists is too closed and restricted and only a few people are able to attend and participate in the official ISO meetings.

In the forums you will find links to the current standardization proposals and to some of the earlier mailing list discussions. A wiki is also planned in the near future to allow forum discussions to be summarized, providing a more suitable collaboration tool to get the text of the final standardization proposals in shape for balloting.
All the best,

Paulo

P.S. I will be personally paying for the hosting costs, hence the domain name used for the forums.

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Book Announcement
Finite Model Theory and its Applications

 Communicated by Moshe Y. Vardi
 
Title: Finite Model Theory and Its Applications
Reference: Erich Graedel, Phokion G. Kolaitis, Leonid Libkin, Maarten Marx, Joel Spencer, Moshe Y. Vardi, Yde Venema, and Scott Weinstein. Springer, 2007, 437 pages, hardcover, ISBN: 978-3-540-00428-8.
URL: http://www.springer.com/978-3-540-00428-8

From the back cover: This book gives a comprehensive overview of central topics in finite model theory - expressive power of logics, descriptive complexity, and zero-one laws - together with selected applications relating to database theory and artificial intelligence, especially constraint databases and constraint satisfaction problems. The final chapter provides a concise modern introduction to modal logic, emphasizing the interaction with finite model theory. The underlying theme of the book is the use of  first-order, second-order, fixed-point, and infinitary logic, as well as various fragments of and hierarchies within these logics, to gain insight into phenomena and problems in complexity theory and combinatorics.

The book emphasizes the use of combinatorial games, such as extensions and refinements of the Ehrenfeucht-Fraissi games, as a powerful way to analyze the expressive power of logics, and illustrates how sophisticated notions from model theory and combinatorics, such as o-minimality and treewidth, arise naturally in the applications of finite model theory to database theory and artificial intelligence.

Students of logic and computer science will find here the tools necessary to embark on research into finite model theory, and all readers will experience the excitement of a vibrant area of the applications of logic to computer science.

Table of contents:
  1. Unifying Themes in Finite Model Theory
  2. On the Expressive Power of Logics on Finite Models
  3. Finite Model Theory and Descriptive Complexity
  4. Logic and Random Structures
  5. Embedded Finite Models and Constraint Databases
  6. A Logical Approach to Constraint Satisfaction
  7. Local Variations on a Loose Theme: Modal Logic and Decidability


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Book Announcement
Stochastic Relations: Foundations for Markov Transition Systems

 Communicated by Ernst-Erich Doberkat
 
Title: Stochastic Relations: Foundations for Markov Transition Systems
Reference: Ernst-Erich Doberkat (University of Dortmund, Germany) Chapman & Hall/CRC Studies in Informatics Series, vol. 1, Chapman & Hall, Baton Rouge and New York, ISBN 1-584-889-411, 376 pages, 2007,

Collecting information previously scattered throughout the vast literature, including the author's own research, "Stochastic  Relations: Foundations for Markov Transition Systems" develops the theory of stochastic relations as a basis for Markov transition systems.

After an introduction to the basic mathematical tools from topology, measure theory, and categories, the book examines the central topics of congruences and morphisms, applies these to the monoidal structure, and defines bisimilarity and behavioral equivalence within this framework. The author views developments from the general theory of coalgebras in the context of the subprobability functor. These tools show that bisimilarity and behavioral and logical equivalence are the same for general modal logics and for continuous time stochastic logic with and without a fixed point operator.

With numerous problems and several case studies, this book is an in depth study of an important aspect of computer science theory.

Table of Contents

PREFACE

A GENTLE INTRODUCTION TO ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
Introduction
Measurable Spaces
Polish and Analytic Spaces
Measurable Selectors
Probability Measures
Categories

STOCHASTIC RELATIONS AS MONADS
Introduction
The Manes Monad
The Giry Monad
Case Study: Architectural Modeling through Monads

EILENBERG-MOORE ALGEBRAS FOR THE GIRY MONAD
Introduction
Characterization through Equivalence Relations
Positive Convex Structures
Algebras through Positive Convex Structures
Examples
The Left Adjoint

THE EXISTENCE OF SEMI-PULLBACKS
Introduction
A Road Map
Extending Semi-Pullbacks of Measures
The Existence of Semi-Pullbacks

CONGRUENCES AND BISIMULATIONS
Introduction
Smooth Equivalence Relations
Factoring
Bisimulations
Behavioral Equivalence and a Portmanteau
2-Bisimulations
Simple Relations
Case Study: The Converse of a Stochastic Relation
Case Study: Simple Relations for Counting

INTERPRETING MODAL AND TEMPORAL LOGICS
Introduction
Modal Logics
Projective Limits for Interpreting Temporal Logics
F-Bisimulations for CSL
Logical Equivalence for muCSL

NOTATIONS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

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