EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award 2025 -- Call for Nominations

It's the time of the year for the standard call for nominations for EATCS Awards. Today, I am reposting the call for nominations for the EATCS Distinguished Dissertation Award 2025. See below and here for details. 

Do spread the news and encourage worthy candidates to submit their theses for this accolade!

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The EATCS establishes the Distinguished Dissertation Award to promote and
recognize outstanding dissertations in the field of Theoretical Computer
Science.

Any PhD dissertation in the field of Theoretical Computer Science that has been
successfully defended in 2025 is eligible.

Up to three dissertations will be selected by the committee for year 2025. The
dissertations will be evaluated on the basis of originality and potential impact
on their respective fields and on Theoretical Computer Science.

Each of the selected dissertations will receive a prize of 1000 Euro. The award
receiving dissertations will be published on the EATCS web site, where all the
EATCS Distinguished Dissertations will be collected.

The dissertation must be submitted by the author as an attachment to an email
message sent to the address [email protected] with subject EATCS
Distinguished Dissertation Award 2025 by February 28th, 2026 (CET). The deadline
is strict and late submissions will not be considered.

The body of the message must specify: Name and email address of the candidate;
Title of the dissertation; Department that has awarded the PhD and denomination
of the PhD program; Name and email address of the thesis supervisor; Date of the
successful defence of the thesis.

A five-page abstract of the dissertation and a letter by the thesis supervisor
certifying that the thesis has been successfully defended must also be included.
In addition, an endorsement letter from the thesis supervisor, and possibly one
more endorsement letter, must be sent by the endorsers as attachments to an
email message sent to the address [email protected] with subject
EATCS DDA 2025 endorsement. The name of the candidate should be clearly
specified in the message.

The dissertations will be selected by the following committee:

Standa Zivny (chair)
Petra Berenbrink
Loukas Georgiadis
Kasper Green Larsen
Emanuela Merelli

The award committee will solicit the opinion of members of the research
community as appropriate. Dissertations supervised by members of the selection
committee are not eligible. The EATCS is committed to equal opportunities, and
welcomes submissions of outstanding theses from all authors.

EATCS Fellows 2026 - Call for Nominations

The call for nominations for EATCS Fellows 2026 is out and I copy-paste it below. On behalf of my colleagues in the Fellow Selection Committee 2026, I strongly encourage EATCS members to submit strong nominations.

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EATCS Fellows 2026 - Call for Nominations

Deadline: Saturday, 28 February 2026

The EATCS Fellows Program is established by the Association to recognize outstanding EATCS Members for their scientific achievements in the field of Theoretical Computer Science. The Fellow status is conferred by the EATCS Fellows Selection Committee upon a person having a track record of intellectual and organizational leadership within the EATCS community. Fellows are expected to be "model citizens" of the TCS community, helping to develop the standing of TCS beyond the frontiers of the community. In particular, the program is committed to broad representation and especially encourages nominations from underrepresented groups and research fields.

In order to be considered by the EATCS Fellows Selection Committee, candidates must be nominated by at least four EATCS Members. Please verify your membership at http://www.eatcs.org/.

The EATCS Fellows Selection Committee 2026 consists of

Luca Aceto
Orna Kupferman  (chair)
Stefano Leonardi 
Paul Spirakis

INSTRUCTIONS: Proposals for Fellow consideration in 2026 must be submitted by Friday, 28 February 2026, by email to the EATCS Secretary -  [email protected]. The subject line of the email should read "EATCS Fellow Nomination - < surname of candidate >".

Please note that all nominees and nominators must be EATCS members. A nomination should consist of details on the items below. It can be co-signed by several EATCS members. Two nomination letters per candidate are welcome. 

1. Name of candidate, candidate’s current affiliation and position, candidate’s email address.

2. Short summary of the candidate’s accomplishments (citation – 25 words or less).

3. The most important contributions that qualify the candidate for the rank of EATCS Fellow according to the following two categories: (3.1) Technical achievements, (3.2) Outstanding service to the TCS community. Please limit your description to at most three pages.

4. Nominator(s): Name(s) Affiliation(s), email (s), and relationship to the candidate.

2024 Award Winners announced by Computer Science Canada | Informatique Canada

Computer Science Canada | Informatique Canada has announced the list of recipients of its awards for 2024. 

Members of the TCS community will be pleased to see that Faith Ellen (University of Toronto) is one of the recipients of the Lifetime Achievement Award 2024.  Congratulations Faith!

On a personal note, I am also delighted to see that Nicola Cotumaccio was selected for the Canadian Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award 2024 . Nicola's PhD thesis, entitled Data compression meets automata theory, was supervised by Travis Gagie (Dalhousie University), Nicola Prezza (Ca' Foscari University of Venice) and Catia Trubiani (Gran Sasso Science Institute), as part of a joint Gran Sasso Science Institute-Dalhousie University degree,  and was supported by a scholarship from Dante Labs. 

