26-30 Mar 2012
Cambridge, U.K.
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Newton Institute Workshop
"Logical Approaches to Barriers in Complexity II"
26 - 30 March 2012
http://www.newton.ac.uk/programmes/SAS/sasw01.html
Organisers: Arnold Beckmann (Swansea) and Anuj Dawar (Cambridge)
in association with the Newton Institute programme
"Semantics and Syntax: A Legacy of Alan Turing"
Deadline for application for participation: 26th January 2012
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Computational complexity theory has its origin in logic. The
fundamental goal of this area is to understand the limits of
efficient computation (that is understanding the class of
problems which can be solved quickly and with restricted
resources) and the sources of intractability (that is what takes
some problems inherently beyond the reach of such efficient
solutions). The most famous open problem in the area is the P =
NP-problem, listed among the seven Clay Millenium Prize problems.
Logic provides a multifarious toolbox of techniques to analyse
questions like this, some of which promise to provide deep
insights in the nature and limits of efficient computation.
In our workshop, we shall focus on logical descriptions of
complexity, i.e. descriptive complexity, propositional proof
complexity and bounded arithmetic. Despite considerable progress
by research communities in each of these areas, the main open
problems remain. In finite model theory the major open problem is
whether there is a logic capturing on all structures the
complexity class P of polynomial time decidable languages. In
bounded arithmetic the major open problem is to prove strong
independence results that would separate its levels. In
propositional proof complexity the major open problem is to prove
strong lower bounds for expressive propositional proof systems.
The workshop will bring together leading researchers covering all
research areas within the scope of the workshop. We will
especially focus on work that draws on methods from the different
areas which appeal to the whole community.
TUTORIAL SPEAKERS:
Samuel R. Buss (University of California, San Diego)
Stephan Kreutzer (Technische Universität Berlin)
INVITED SPEAKERS:
Albert Atserias (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya [UPC])
Yijia Chen (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)
Stefan Dantchev (Durham University)
Arnaud Durand (Université Denis-Diderot Paris 7)
Bjarki Holm (University of Cambridge)
Juha Kontinen (University of Helsinki)
Jan Krajicek (Charles University in Prague)
Phuong The Nguyen (University of Montreal)
Rahul Santhanam (University of Edinburgh)
Nicole Schweikardt (Goethe University)
Neil Thapen (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic)
SPECIAL EVENING LECTURE:
Andrew Hodges (Oxford University)
PARTICIPATION:
The application form for participation in this workshop
can be found at
http://www.newton.ac.uk/cgi/wsapply?CODE=SASW01
The Deadline for receiving the application is
26th January 2012
CONTACT:
For further questions concerning this workshop please contact
a.beckmann<at>swansea.ac.uk