28th Estonian Winter School in Computer Science

The 28th edition of the Estonian Winter School in Computer Science was held in the period 2-5 March in Viinistu, a small fishing village located on the coast of the Gulf of Finland. This edition of the school was organised by Cybernetica AS and the programme/organising committee included 

• Peeter Laud (Cybernetica AS), 
• Monika Perkmann (Tallinn University of Technology),
• Pille Pullonen-Raudvere (Cybernetica AS),
• Ago-Erik Riet (University of Tartu) and
• Tarmo Uustalu (Reykjavik University and Tallinn University of Technology). 

The main objective of this series of winter schools is to expose Estonian, Baltic, and Nordic graduate students in computer science (but also interested students from elsewhere) to research topics that are usually not covered within the regular curricula. 

This year's edition of the school featured four courses, each consisting of four hours of lectures and three hours of exercises. Renato Neves (University of Minho, Braga, Portugal) delivered a course on "Reasoning precisely about imprecisions (metric program equialence)". Matej Pavlović (Near One) gave a course on "Distributed consensus, state machine replication and Byzantine fault tolerance". Miklós Simonovits (Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Hungary) spoke about "Extremal graph theory and related areas". Finally, I contributed some lectures on "The equational logic of concurrent processes: Results and proof techniques".  

I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in this winter school. It was a great pleasure to learn from the other lecturers and to interact with the young researchers and students, including several BSc ones, who attended the event in a relaxed and idyllic setting. The organisation of the event was perfect and allowed all participants plenty of opportunities to discuss topics related to research, academic life and their studies with the lecturers and the organisers. We also had a lot of fun listening to the humorous presentations delivered at CRAPcon'26, including talks on pets in the wild, the Fibonacci properties of the broccolo romanesco, node equality in graphs, and reasons one should not enrich (in category theory and beyond). 

The organisers of the Estonian Winter School deserve the appreciation of the computer science community for their efforts over about 30 years. To my mind, events of this type have a huge positive influence on young computer scientists, some of whom then decide to pursue PhD studies and a research career. Organising the editions of the school for such a long period of time requires a lot of work and this type of contribution to the community is often not sufficiently recognised when evaluating an academic for positions or promotions. 

For the little that it might be worth, let me thank the organisers, the other lecturers and all the attendees for a lovely event, which rekindled a little, much-needed optimism in me in very troubled times. 

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 dissertation-award@eatcs.org 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 dissertation-award@eatcs.org 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 -  secretary@eatcs.org. 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.