Nicola was also a co-recipient of the Best PhD thesis award of the Italian Chapter of the EATCS. 

To my mind, the best way to get a glimpse of the work Nicola presented in his award-winning doctoral dissertation is to read the short summary he published in the Bulletin of the EATCS. However, I strongly encourage anyone interested in TCS to have a look at the full dissertation or at the articles on which it is based, including one that was published in the JACM. 

Since February 2024, Nicola has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. I look forward to seeing the developments in his academic career. 

PhD Position in Probabilistic Session Types at the IT University of Copenhagen

Marco Carbone has a PhD position at the IT University Copenhagen in the PROBABILIST project (PROBABILIstic Session Types), funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF-FNU) starting in August or soon thereafter. The project is in cooperation with Nobuko Yoshida at the University of Oxford.

See here for details and encourage suitable students to apply for this exciting PhD position. Spread the news!

Answers to four teaching-related questions from Teaching Affairs at Reykjavik University

The Teaching Affairs Office at Reykjavik University is creating a video in which several faculty members answer some questions related to the principles that guide their pedagogical work. I am taking part in that enterprise and was asked to answer the four questions below. Here are the written versions of the answers I intended to give orally, as a note to myself and in case they are of interest to anyone. 

What would your answers to those questions be? 

Q1: What is your teaching philosophy? or What is your approach to teaching? 

My approach to teaching is eclectic. Overall, I try (and often fail, alas) to create a stimulating learning environment in cooperation with my students and teaching assistants, where anyone should feel safe to make mistakes and learn from them. 

I'll do anything to entice my students to engage actively with the material covered in my courses provided it is in reasonably good taste and conveys my enthusiasm for the subject I'm asked to teach. This includes the much-maligned lecture, since I firmly believe that telling a good story is still one of the best ways we have to inspire our students and to provide the context and intellectual history of the ideas we cover in our courses. However, I view lectures as arenas for a game of intellectual table tennis with the students, as "commedia dell'arte" performances in which we interact and learn from one another. 

Q2: Has your teaching philosophy changed? If so, how and why has it changed? 

At the beginning of my career, I focused too much on the content I thought I was expected to deliver during my courses. However, over the years, I have come to realise that less is more and that we should "distil and conquer". Today, students can access content from a huge variety of sources, but they can't typically get context and enthusiasm for the subject they are learning, which, to my mind, comes from the development of a good story as a course progresses. I also think that we should try to avoid being boring in our teaching. This is especially true when we teach the topics we love in theoretical computer science. Students find those topics exotic, hard and dry, whereas our subject has a long and extremely interesting intellectual heritage that every cultured person should know and that we could covey to our students as keen storytellers. See Scott Aaronson's book and his teaching statement, which I still find inspiring after all these years. 

Q3: How do you promote active learning in your teaching? 

I try to emphasise learning in every component of my teaching. Note that I wrote "learning" because I believe that all learning is an active process. 

Even when I lecture, I do my best to play intellectual table tennis with my students by asking them "why" and "what if" questions, and by encouraging them to think about the concepts we are covering in real time. Apart from using the Socratic method in my lecturing, I set students assignments so that they can deepen their understanding of the course material by practising the skills they have learnt. In several of my courses, I also give students a couple of open-ended group projects that are just beyond their current abilities, so that they can challenge themselves and engage in peer learning. 

The most extreme form of active learning I have used in my teaching is exemplified by an intensive three-week course I designed with Anna Ingolfsdottir and that I have taught each year in the period 2013-2023. After a brief introduction putting the material the students are going to learn and the work they are going to do in context, I give them material they should read and start experimenting with independently by the end of day one of the course. From day two of the course and over the following three weeks, I set students challenges that they tackle in groups at their own speed, acting as a facilitator in the classroom and introducing new course topics on a by-need basis. 

Every year, students rise to the challenge and do work which often goes beyond my expectations and of which they are proud. 

Q4: What have you found to be the most effective active learning strategy in your teaching context?

I don't believe that there is a "most effective active learning strategy". However, having worked at Aalborg University for a decade in a previous life, I have come to appreciate the Aalborg model for problem-based learning as an extremely beneficial strategy to foster creativity, critical thinking and the ability to learn independently in students. To my mind, Reykjavik University would stand to gain by embracing more aspects of problem-based learning in earnest. 

Call for papers - GandALF 2025

If you do research on any of the topics covered by GandALF, do consider submitting a paper to the conference and making the trip to Malta in mid-September!

Call for papers  - GandALF 2025

The Sixteenth International Symposium on Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification 

will take place in Valletta, Malta, 15-18 September 2025.

