The aim of the section is to provide a platform for researchers in a formal approach to the process comprising rational behaviour: from gathering and representing information, via reasoning and decision making up to acting.

For more information, see http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~wiebe

To illuminate the dark days before Christmas the ILLC throws another modest yet delightful Xmas-drink. The UvA christmas gifts lay ready for you under the christmastree. Next to that there's a beautiful display of Georgian portrets. The drink is at 22 December at 16.00 hours at the third floor of the Euclides building. We hope to welcome you all.

The aim of this workshop is to present some recent advances in the field of reasoning about space with a particular emphasis on bringing researchers in various fields together for purposes of looking at unifying logical frameworks (such as, for instance, modal logic) and getting a better sense of the most fruitful avenues for further research.

For more information, see here or http://www.illc.uva.nl/RaS/

CLIN 2003, the 14th Meeting of Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands, will be held in Antwerp on friday December 19th 2003. It will be organized by the CNTS - Language Technology Group of the University of Antwerp.

For more information, an online registration form and a preliminary program, see http://cnts.uia.ac.be/clin2003/

The Fourteenth Amsterdam Colloquium will be held December 19 -- 21 at the University of Amsterdam. The Amsterdam Colloquia aim at bringing together linguists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists who share an interest in the formal study of the semantics of natural and formal languages. The spectrum of topics covered ranges from descriptive (semantic analyses of all kinds of expressions) to theoretical (logical and computational properties of semantic theories, philosophical foundations).

The Colloquium is organized under the auspices of the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam.

For more information and an online registration form, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/AC03/. The preliminary program is available on this site as of October 24th.

This symposium is the second of three devoted to the exploration of the common ground between the "Logic and Natural Language Processing" Area of CoLogNET (Network of Excellence in Computational Logic, http://www.colognet.org/) and ELSNET (Network of Excellence in Human Language Technologies, http://www.elsnet.org/). The topic of this session is 'Questions and Answers'. The symposium will address both the logical foundations underlying these notions, and technological implications for question answering systems.

The symposium aims at bringing together researchers interested in a combination of theoretical and applied perspectives, and invites an exchange of ideas between computational linguists, computer scientists and logicians. It will feature invited talks by leading researchers from academia and industry as well as a number of contributed talks. Invited speakers are Jeroen Groenendijk (ILLC, University of Amsterdam), Werner Ceusters (Language and Computing) and Karen Spärck Jones (Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge). The symposium will be co-located with the Fourteenth Amsterdam Colloqium.

Deadline for submission of papers is September 1, 2003. A selection of contributions will be published as special issue of the Journal of Applied Logic (ELSEVIER). For more information , see the symposium website at http://www-uilots.let.uu.nl/~ctl/workshops/CES03/, or contact the organizer, Raffaella Bernardi, at Raffaella.Bernardi at unibz.it.

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-2.html#Dec15 .

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/seminar.html

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://www.illc.uva.nl/logic_tea/. For more information, please contact Merlijn Sevenster (sevenstr at science.uva.nl) or Hartmut Fitz (hfitz at hum.uva.nl).

The primary aim of the workshop is to provide a meeting place where researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium (and neighboring countries) who are working in the domain of information retrieval and related disciplines can exchange information and present new research developments. Keynote speakers will include Charlie Clarke (University of Waterloo), Bjørn Olstad (FAST Search, 2bconfirmed), and Bonnie Webber (University of Edinburgh).

For more information, see here or http://lit.science.uva.nl/DIR/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-2.html#Dec05 .

This year's annual hybrid logics meeting will be organized at ILLC in Amsterdam. The intended purpose of the meeting is to examine some of the new directions in the world of HyLo research as well as to put future of hybrid logic in perspective.

For more information and a provisional program, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~bcate/hylo/

Playing games is a challenging task. It is even more interesting when a player anticipates the behaviour of the opponent. An important task of playing games is to detect and employ weaknesses in the opponent's strategy. For human players, it is a part of psychology to anticipate the opponent's move. For computers such things belong to the domain of artificial intelligence. Obviously, most of the current game-playing computer programs do not take the peculiarities of the opponent into account. This holds especially for computer programs that play the classical board games such as chess, go, and checkers. In other areas of computer game-playing, opponent-modelling is an integral part of the strategy, for instance in repeated games such as Roshambo and Poker. This workshop deals with the use of opponent models by computers in classical board games, repeated games, and in modern action games.

