call for papers, previous message
From: Jana Kohoutkova
Subject: SOFSEM'94
Date: Fri, 8 Jul 1994 12:06:44 +0200 (MET DST)
CALL FOR PAPERS & PARTICIPATION
--------------------------------------------------------------
| |
| SOFSEM'94 |
| |
| XXI-st International Winter School |
| on theoretical and practical aspects of computer science |
| |
--------------------------------------------------------------
November 27 - December 9, 1994
Milovy, Czech Republic
Organized by Czech and Slovak Societies for Computer Science and
Czech ACM Chapter
Subject: SOFSEM (SOFtware SEMinar) is a two-week international winter
school; its aim is to present the state-of-the-art activities across
a wide spectrum of Computer Science. The programme has two kinds of
presentations:
Invited Talks (tutorials by prominent researchers in the field)
Contributed Talks (presentations of original research contributions
by SOFSEM participants).
PROGRAMME OF INVITED TALKS:
==============================================
(see Appendix A for abstracts and biographies)
Bradfield J. (Uni Edinburgh, UK) :Verifying Properties of Concurrent Systems
Eaglestone B. (Uni Bradford, UK) :An Artistic Design System
Gaag L. (Uni Utrecht, Netherlands) :Bayesian Belief Networks: Odds and Ends
Gottlob G. (TU Vienna, Austria) :Expressive Power of Logical DB-queries
Hegedus T. (Comenius Uni, Slovakia):Computational Learning Theory and
Neural Networks
Hopgood B. (RAL, Oxon, UK) :New GKS and Extensions to PHIGS
Jones N. (Uni Copenhagen, Denmark) :Partial Evaluation and Automatic Program
Generation
Jul E. (Uni Copenhagen, Denmark) :Evaluation of the Emerald System
Kleindienst J. (TU Prague, Czechia):Have you tried to talk to your computer
recently ?
Lloyd J. (Uni Bristol, UK) :The Goedel Programming Language
Mellor P. (City Univ, London, UK) :CAD: Computer Aided Disaster
Moessenboeck H. (ETH Zurich): Oberon - 2: A Modern Successor to Pascal
and Modula-2
Reinisch F. (Siemens AG Austria) :Software Configuration Management
in Modern SW Engineering
Schroeder W. (GMD Berlin, Germany) :Scalable Operating Systems
Strakos Z, Tuma M. (Academy of Sci, Prague) :Current Trends in Numerical
Linear Algebra
Voda P. (Uni Bratislava, Slovakia) :Logic as Programming and Programming
as Logic
Zuba G. (Siemens AG Austria) :Software Quality Assurance According to
ISO 9000
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The winter school is the 21st in the series of SOFSEM seminars held
every year. This international winter school follows many successful
meetings; it is intended to foster cooperation among people working in
various areas of computer science.
Its scientific program offers a unique opportunity to gain a relatively
quick and representative overview about the selected parts of computer
science, presented by top researchers. Its social program provides
an optimal framework for discussions, meetings, contact establishing,
and recreation. Especially suited for PhD students and young computer
scientists.
------------------------------------
Venue: The winter school will be held at Conference Center Milovy located
at Bohemian-Moravian Uplands by the town of 'Zdar nad Sazavou'.
The location is easily accessible from airports at Prague or Vienna
(2-3 hours by car, bus or train).
Swimming pool, sauna, fitness-center, day-club and other services are
available. Countryside provides a good opportunity for cross-country
skiing most of the winter season.
Advisory Board: Dines Bjorner (UN University, IIST, Macau)
Peter van Emde Boas (Uni Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Manfred Broy (TU Munich, Germany)
Michal Chytil (Arthur D.Little Int., Prague, CR)
Georg Gottlob (TU Vienna, Austria)
Keith Jeffery (RAL, Oxon, UK)
Maria Zemankova (Mitre Corp, McLean, USA)
Program Committee: Chair - J.Staudek (Technical Univ. Brno),
M.Bartosek (Masaryk Univ., Brno), J.Kral (Masaryk Univ.,Brno),
J.Pavelka (Charles Univ., Prague), F.Plasil (Czech TU, Prague),
I.Privara (Inst. of Informatics and Statistics, Slovakia),
B.Rovan (Comenius Univ., Slovakia), J. Wiedermann (Acad.of Science,
Prague), J. Zlatuska (Masaryk Univ., Brno).
