CONCUR 2002 Conference Report

by Lubos Brim

The 13th International Conference on Concurrency Theory, sponsored by ERCIM, was hosted by the Faculty of Informatics of Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic from 19-24 August 2002. There were 174 registered participants to CONCUR 2002 and its satellite events from 18 countries around the world.

The purpose of the CONCUR conferences is to bring together researchers, developers and students in order to advance the theory of concurrency and promote its applications. Interest in this topic is continuously growing as a consequence of the importance and ubiquity of concurrent systems and their applications, and of the scientific relevance of their foundations. The scope covers all areas of semantics, logics and verification techniques for concurrent systems. Topics include concurrency-related aspects of models of computation and semantic domains, process algebras, Petri nets, event structures, real-time systems, hybrid systems, probabilistic systems, model checking, verification techniques, refinement techniques, term and graph rewriting, distributed programming, logic constraint programming, object-oriented programming, typing systems and algorithms, security, case studies, tools and environments for programming and verification.

The first two CONCUR conferences were held in Amsterdam (NL) in 1990 and 1991, with the following locations being Stony Brook (USA), Hildesheim (D), Uppsala (S), Philadelphia (USA), Pisa (I), Warsaw (PL), Nice (F), Eindhoven (NL), University Park (Pennsylvania, USA), and Aalborg (DK). The proceedings of CONCUR 2002 have appeared in Springer LNCS as volume 2421.

The technical programme of the conference and its satellite events delivered 116 presentations in total, from which 18 were invited talks and invited tutorials. Out of 101 regular papers submitted to CONCUR 2002, 32 were accepted for presentation at the conference. The conference also included five talks by invited speakers. Both Amir Pnueli (Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, IL) and Vaughan Pratt (Stanford University, USA) reappeared in the role of CONCUR invited speakers after ten years, and further invited talks were given by Wan Fokkink (CWI Amsterdam, NL), Alexander Rabinovich (Tel Aviv University, IL) and Davide Sangiorgi (INRIA Sophia Antipolis, F). Additionally, there were two invited tutorials, given by Julian Bradfield (University of Edinburgh, UK) and Andrew D. Gordon (Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK). The best student paper award went to 'Local Model-Checking Games for Fixed Point Logic with Chop' by Martin Lange.

CONCUR 2002 was accompanied by a special event called Tools Day organised by Ivana Cerná, and by the following satellite workshops:

• CMCIM'02 (Categorical Methods for Concurrency, Interaction, and Mobility), organised by Alexander Kurz, held on 24 August 2002
• EXPRESS'02 (9th International Workshop on Expressiveness in Concurrency), organised by Uwe Nestmann and Prakash Panangaden, held on 19 August 2002
• FATES'02 (Formal Approaches to Testing of Software), organised by Robert M. Hierons and Thierry Jéron, held on 24 August 2002
• FOCLASA'02 (1st International Workshop on Foundations of Coordination), organised by Antonio Brogi and Jean-Marie Jacquet, held on 24 August 2002
• INFINITY'02 (4th International Workshop on Verification of Infinite State Systems), organised by Antonín Kucera and Richard Mayr, held on 24 August 2002
• MTCS'02 (3rd International Workshop on Models for Time-Critical Systems), organised by Kim Larsen and Walter Vogler, held on 24 August 2002
• PDMC'02 (1st International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Model Checking), organised by Lubos Brim and Orna Grumberg, held on 19 August 2002.

The conference took place in the Czech Republic for the first time. The organisers attempted to give the conference additional stimuli like moderate conference fees and cheap accommodation on the University campus to make it attractive to participants from Central and Eastern Europe and to young researchers all over the world.

Link:
Conference web page: http://www.fi.muni.cz/concur02

Please contact:
Lubos Brim, CRCIM
Tel: +420 54151 2323
E-mail: brim@fi.muni.cz