[TYPES/announce] Announcing ACM's new Special Interest Group on Logic and Computation

[prakash]

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 Gödel 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