CONTRIBUTIONS:
Contributed Talks: Authors are invited to submit 5 copies (or a postscript
file) of full papers not longer than 4 pages representing their original
work. It is understood that the research reported may also reflect early
research stages, unpolished recent results, or informal expositions.
Presentation time for a Contributed Talk is 25 minutes.
Address for submissions: Miroslav Bartosek
UVT, Masaryk University
Buresova 20, 602 00 Brno
Czech Republic
e-mail: bartosek@muni.cz
Poster session: Full versions of two-page posters in the final form are
expected. Contributions not selected for Contributed Talk category
may be accepted for poster session.
Short communications: Two special evening sessions, devoted to short
communications by SOFSEM participants, will be organized during the
winter school.
Language: The school is conducted in English.
The proceedings including invited papers and accepted contributed papers
will be available at the conference.
Important dates:
----------------
Submission of contributions: June 15
Acceptance notification: September 1
Camera-ready version: September 20
Sofsem'94 winter school: November 27 - December 9, 1994
FEES
The registration fee covers the organization expenses, accommodation
and meals for twelve day winter school, as well as a copy of proceedings.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
until 31st July 1994 double(shared) room single room
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Basic rates $ 350 $ 400
C/S participants 5 000 Kc 6 800 Kc
Members of CIS, SIS, CZ ACM 4 500 Kc 6 300 KC
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
after 31st July 1994:
Basic rates $ 400 $ 450
C/S participants 5 600 Kc 7 400 Kc
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(On-site payment in cash for non C/S participants also possible.)
Additional support for students presenting accepted contributions
may be requested.
Banking : Ceska sporitelna Brno - mesto, Brno, Czech Republic
Account Name : Ceska informaticka spolecnost, pobocka Brno
Account Number : 6851659-628/0800
Detais of Payment: Fill in your name and affiliation.
Organization: For more information regarding SOFSEM'94 and Local
Arrangements (or if you wish to subscribe to Sofsem mailing list
or to deliver a registration form)
please contact:
sofsem@muni.cz
------------------------------------------------------------------
Appendix A - Invited Talks:
Julian Bradfield
University of Cambridge, UK
Verifying Temporal Properties of Concurrent Systems
---------------------------------------------------
The modal mu-calculus is a powerful logic with which to express
properties of concurrent systems. There are algorithms which
allow one to check whether a finite system satisfies a formula
of this logic; but many interesting systems are infinite, or at
least potentially infinite. The talks will be concentrated on an
approach to verifying infinite systems. In the first talk, the
modal mu-calculus will be introduced, both formally and by
example, and then describe the tableau-based technique with
which one can prove properties of systems. The second talk will
illustrate the technique with some case studies, and describe a
prototype tool to provide computer assistance for the human
verifier, and discuss the problems it raises.
....................
Julian Bradfield read Mathematics at the University of
Cambridge, and then in 1987 went to the LFCS in Edinburgh to do
his doctoral thesis with Colin Stirling, on the topic of
``Verifying Temporal Properties of Systems''. After graduating
in 1991, he worked on verification and logic research. He is
currently on the Faculty at Edinburgh, working mainly on the
modal mu-calculus.
Barry Eaglestone
University of Bradford, UK
An Artistic Design System
--------------------------
Artists, like engineers, experience materials and process
management problems. These are analysed, and a solution based
upon adapted engineering design systems technology is
proposed. The artistic design system architecture, object model
and user interfaces described are of the TEMA system. TEMA is
named after a piece of music, and has been designed through
analysis of the working methods of a composer. The design is
being evaluated as a music composition demonstrator. The talk
will review technologies used in the project: object-oriented
database design method, the object-Z formal specification
language, the postgres extended relational database system, and
timbre-space based interfacing technique.
....................
Barry Eaglestone is a lecturer in computer science at the
University of Bradford. He coordinates a research group
involving specialists in music, signal processing and computer
science in Bradford, Stockholm and Berlin. He is author of a
well reviewed text book on relational databases.
Linda van der Gaag
Utrecht University, Netherlands
Bayesian Belief Networks: Odds and Ends
---------------------------------------
In artificial intelligence research, the belief network
framework for reasoning with uncertainty is rapidly gaining in
popularity. The framework provides a flexible formalism for
representing a joint probability distribution on a set of
variables; in addition, it provides algorithms for efficiently
computing probabilities of interest and for processing evidence.
At present, the framework is being employed for various types of
application, ranging from probabilistic information retrieval to
medical diagnosis. This talk will provide an introduction to
the belief network framework and will discuss use of the
framework in diagnostic problem solving.
