[DL] Tableaux 2003 TCS elections

[Tableaux 2003]

Dear All,
Nomination of candidates for the Tableau Steering Committee is 
completed. Five people have been proposed, four accepted.
You will find the names and a short statement below.

The election will take place at the Tableau Business Meeting in
Rome, Friday September 12, 17:00.

Looking forward to meeting you there.

Peter H. Schmitt
(TSC Vice President) 



====================================================================
Peter Baumgartner

My main research area is automated deduction, with focus on classical
first-order logic and rule-based knowledge representation
languages. For this, I consider Tableau calculi and their
implementations, and I am particularly interested in practical
applications.

I attended the TABLEAUX conferences (workshops) from the very
beginning on, and I co-authored four TABLEAUX workshop and four
TABLEAUX conference contributions. I served on the programme committee
several times, was the publicity chair in 2001 (when Tableau joined
IJCAR) and co-edited the proceedings of the 1995 meeting.

Concerning the future of TABLEAUX, I think it is important to preserve
its status as an attractive and established conference. To this end, I
am very much in favor of co-locating TABLEAUX with related conferences
or workshops (as FTP - First-Order Theorem Proving) and also
integrating Tableaux into IJCAR.

==================================================================
Bernhard Beckert:

TABLEAUX has come a long way from its beginnings as a workshop in a
small village in the Black Forest to a well-established annual
conference.  In recent years it faces some fundamental problems, in
particular a decreasing number of submissions - as do all the other
Automated Reasoning conferences.

Many believe that this is mainly due to an increasing fragmentation
and propose joint events, such as IJCAR, as the solution. They are
definitely right, but there is another reason as well: Automated
Deduction has developed into a mature field. And although that is a
basically positive development, obtaining new results is becoming
increasingly difficult. As a consequence we have seen at TABLEAUX more
and more papers on new calculi for non-classical logics (which is fine
as long as the logics are not too obscure). 

I believe that TABLEAUX should make more use of the positive effects
of a maturing research field: More and more possible applications
emerge, and many researchers now work on applying tableau calculi. I
myself am (still) interested in, using, and developing new
tableau-like calculi. But my focus has shifted from fundamental
questions - equality handling, skolemisation, free variables - towards
applications of tableau calculi in software verification.  

TABLEAUX should embrace areas where tableau-like calculi are applied
(such as verification, knowledge representation, computer algebra,
etc.) and should try to attract papers from these research fields.


My views on the future of TABLEAUX are: 

* TABLEAUX is part of a joint conference (IJCAR) every second or third
  year. In particular, TABLEAUX does not join FLoC as a separate
  conference but as part of IJCAR. This allows a close interaction
  with the other sub-fields of automated deduction and gives the
  automated reasoning community a high visibility.

* TABLEAUX is a separate conference at least every second year,
  possibly co-located with (small) related events such as FTP and
  TPHOL. Thus, TABLEAUX preserves its identity and allows for the closer
  interaction of its participants that is only possible at small
  events. We should also not forget that there are researchers in the
  tableau community who are not interested in automated reasoning and
  will only participate in TABLEAUX when it is not part of IJCAR.

* TABLEAUX tries to attract more papers on the application of
  tableau-like calculi, by selecting researchers from application
  areas as invited speakers or even members of the program committee
  and by co-locating with workshops or conferences from these areas.

* The standards of the refereeing process have always been very high
  at TABLEAUX. Since a good refereeing process is one of the best ways
  to attract good papers, we have to work hard to keep it that way.
  In particular, the way we use the software for electronic PC
  meetings is not always optimal and should be improved.


My relation to TABLEAUX: 

I have done research on tableau-like calculi for the last ten years,
attended all TABLEAUX workshops and conferences, published nine papers
in the TABLEAUX conference series, gave a tutorial at TABLEAUX'99, and
have been on the program committee since 1999.

