Logic List Mailing Archive

new ACM special interest group: SIGLOG

Dear Colleague,

I am delighted to announce the formation of a new special interest group 
focussed on logic and computation. The new SIG will be called SIGLOG. The 
officers are: Prakash Panangaden (Chair), Luke Ong (vice-Chair), Natarajan 
Shankar (Treasurer), Alexandra Silva (Secretary). The officers will be 
assisted by an executive committee and an advisory committee. The 
formation of this SIG has taken a long time with a lot of effort put in by 
many people. The idea of such a SIG was first mooted in 2007 by Moshe 
Vardi and Dana Scott and the first draft proposals were written by Vardi 
with input from Martin Abadi, Rajeev Alur and Phokion Kolaitis.

For a long time the logic and computation community has functioned without 
a unifying organization. It has, nevertheless, grown in numbers and 
diversity and there are now many conferences that testify to the vitality 
of the community. Indeed the FLoC cluster of conferences this Summer in 
Vienna is expected to attract 1500 participants. There are, however, many 
ways in which a community-wide organization can serve the community that a 
single-conference-based organization cannot.

SIGLOG aims to serve a broad range of interests. The flagship conference 
will be the ACM-IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science. SIGLOG will 
actively seek association agreements with other conferences in the field. 
A SIGLOG newsletter is planned to be published quarterly in an electronic 
format with community news, technical columns, members? feedback, 
conference reports, book reviews and other items of interest to the 
community. An important activity of SIGLOG will be advocating for the 
importance of logic in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. 
Another important activity will be the establishment of prizes to 
recognize the outstanding contributions made by leading members of the 
community. Several members of the community have won Turing prizes, but 
there is room for much more recognition, especially for younger 
researchers. SIGLOG will collaborate closely with EATCS and EACSL as well 
as other organizations, for example the Gdel Society. SIGLOG will 
maintain close ties with the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic. The 
upcoming Federated Logic Conferences in Vienna (part of the Vienna Summer 
of Logic) will feature a SIGLOG launch event.

SIGLOG seeks to be an inclusive and diverse organization. We are committed 
to encouraging the participation of women in computing and are pleased to 
note that there are many outstanding women leaders in the research areas 
covered by SIGLOG. We actively seek members from all geographical regions 
and from a broad variety of research interests.

It is possible to join SIGLOG as soon as today by filling the form at 
http://www.acm.org/membership/sig-pdfs/SIGLOG.pdf . One can join SIGLOG 
without joining ACM (the SIGLOG membership fee is $25 and $15 for 
students).

Yours sincerely,
Prakash Panangaden
SIGLOG Chair