....................
Linda van der Gaag is assistant professor at the Computer
Science Department of Utrecht University, the Netherlands.
Her research concerns algorithmic aspects of reasoning in
knowledge-based systems; her main interests are in probabilistic
approaches to reasoning with uncertainty and in reason
maintenance.
Georg Gottlob
TU Vienna, Austria
Expressive Power of Logical Database Queries
--------------------------------------------
Logical query languages offer a very flexible and powerful
access to databases. There are basically two types of logical
query languages. The first type has its origin in Logic
Programming. It consists basically of the Datalog language and
its extensions (Datalog + negation, disjunction, etc). The
second type of query language consists of extensions of first
order logic on finite structures with generalized quantifiers
(e.g. Henkin quantifiers). The talk gives a brief survey of
relevant results on both types of languages and present some of
our own results concerning the expressive power of such query
languages, measured in terms of Complexity Theory.
....................
Georg Gottlob holds the position of a Professor of Computer
Science at the Informations Systems Institute of the Vienna
Technical University since 1988. He is currently the head of
this department and of the Christian Doppler Expert Systems
Laboratory. His research interests are: Database Theory, AI,
Computational Logic, and Complexity Theory.
Tibor Hegedus
Department of Computer Science, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia
Computational Learning Theory and Neural Networks
-------------------------------------------------
Computational learning theory is a relatively new field of
theoretical computer science concerned with the formal analysis
of algorithms for machine learning. Its goal is to establish
formal models of the process of learning, and to understand what
can and what cannot be learned efficiently in these models,
providing thus a theoretical basis for the so far mainly
empirical research on machine learning, and perhaps gaining
insight into the human learning process as well. In the paper we
give a short account of some aspects of the results obtained
within the framework of computational learning theory, by
describing several learning models and characterizations of
learnability, and illustrating the considered approaches on
examples taken from the context of learning on feed-forward
neural networks.
....................
Tibor Hegedus received a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Safarik
University, Kosice, Czechoslovakia in 1991. He then enrolled in
Ph.D. study at the Department of Computer Science, Comenius
University, Bratislava, Slovakia. He has been studying
computational learning theory with emphasis on neural networks.
Bob Hopgood
Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon, UK
New GKS and Extensions to PHIGS
-------------------------------
GKS, defined in 1985, is the first ISO graphics standard to be
revised. The review of GKS started in 1987 and has reached the
Draft International Standard stage with the balloting for
acceptance as an International Standard closing in March 1994.
One major change is the introduction of a well-defined abstract
picture which is defined and can be saved, transmitted, or
displayed. The talk will give an Overview of the main changes
incorporated into this new standard. PHIGS, defined in 1989, is
required to be reviewed by ISO by 1994. The main areas of
discussion are non-retained data, improved input functionality,
better control facilities, internationalisation of the text
model and several others. The talk will indicate the progress
made in 1994 with these Amendments.
....................
Bob Hopgood is head of the Informatics Department at the
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK. His interests in
computer graphics dates from 1961 designing a number of graphics
systems in the 1960s and 1970s. He and David Duce are co-editors
of GKS-9X. He is currently Chairman of the Professional Board
of Eurographics and Chairman of the Executive Committee of
ERCIM, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and
Mathematics.
Neil D. Jones
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Partial Evaluation and Automatic Program Generation
---------------------------------------------------
Partial evaluation is automatic program specialization: given a
program and knowledge of some of its input data, a partial
evaluator produces another program which, when run on the
missing data, gives the same result as running the original
program on all its data. One can compile by specializing an
interpreter to a fixed source program. Further, compilers, and
even a compiler generator, can be generated by self-application
-- using the specializer to specialize itself. A special case is
to transform an interpreter into a compiler -- useful because
interpreters are significantly easier to write than compilers,
but have much slower execution than compiled code. The talk
introduces partial evaluation and describes some fully automatic
partial evaluators.
....................
Neil Jones held academic positions at Un. Western Ontario,
Penn State Un., Un. Kansas, Aarhus Un., and Un. of Copenhagen.
Organized several conferences in compiler generation and program
analysis, wrote three books and edited 6, wrote around 60
articles on complexity theory, programming language semantics,
compiler generation, program analysis and transformation.