=====================================================================
Jean Goubault-Larrecq

Jean Goubault-Larrecq is professor of computer science
at ENS Cachan, a leading "grande cole" near Paris, France.
He is head of the INRIA Futurs SECSI team; one of the
main themes of this team is formal and automated verification
of security properties of cryptographic protocols and
programs.  Jean Goubault-Larrecq has about 40 publications
in areas of automated deduction (BDDs, tableaux), lambda-calculus
(and in particular calculi of explicit substitutions),
modal logics and algebraic topology, and computer security.
	He has been a regular member of the Tableau
programme committee since 1994.
	See http://www.lsv.ens-cachan.fr/~goubault/?lang=en


Statement:

The Tableaux conferences are now well-established in the
landscape of logic conferences today, with a steady pool
of submissions each year.  While Tableaux is no LICS or
CADE, it manages to attract sufficient submissions of
good quality each year to get a respectable status.
	Nevertheless, Tableaux is in need of a definition
of its purpose, if only to define its social utility,
compared to the leading conferences of the field.
In particular, Tableaux could be a place for papers
on tableaux methods for various exotic logics, but
exotic logics should not be the foundations of Tableaux.
The relationships with domains such as description
logics, BDD, and other "related methods" should also
be reinforced.
	For that matter, regular colocations or
associations with conferences in nearby domains
is welcome, provided Tableaux does not get swamped
among a zillion other conferences.  In other words,
I am in favour of other IJCARs (which was profitable
to the Tableux community), not of other FLoCs.
	
====================================================================
Neil Murray

I am honored to have been nominated to serve on the Tableaux Steering
Committee.  I'll give a brief synopsis of my research interests and
professional duties, followed by some comments on my perception of
TABLEAUX vis-a'-vis the logic and computing community.

My main research interest is in automated deduction; this has
included both theoretical and experimental studies. The development of
inference techniques for negation normal form (NNF) formulas and
related tableau-based techniques is central.

NNF-based techniques are also promising for producing
a representation of the models of a (propositional) formula.
This capability is important for many more practical applications
than was previously thought to be the case. Planning is one
example, and fault-diagnosis is another. These issues are closely
related to recent developments in ``Decomposable Negation Normal
Form (DNNF)'' (Darwiche, J.ACM (48,4), July 2001) and to my 
contribution (with Erik Rosenthal) in the upcoming TABLEAUX.

I am currently a Professor and the Chair in the Department of Computer
Science, University at Albany, USA, as well as co-Director of the
Institute for Informatics, Logics, and Security Studies there.
I am the Treasurer and ex-officio Trustee of CADE, Inc.

In the last six years or so, there has been much discussion of the
various logic communities and the extent to which they form in total
a large global community. Here is a statement I made about three
years ago:

    TABLEAUX is one of many logic related conferences that
    may have arisen as a result of both positive and
    negative forces. It has fostered much good work that
    otherwise would perhaps not have found a home, yet
    contributes somewhat to fragmentation of the wider
    community. To counter fragmentation while retaining our
    identity, I lean towards alternating (in some fashion)
    joint and independent conferences; the joint events can
    be co-located with other(s) such as in 2000, or held as
    a more general federated event such as FLoC or the
    proposed IJCAR.

In the intervening time, I've played a role as CADE Trustee in the
decisions that have led to participation of both TABLEAUX and CADE
in various FLoC and IJCAR meetings. Things seemed to have worked
out not too differently from what I had suggested. The current
pattern seems to be roughly that of three year cycles of 1) IJCARs,
2) FLoCs, and 3) independent meetings. I believe this is working
well so far.  Both 2) and 3) help preserve the identity of the
individual communities (which I favor), while both 1) and 2)
contribute to cross-fertilization amongst them (which I also favor).

Of course, it is not necessary to preserve this pattern precisely.
But I favor maintaining this balance, at least to some extent,
in the future.




-- 

TABLEAUX 2003 Organizing Committee

http://tab2003.dia.uniroma3.it

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