For more information, see http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/~donkers/workshop/

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-2.html#Dec03 .

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

The Australian National University (ANU) has an exciting opportunity for IT professionals, senior educators, and students to enhance their logic and reasoning skills in a two-week intensive summer school. The Logic and Automated Reasoning Summer School comprises a blend of practical and theoretical short courses on aspects of pure and applied logic taught by international and Australian experts.

Registration closes Friday 31 October 2003. For more information, see http://arp.anu.edu.au/lss/ or get the brochure at the ILLC office

The ILLC-Day in Bonn will be the second part of a pair of one-day workshops connecting logical research in Bonn and at the ILLC in Amsterdam. The first event was the LiB-Day in Amsterdam (June 30, 2003). We hope that several researchers from the Bonn Forschergruppe Wissensformate will be present for discussions.

All researchers, graduate students and undergraduate students are cordially invited to join us for the talks.

For more information, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~bloewe/ILLC-Day.html

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/seminar.html

A Colloquium on the Philosophy and History of Logic and Language. Speakers include Jan Wolenski (Cracow/NIAS Wassenaar), Sandra Lapointe (Québec/CNRS Paris), Willem R. de Jong (VU Amsterdam) and Wojciech Zelaniec (Zielona Gora).

For more information, see http://www.ph.vu.nl/~arianna/AS.html

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://www.illc.uva.nl/logic_tea/. For more information, please contact Merlijn Sevenster (sevenstr at science.uva.nl) or Hartmut Fitz (hfitz at hum.uva.nl).

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://www.illc.uva.nl/logic_tea/. For more information, please contact Merlijn Sevenster (sevenstr at science.uva.nl) or Hartmut Fitz (hfitz at hum.uva.nl).

This is the second of two conferences on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the leading journal in symbolic logic Studia Logica. The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars of philosophy, logic, mathematics, and computer science and other discplines who have contributed significantly to what Studia Logica is today. The conference will include lectures by distinguished scholars covering topics within the aim and scope of the journal.

For more information, see http://www.50yrs.philog.ruc.dk/conference2.html

For more information see the CSCA website at http://www.csca.uva.nl/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

Joint meeting with IHFS

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/seminar.html

Juan Heguiabehere will talk about the importance of implementation and benchmarking in automated reasoning, especially as concerns modal and hybrid theorem proving, and the use of Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL) and extensions as a programming language.

Afterwards there will be a meeting of the LIT group with the students from the Master of Logic program. This meeting will be held at the Herengracht 182, starting at 16.00. The meeting is only accessible for LIT and/or MOL members.

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-2.html#Nov14 .

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://www.illc.uva.nl/logic_tea/. For more information, please contact Merlijn Sevenster (sevenstr at science.uva.nl) or Hartmut Fitz (hfitz at hum.uva.nl).

This talk discusses some interactions of scope alternation with syntactic phenomena including coordination, binding, and word-order in Germanic languages.

For more information, see here

Tapio Korte will argue, against Carnap, Church and Dummett, that the role of sense in Frege's theory of meaning is to act as a bearer of reference, not to mediate between expression and object.

For the full abstract and more information, see http://www.ph.vu.nl/~arianna/TapioKorte.pdf or contact A.Betti at ph.vu.nl.

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://www.illc.uva.nl/logic_tea/. For more information, please contact Merlijn Sevenster (sevenstr at science.uva.nl) or Hartmut Fitz (hfitz at hum.uva.nl).

(joint work with Joe Halpern, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY)
As examples such as the Monty Hall and the 3-prisoners puzzle show, applying conditioning to update a probability distribution on a ``naive space'', which does not take into account the protocol used, can often lead to counterintuitive results. We give a detailed explanation of this phenomenon. A criterion known as CAR (``coarsening at random'') in the statistical literature characterizes when ``naive'' conditioning in a naive space works. We provide two new characterizations of CAR. First we show that in many situations, CAR essentially *cannot* hold, so that naive conditioning must give the wrong answer. Second, we provide a procedural characterization of CAR, giving a randomized algorithm that generates all and only distributions for which CAR holds. Both results complement earlier work by Gill, van der Laan and Robins.

We also consider more generalized notions of update such as Jeffrey conditioning and minimizing relative entropy (MRE). We give a generalization of the CAR condition that characterizes when Jeffrey conditioning leads to appropriate answers, and show that there exist some very simple settings in which MRE essentially never gives the right results. This generalizes and interconnects previous results obtained in the literature on CAR and MRE.