Eric Jul
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Evaluation of Emerald
---------------------
The Emerald language was originally designed to be used for
distributed programming. It was based on experience with the
Eden system and inherited several important attributes from Eden
including object-orientation and the use of a concurrent
language as the base language. Emerald went further by
introducing abstract types, a flexible dynamic type system,
fine-grained objects, and distribution concepts (such as
on-the-fly mobility) as an integral part of the language. This
talk will give a retrospective view of Emerald and will present
our experience with the system along with the latest
developments of the system.
...................
Eric Jul is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer
Science at the University of Copenhagen. He obtained a Ph.D. at
the University of Washington. He currently heads the group for
Distributed Systems at DIKU. His main research interests
include distributed systems, operating systems, object-oriented
languages, mobile computing, and object-oriented design and
analysis.
Jan Kleindienst
IMB Watson Research Center, USA
Have you tried to talk to your computer recently ?
--------------------------------------------------
The intention of this talk is to present an overview of current
technologies used in the speech recognition area. Speech
recognition can be viewed as a problem defined by three axes:
vocabulary size, degree of speaker independence, and the amount
of silence between words. Think of it as a cube. The left-hand
corner is a small vocabulary of totally speaker-dependent words,
that must be uttered with a distinct pauses between each
(isolated speech). As you move out along any axis, speech
recognition gets harder and harder for the computer. This paper
is going to describe the current state considering the
tree-dimensional space mentioned above.
....................
Jan Kleindienst received the M.S. degree in 1991 from the Czech
University of Technology (CTU), Prague. He is currently working
towards the Ph.D. degree at IBM Watson Research Center,
Hawthorne, USA. His research interests include operating system
development and speech recognition.
John W. Lloyd
University of Bristol, UK
The Goedel Programming Language
------------------------------
The talk will discuss the programming language Goedel, which is
a declarative, general-purpose programming language in the
family of logic programming languages. Goedel supports
infinite precision integers, infinite precision rationals, and
also floating-point numbers. It can solve constraints over
finite domains of integers and also linear rational
constraints. It supports processing of finite sets.
Considerable emphasis is placed on Goedel's meta-logical
facilities which provide significant support for meta-programs
that do analysis, transformation, compilation, verification,
debugging, and so on. The declarative nature of Goedel makes
it particularly suitable for use as a teaching language, narrows
the gap which currently exists between theory and practice in
logic programming.
....................
John Lloyd is a Professor of Computer Science at the University
of Bristol. He has been involved in logic programming research
since 1980 and has published on the theoretical and practical
aspects of a variety of topics in logic programming. He is also
the author of a textbook on the theory of logic programming. He
is currently working on the design and implementation of the
programming language Goedel.
Pete Mellor
City University, London, UK
CAD: Computer-Aided Disaster!
-----------------------------
Computers can kill (or at least, muck you up in other ways)!
This lecture describes a number of recent disasters in which
computers have been wholly or partly to blame, including the
Therac-25, which administered overdoses of radiation to its
patients, the London Ambulance fiasco, the ill-fated Taurus
system, the crashes of the Gripen fly-by-wire fighter, the
failure of the Patriot missile to defend against Scuds and
several others. The accident sequences will be analysed, and
the part played by the inherent weaknesses of computer systems
will be assessed. Recent trends in the design of complex systems
will be examined, and the concept of ``risk homeostasis''
explored. The underlying social and human causes will be
presented and analysed. Naught for your comfort (... just when
you thought it was safe to back into the terminal room!).
....................
Pete Mellor is with the Centre for Software Reliability, which
is specialised in the measurement of various aspects of software
dependability. The general areas of his interest are:
Safety-critical software (particularly the use of software in
avionics), Data collection for the measurement of software
dependability, Standards for software dependability.
Hans P. Moessenboeck
University of Linz, Austria
Oberon-2: A modern successor to Pascal and Modula-2
---------------------------------------------------
Oberon-2 is a streamlined object-oriented language developed at
ETH Zurich by Niklaus Wirth and his co-workers. Among its most
important features are block structure, strong typing, modules
with separate compilation, and extensibility. Oberon programs
run in a special environment that provides garbage collection,
dynamic loading of modules, and multiple entry points to
programs. It constitutes an efficient and extensible working
environment. The language and the system are available on most
platforms and have been used in teaching and research for more
than 5 years. The talk explains the basic features of the Oberon
language and system and shows how both parts can be used to
write extensible software.
....................
Hanspeter Moessenboeck is a Professor of Computer Science at the
University of Linz (Austria). He spent 6 years at ETH Zurich
where he was involved in the development of Oberon-2. His
current interests include operating systems, programming
languages and object-oriented programming.