Web page: https://gandalfsymposium.github.io/2025/

The aim of the symposium is to bring together researchers from

academia and industry who are actively working in the fields of

Games, Automata, Logics, and Formal Verification. The symposium covers

an ample spectrum of themes, ranging from theory to applications, and

encourages cross-fertilization. Papers focused on formal methods are

especially welcome. Authors are invited to submit original research or

tool papers on all relevant topics in these areas. Papers discussing

new ideas that are at an early stage of development are also welcome.

The topics covered by the conference include, but are not limited to,

the following:

Automata Theory

Automated Deduction

Computational aspects of Game Theory

Concurrency and Distributed Computation

Decision Procedures

Deductive, Compositional, and Abstraction Techniques for Verification

Finite Model Theory

First-order and Higher-order Logics

Formal Languages

Formal Methods for Systems Biology, Hybrid, Embedded, and Mobile Systems

Games and Automata for Verification

Game Semantics

Logical aspects of Computational Complexity

Logics of Programs

Modal and Temporal Logics

Model Checking

Models of Reactive and Real-Time Systems

Program Analysis and Software Verification

Run-time Verification and Testing

Specification and Verification of Finite and Infinite-state Systems Synthesis

## Proceedings:

The proceedings will be published by Electronic Proceedings in

Theoretical Computer Science. Authors of the best papers will be

invited to submit a revised version of their work to an special issue

of Acta Informatica. Selected papers from previous editions appeared

in special issues of the International Journal of Foundation of

Computer Science (GandALF 2010), Theoretical Computer Science (GandALF

2011 and 2012), and Information and Computation (GandALF 2013 and

2014).

## Invited Speakers:

- Radu Mardare (Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland)

- more TBA

## Submissions:

Submitted papers should not exceed fourteen (14) pages using EPTCS

format (please use the LaTeX style provided at https://style.eptcs.org),

be unpublished and contain original research. For papers reporting 

experimental results, authors are encouraged to make their data

available with their submission.

Submissions must be in PDF format and will be handled via

EasyChair Conference system at the following address:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=gandalf2025

## Important dates:

Paper submission deadline: 30 May 2025

Acceptance notification: 4 July 2025

Camera-ready deadline: 25 July 2025

## Program Committee:

Elli Anastasiadi (Aalborg University)

Giorgio Bacci (Aalborg University) co-Chair

Giovanni Bernardi (Université Paris Diderot - IRIF)

Udi Boker (Reichman Universtiy)

Laure Daviaud (University of East Anglia)

Mohammed Foughali (IRIF/Université Paris Cité)

Adrian Francalanza (University of Malta) co-Chair

Silvia Ghilezan (University of Novi Sad)

Daniele Gorla (University of Rome "La Sapienza")

Ryan Kavanagh (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Tim Lyon (Technische Universität Dresden)

Mohammad Reza Mousavi (King's College London)

Ocan Sankur (Mitsubishi Electric R&D Centre Europe)

Sarah Winkler (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)

Sarah Winter (IRIF & Université Paris Cité)

... more to be announced

## Steering Committee:

Luca Aceto (Reykjavik University, Iceland)

Javier Esparza (University of Munich, Germany)

Salvatore La Torre (University of Salerno, Italy)

Angelo Montanari (University of Udine, Italy)

Mimmo Parente (University of Salerno, Italy)

Jean-François Raskin (Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)

Martin Zimmermann (Aalborg University, Denmark)

What's your opinion on double-blind reviewing in TCS conferences?

Recent discussions with some colleagues spurred me to read again Ran Canetti's white paper on double-blind reviewing in IACR conferences. I also went back to a post by Boaz Barak and to its discussion thread, as well as to this post that motivated it. I was also reminded of the coverage of single- and double-blind reviewing in this chapter of the book "The Science of Science" (see, for instance, page 25 in that file). I recommend all those resources. 

FWIW, I share Ran Canetti's analysis of the pros and cons of double-blind reviewing. At the end of the day, evaluating scientific papers submitted to conferences and journals is largely a subjective exercise. IMHO, this is especially true for conferences where, apart from a number of clear accepts and clear rejects, a PC typically has to choose a small number of papers from a typically much larger pool of "scientifically equivalent" articles. 

Double-blind reviewing and rebuttals are two ways in which our community tries to make the process of selecting a good programme for a conference---which is, after all, the job description of a conference PC---more objective than it really is. However, I keep wondering whether those steps make a difference, especially in addressing bias, in an age where every scientific contribution should be available online in publicly accessible form before it is submitted to a conference. Shouldn't we simply trust the PC chairs of a conference to make sure that the refereeing process and the PC discussion are as thorough as possible, given the time constraints under which they take place? 

What's your opinion on double-blind reviewing as authors, PC members and PC chairs, especially in conferences in TCS, broadly construed? Do you prefer to submit to conferences that implement double-blind reviewing? If so, why?

I'd be grateful if you could post your opinions as comments to this post.