SPR-03 is organized by the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI) of the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU).

For more information, see here or http://www.sc.ehu.es/ilwlaanj/SPR/SPR03.html, email ylplaanj at sf.ehu.es or call +34-943-017451

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

This week Spencer will tell us about his new proof of completeness of temporal logic with interior operator interpreted over rationals, and the relation of this logic to betweenness modality.

For more information, contact Darko S. at sarenac at stanford.edu

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

This theme afternoon, organized by the VvL (the Dutch Society for Logic) features the following talks:
Robert van Rooij, Cooperative information exchange: Exhaustive interpretation and the division of pragmatic labour.
Paul Harrenstein, Game-theoretical Consequence.
Mehdi Dastani, Programming Agent Deliberation.
Rohit Parikh (special guest, New York): What to do next?

From 12:30-13:30 a cold lunch will be offered by the Society, available if you registered at least 1 week in advance by e-mailing jve at cwi.nl.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.cwi.nl/orgs/vvl/toekomst.html

In the framework of the Cognition programme of the Dutch Research Foundation NWO, the University of Amsterdam organises a symposium on the origins of novel knowledge and novel behavior. The symposium is aimed at bringing together ideas on novelty from Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Cognitive Psychology, Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Language.

Registration is free but since the number of participants is limited, those who want to participate must register by sending an email with name, address and affiliation to dr. Maartje Raijmakers (Email: M.E.J.Raijmakers at uva.nl) before 27 October.

For more information, see http://users.fmg.uva.nl/mraijmakers/novelty/.

Arthur Norman Prior (1914-69) was the founding father of the modern logic of time and modality. There is still a lot to learn from Prior's writings, and of Prior's last book Papers on Time and Tense. The conference "The Logic of Time and Modality", organized by PHILOG, aims to discuss the modern challenges, problems, and applications of the Priorean approach to the logic of time and modality.

For more information, see http://www.philog.ruc.dk/phiconf3.html

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/seminar.html

The latest issue of the Journal of Logic Language and Information is on Connecting the Different Faces on Information. This special issue features contributions by Barteld Kooi, Johan van Benthem, Robert van Rooy, Rohit Parikh and Ramaswamy Ramanujam, Vincent Hendricks, and Peter Gruenwald and Paul Vitanyi.

Rohit Parikh's visit to the Netherlands gives us a wonderful opportunity to bring together many of the authors who contributed to the special issue for a final discussion.

For more information and a preliminary program, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~bcate/connecting/

The relevant material for this tutorial can be found in: http://www.dit.unitn.it/~aiellom/publications/topax.pdf

For more information on the Spatial Reasoning Group, contact D. Sarenac at: sarenac at stanford.edu

The Workshops on Optimality Theory Syntax (WOTS) played an important role in the past years for bringing together linguists sharing an interest in OT syntax. They provided excellent opportunities for researchers pioneering in OT syntax to present their work in progress and they provided a matrix for lively discussions and fruitful collaboration among those researchers and other participants. This year for the first time WOTS is organized outside Germany, which indicates its still growing international character.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

Neural networks are computer programs that are able to learn. Their functioning is inspired by the function of the brain. The value added by neural networks is strongest for those problems that lack explicit knowledge. A large number of neural network aided applications has already been realized. Well-known applications are pattern recognition, time series prediction, and process control. Neural networks do not always produce the best solution, however. Better solutions are therefore often obtained through a combination with explicit domain knowledge. Bayesian statistics offers an elegant formalism to combine learning and explicit modeling. Furthermore, statistical methods for quantification of reliability are of great importance. A modern trend is therefore marked by an integrated approach that combines neural networks with methods from statistics and artificial intelligence. The symposium 'Learning Solutions 2003' offers an up-to-date overview of Dutch research in this area.

For more information, see http://www.snn.kun.nl/nederland/index.php3?page=15

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

This event, held under the auspices of the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, will focus on mathematical logic and its applications in algebra and arithmetic. Invited speakers include: L.van den Dries, A.Enayat, Y.Ershov, I.Kalantari, F.-V.Kuhlman, S.Kuhlman, A.Macintyre, A.Pillay, and A.Visser.