Franz Reinish
Siemens AG, Austria, Vienna
Software Configuration Management in Modern Software Engineering
----------------------------------------------------------------
Up to date software development has to meet increasing
requirements -- especially those with reference to the quality
of the software development proccess. As state of the art
quality management as well as product and project management
can not be performed without efficient configuration management
(CM) support. The importance of CM for practical work as well
as a field of research is dramatically increasing.
This makes it possible to investigate and compare
already existing concepts and solutions as they have been
provided by different authors and tool-vendors. Based on this
abstraction possible future developments can be discussed
in a much more productive way.
Wolfgang Schroeder
Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Scalable Operating Systems
--------------------------
The talk discusses state-of-the-art microkernel technology in
the light of massively parallel and distributed systems. The
goal is to try to answer the question of whether distributed
(microkernel-based) operating systems are adequate for
distributed-memory parallel computers or whether specific system
software structures are required. If the latter is the case, how
much will these structures differ from or have in common with
distributed (microkernel-based) operating systems. The intent is
to elaborate requirements for an operating system structure
whose implementation need not be bypassed in order to achieve
high-performance. The PEACE parallel operating system will be
used as a case study in the course of exemplifying the various
design approaches. To this end, PEACE will be compared to MACH
(i.e., OSF/1) and CHORUS.
....................
Wolfgang Schroeder-Preikschat studied computer science at the
Technical University of Berlin, Germany, from which he also
received his Ph.D. Currently he is with the German National
Research Center of Computer Science (GMD), Research Institute
for Computer Architecture and Software Technique (FIRST),
Berlin, as a director of the System Software Dept. His main
research interests are distributed/parallel operating systems,
object-oriented software construction, communications systems,
and computer architecture.
Zdenek Strakos, Miroslav Tuma
Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic
Current Trends in Numerical Linear Algebra: From Theory to Practice
-------------------------------------------------------------------
After short remarks on the history, the talk will review the
state-of-the-art in numerical methods and mathematical software
for solving large (possibly sparse) linear systems and mention
some consequences for computing eigenvalues. The talk presents
both the recent mathematical developments important for
understanding and correct using the methods as well as the
implementation issues (questions of numerical stability and
limiting accuracy, characterizing convergence of iterative
methods, data structures and system support, cost of
implementation, etc.). Parallel computer architectures can
ensure substantial speedup of computations, but, on the other
hand, multiply the difficulties by adding new dimensions to the
considerations.
....................
Both authors graduated in applied mathematics from Faculty of
Nuclear Science and Physical Engineering, Czech Technical
University, Prague. They took research positions at the
Institute of Computer Science, Czech Academy of Sciences where
they got PhD. in Computer Science (1986 and 1989). Main
research interests: iterative and direct methods for large-scale
computations, performance evaluation of parallel computers.
Paul Voda
University of Bratislava, Slovak Republic
Logic as Programming and Programming as Logic
---------------------------------------------
The talk will sketch a presentation of lower recursion theory,
basic classical logic and computer programming in an unified
way. Simple programming language Mini-Trilogy which can compute
various classes of recursive functions (polynomially computable,
primitive recursive, epsilon_0-recursive, etc) is based in
logic, is a practical computer programming language with an
efficient compilation. We use Mini-Trilogy in the meta-theory
for the development of first-order logic. By doing this we
emphasize the finitary character of most theorems in logic. It
turns out that to prove a theorem of first-order logic means to
write a Mini-Trilogy program which operates on proofs and then
prove its properties.
....................
Paul Voda has developed compilers for the languages Pascal
(1973), BPS (1977), Trilogy I (1986-87), Trilogy II
(1989-92). The theoretical research into the semantics of the
last two languages was done at the the Universities of Edmonton
and British Columbia (Vancouver) (1980-1988) and the research
into the theme of the talk at the University of Bratislava
(1993-94).
Gerhard Zuba
Siemens AG, Austria
Software Quality Assurance Acording to ISO 9000
-----------------------------------------------
The term of ``Quality'';
Definition of quality, quality policy, quality assurance, quality
system, quality versus cost, schedule and functionality.
Quality monitoring -- Quality Assurance -- Quality Management.
Quality is duty of everyone in the company.
The importance of quality.
Tasks of top-management, project-leaders and assistants.
Series of standards ISO 9000
Objectives and scopes. Field of application. References.
The ISO 9001 Standard Quality-system requirements.
20 elements of quality. The Certificate. Auditing quality systems.
Benefits.
sofsem@muni.cz
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