For further information, visit http://www.ipm.ac.ir/logic2003/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/seminar.html

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

For more information, see http://www.math.uni-muenster.de/logik/events/2003/kolloquium.html

Abstract: We present topological interpretation of modal logic S4 with particular emphasis on its modern use in the theory of spatial reasoning. This interpretation dates back to at least as far as a paper of J.C.C. McKinsey and A. Tarski in the 40's [The algebra of topology, Ann. of Math. (2) 45 (1944), 141--191], but until recently not much active research has been done on the topic. Recent years have seen the revival of research with applications in robotics, AI, and spatial reasoning. In the first part of the lecture, I will introduce the topological interpretation and some of its most interesting properties. If time permits, in the second part I will say something about possible extensions of this approach and some of its uses.

Prerequisites: Some knowledge of modal logic is assumed, but no (or very little) knowledge of topology.

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://www.illc.uva.nl/logic_tea/. For more information, please contact Merlijn Sevenster (sevenstr at science.uva.nl) or Hartmut Fitz (hfitz at hum.uva.nl).

Coming Thursday afternoon we will receive the visit of three researchers from Brazil and Suiss, who are working in themes related to modal logic, coming mainly from mathematical and philosophical aspects of the subject:

• Paulo Veloso and Sheila Veloso (COPPE and IM/UFRJ/Brasil): Filter and Ultrafilter logic
• Jean-Yves Beziau (Neuchatel/Suiss): Relations between modal logic and paraconsistent logic from the perspective of the square of oppositions

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

Student association VIA, for AI, computer science and informatics students of the University of Amsterdam, is organizing the second edition of BNAIS, Belgian-Dutch Artificial Intelligence Symposium for students. This year's BNAIS theme is "Playing God? Creation and control". A wide variety of issues are brought together in this theme. Technical, theoretical as well as ethical considerations will be brought forward. Current and future developments in AI will be discussed, with subjects ranging from the creation of artificial life to controlling that creation, or control in modern day society using AI techniques.

BNAIS will consist of 3 lectures, around ten workshops, presentation of the yearly Belgian-Dutch award for the best AI Master's thesis, various discussions and a continuous information market.

For more information, see http://bnais.mine.nu/index.php?lang=en

The Workshop on Logic, Foundational Research, and Metamathematics will take place in Münster, Germany, hosted by the Institut für Mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung at the University of Münster. It is intended as a forum for the exchange of ideas and interaction between researchers working in different areas of proof theory.

For more information, see here or visit the workshop's homepage at http://www.math.uni-muenster.de/logik/wpt03/

For more information see the CSCA website at http://www.csca.uva.nl/.

The fifth Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation will be held in the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi, at the Tbilisi State University from October 6 to October 10, 2003. The Symposium is organized by the Centre for Language, Logic and Speech of the Tbilisi State University in conjunction with the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam.

For more information, see the symposium website at http://www.illc.uva.nl/Tbilisi/

The 1st of 2 conferences in 50th Anniversary of the leading journal in symbolic logic Studia Logica. Submit papers by August 15 to stud at ifispan.waw.pl

This is the first of two conferences on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the leading journal in symbolic logic Studia Logica. The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars of philosophy, logic, mathematics, and computer science and other discplines who have contributed significantly to what Studia Logica is today. The conference will include lectures by distinguished scholars covering topics within the aim and scope of the journal.

For more information, see http://www.50yrs.philog.ruc.dk/

What are large cardinals? What is the correlation between them and the theory of the real numbers? And why do we rarely (if ever) see those sets of real numbers that are influenced by the existence or nonexistence of these huge objects?

For more information, see here or http://www.science.uva.nl/research/math/Calendar/colloq/#lowe

The "Gesellschaft für Semantik" (GfS) is pleased to announce its Eighth Annual Meeting "Sinn und Bedeutung VIII". The "Sinn und Bedeutung" meetings aim to provide a platform for semanticists to present recent work. The area of interest includes all topics from current semantic research: formal semantics, cognitive semantics, descriptive semantics, typological semantics, historical semantics, philosophy of language etc.

Invited speakers include Sigrid Beck (Connecticut), Hans Kamp (Stuttgart) and Robert van Rooy (Amsterdam).

For more information and registration, see http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/fb10/SuB8.

Following a series of successful workshops on the implementation of logics held in conjunction with the LPAR conference, there will be a fourth workshop on this topic, to be held in conjunction with LPAR'2003.

For more information, see the LPAR'2003 website at http://www.lpar.net/2003/

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

The talk will be followed by celebrations about the CLLI seminar's five years anniversary; and the presentation of the first annual LIT-award to Juan Heguiabehere---Congratulations!

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-2.html#Sep26 .

The 15th Belgian-Dutch Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC'03) is organised by SNN. BNAIC'03 will be held on Thursday October 23 and Friday October 24, 2003 in the Radboud Auditorium and Kasteel Heyendael, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

It will be collocated with the workshop 'Learning Solutions' on Wednesday October 22, 2003. This collocation aims to promote interaction between researchers in AI and industry. BNAIC-papers addressing industrial applications will be offered a poster at the workshop.

For more information, see http://www.snn.kun.nl/bnaic/index.php3?page=2

The Congress of the Italian Ass. for AI(AI*IA) is the traditional two-yearly meeting of researchers working on theory and applications in AI.

For more information, see here or http://www-aiia2003.di.unipi.it/aiia2003/index-eng.html

Invited speakers include Franz Baader, Serikjan Badaev, Dexter Kozen, Sergei Goncharov and Thomas Wilke.

For more information, an online registration form and a preliminary program, see http://www.lpar.net/2003/

The workshop Methods for Modalities' (M4M) aims to bring together researchers interested in developing proof tools and reasoning methods for modal logic broadly conceived, including description logic, hybrid logics, feature logic, temporal logic, etc.

For more information, see the conference website at http://www.science.uva.nl/~m4m/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/seminar.html

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-2.html#Sep19 .

Graphics - written language, charts, graphs, diagrams, interfaces - serve a number of functions: to attract interest and adorn, to record information, to promote memory, to organize information in order to facilitate inference and discovery. To do so effectively, they use elements and the spatial relations among them meaningfully, forming a rudimentary semantics and syntax respectively. An examination of graphics produced by children and adults from many cultures reveals common underlying cognitive principles in the use of space and the elements in it to convey meaning.

For more information see the CSCA website at http://www.csca.uva.nl/

EG Liaison organizes a meeting to present options for shared research between the ILLC and KP6. Please note that the meeting will be held in dutch.

For more information, see here for the full announcement (in dutch), or contact Ingrid van Loon (ingrid at science.uva.nl)

Seventy-five years ago Hilbert and Ackerman published their Grundzüge der Theoretischen Logik, announcing the start of modern mathematical logic. PHILOG in association with Humboldt University celebrate 75 years of first-order logic by hosting this conference.

For more information, see http://www.fol75.philog.ruc.dk/

The talk is comprised of 2 components: a discussion of canonical completions of bounded lattices with additional operations, and recent developments regarding the motivation behind the orthomodular law.

For more information, see here

Mini-symposium about D.J. Korteweg and G. de Vries, the mathematicians after whom the Math Institute of the UvA is named, and the creators of the Korteweg-de Vries equation which led to important developments in Mathematics and Physics. Following the symposium proper, at 16:25 portraits of the mathematician will be revealed, followed by a reception.

For more information, see here or http://www.science.uva.nl/research/math/News/kdvdag.html

The aim of the conference is the presentation of empirical, theoretical, and analytical work from all areas of interest in cognitive science, such as artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology and anthropology. The focus is on interdisciplinary work that is either of interest for more than one of the mentioned research areas or integrates research methods from different fields. Furthermore, applications of cognitive science research in such domains as human-computer interaction, education, knowledge management, or engineering are equally welcome.

For more information, see the conference website at http://www.eurocogsci03.uos.de/

The PIONIER Project "Music, Mind, Machine" is about the computational modeling of music cognition with an emphasis on the temporal aspects of music perception and music performance such as rhythm, timing and tempo. This six-year project will be concluded this september with a festive afternoon of lectures on the state-of-the-art of Music Cognition.

Invited speakers: prof. dr. D. Huron (Ohio State University, Musicology), prof. dr. J. Bharucha (Tufts University, Psychology), Prof. dr. R. Dannenberg (Carnegie-Mellon University, Computer Science) and Prof. dr. J.A. Michon (Leiden University, Psychology).

For more information, see the project website at http://www.hum.uva.nl/mmm/

The Eighth Workshop on Games in Logic, Languages & Computation (GLLC8) will take place in Groningen on Friday September 5, prior to the PhD defence of Barteld Kooi later that day.

For more information, see http://www.ai.rug.nl/~blom/gllc8/

To welcome our new international Logic students, ILLC organizes its annual boat trip on Thursday September 4. The boat leaves from the back side of the Euclides Building, and will return there a few hours later. Drinks and snacks are served on board.

For more information, see here.

DiaBruck 2003 will be the seventh in a series of workshops that aims to bring together researchers working on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogues in fields such as artificial intelligence, formal semantics and pragmatics, computational linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.
DiaBruck is endorsed by SIGSEM and SIGDial .

For more information, see the workshop website at http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/diabruck/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

The opening of the Academic Year 2003-2004 will take place Monday 1 September, from 15.00 - 17.00. Three lectures will be held for the occasion:
- Johan van Benthem (university professor), 'De kunst van het kennis maken.'
- Fleur Zeldenrust (physics student), 'Enthousiasme is besmettelijk.'
- Sijbolt Noorda (chairmen College van Bestuur) 'Met het oog op overmorgen'
There will be a musical intermezzo and a reception afterwards.

For more information and presentation abtracts, see here, or the ESSLI-2003 site at http://www.logic.at/esslli03/. The papers presented at this workshop may also be found at http://www.illc.uva.nl/MnM/Papers.

Computer Science Logic (CSL) is the annual conference of the European Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL). The Kurt Goedel Colloquium (KGC) is the biennial conference of the Kurt Goedel Society (KGS). The joint conference is intended for computer scientists whose research activities involve logic, as well as for logicians working on issues significant for computer science.

For more information, an online registration form and a preliminary program, see http://www.logic.at/csl03/

Automatic (machine) learning approaches to any NLP task became a rich area with a variety of methodologies. During the last years, its development made significant progress in the direction of presenting new methods and, at the same time, their modifications. These modifications are of different nature and dependent on the language under consideration. The aim of the workshop is to present and evaluate various modifications of the automatic learning methods originally developed for English and declared as language independent. We are especially interested in automatic learning methods for the problems of morphological tagging and parsing across languages with high level of inflection. Further, we encourage quantitative and qualitative comparison/evaluation studies across languages on the inputs and the outputs of the mentioned procedures. The workshop encourages reports of work on:

1. Summarization of morphological and syntactic features relevant for various automatic learning procedures.
2. Tendencies of improvement of the automatic learning methods. Presentation of implemented modifications and their cross language evaluation.
3. New/Latest algorithms for automatic learning.
4. Hybrid approaches (Although, there are trials to apply hybrid approaches, it seems that the true key of how to combine the various parts has still not been found and lies mainly in the success of analyzing the errors of each single component. Studies which present the connection elements for a successful combination of diverse approaches are invited.)

This workshop is part of ESSLLI'03. For more information, see http://ckl.mff.cuni.cz/~alaf03/

The main focus of ESSLLI is on the interface between linguistics, logic and computation. Foundational, introductory and advanced courses together with workshops cover a wide variety of topics within the three areas of interest: Language and Computation, Language and Logic, and Logic and Computation.

The school has developed into an important meeting place and forum for discussion for students, researchers and IT professionals interested in the interdisciplinary study of Logic, Language and Information. ESSLLI-2003 is organised under the auspices of the European Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI).

For more information, see the website at http://www.folli.uva.nl/2003/esslli-2003.html/

Graduate students and young researchers are invited to apply for travel awards to attend the Logic Colloquium 2003 in Helsinki, Finland, August 14-20, 2003. Applications for the following three categories of travel awards should be submitted to the Organizing Committee of the meeting and they should be received before the deadline of April 1, 2003:

1. Up to full compensation of travel, subsistence, and participation fees for graduate students and young researchers who are nationals of an EU Member State or Associated State (see list of countries below) and active inside a Member State or Associated State at the time of the meeting.
2. Modest travel awards for graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s who are either students at USA universities or citizens or permanent residents of the USA.
3. Modest travel awards for graduate students, recent Ph.D.'s and young researchers who are not eligible for either of the previous two categories.

Category 1 is funded by the European Community (EC) and category 2 by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). Category 3 is funded by the ASL and to some extent by the Organizing Committee directly.

For more information, see http://www.helsinki.fi/lc2003/awards.html

Deadline for early registration is May 31st. For more information, see http://www.helsinki.fi/lc2003/

This year's Düsseldorf Summer Workshop "Philosophy and Cognitive Science" will be held by Professor Wilfrid Hodges of the School of Mathematical Sciences at the Queen Mary College, University of London. Hodges recent articles on compositionality received wide acclaim. The seminar is both for students as professionals of philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science.

For more information, see here or http://www.cognitivescience.de/seminar/.

In the year 2003 the TIME symposium and ICTL will be held as a combined event. The idea is to bring together active researchers from distinct research areas involving representation of, or reasoning with, time. As with previous meetings in these respected series, one of the main goals of this conference will be to bridge the gap between theoretical and applied research in temporal representation and reasoning. Thus, we especially encourage submissions concerning temporal aspects within areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Temporal/Spatial Databases and Applications of Temporal Logic in Computer Science in order to achieve a multi-disciplinary perspective on the topic and to benefit from cross-fertilisation of ideas.

There are four tracks in the symposium with separate program committees, all overseen by the program chairs. The conference is planned as a three-day event, and will be organised as a combination of technical paper presentations, an extended poster session, and four keynote talks.

For more information, see here or http://time-ictl.cs.uwa.edu.au/

The SWIFT Summer Workshop will consist of an intense one-week tutorial course on a simplified finestructure theory for Goedel's constructible universe, and of invited and contributed talks. The workshop is equally directed towards specialists in constructibility theory and towards researchers in logic who are interested in a compact introduction to the constructible universe and its finestructure.

For more information, see here or http://www.math.uni-bonn.de/people/logic/Events/SWIFT/

The aim of this conference is to present some recent advances in the use of algebraic, order-theoretic, and topological methods in non-classical logics. We also hope to bring together researchers in the fields of non-classical logics, lattice theory, universal algebra, category theory, and general topology in order to foster collaboration and to get new ideas for further research.

Deadline for registration: 1 June 2003. For more information, see the conference website at http://piscopia.nmsu.edu/morandi/TbilisiConference/.

The purpose of the symposium is to bring novel logical perspectives on cognition into interaction with newly available empirical methods of investigation, especially with an evolutionary backdrop in mind.

For more information and registration, see the CSCA website at http://www.csca.uva.nl/

An interpretative approach to understanding human communication contrasts, at least in emphasis, with the generative perspective adopted in Chomsky's classical arguments for the creativity of human language. This talk illustrates the interpretative perspective through recent work on communication and reasoning, and then draws out the consequences of this shift in emphasis for work on the evolution of cognition.

For more information see the CSCA website at http://www.csca.uva.nl/

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

The LiB-Day in Amsterdam is a joint effort of the logicians from mathematics, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy in Bonn and the researchers at ILLC in Amsterdam to inform each other about the research in logic done in the two places.

This day will mainly present research from Bonn to the people in Amsterdam; there will be a companion event, the ILLC-Day in Bonn during which researchers from Amsterdam present their research in Bonn. LiB and ILLC intend to develop an active research collaboration from these two meetings, potentially leading to a bilateral research program between Amsterdam and Bonn.

All researchers, graduate students and undergraduate students from Amsterdam are cordially invited to join us for the talks.

For more information, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~bloewe/LiB-Day.html

ICALP is the main conference and annual meeting of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS).

For more information, an online registration form and a preliminary program, see http://www.win.tue.nl/icalp2003/

There will be a one-day workshop about quantum computing on Sunday June 29 at the University of Eindhoven. This will be a satellite workshop of ICALP 03, consisting of about 5 invited talks. Attendance is free, but participants need to register for the workshop at http://www.win.tue.nl/icalp2003/.

Further information about speakers and program is/will become available at http://www.cwi.nl/themes/ins4/icalp03-quantum/.

"Connecting people: from animal grunts to human language" is the first of a 5-year series of annual thematic symposia organized by the NWO Cognition programme. Each symposium has a central theme that will be viewed from different cognitive perspectives. We are interested to see how this combination of perspectives may lead to something new, valuable, inspiring and exciting!

Deadline for registration: 13 June 2003

Deadline for registration: 13 June 2003. For more information, see http://www.nwo.nl/cognitie/symposium/

This talk has been canceled due to overlap with a conference. The talk will take place in the fall of 2003 instead.

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~debruin/logic_tea.html

Context affects a wide range of activities in humans and animals as well as in artificial agents and other computer programs. The importance of context is widely acknowledged, and "context" has become an area of study in its own right, as evidenced by the numerous workshops, symposia, seminars, and conferences held recently. The Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT'03), will provide a high-quality forum, for discussions about context among researchers active in artificial intelligence and other areas of computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, the organizational sciences, philosophy, and psychology, with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary research.

For more information, an online registration form, and a preliminary program, see http://context.umcs.maine.edu/CONTEXT-03/

The summer school consists of eight advanced courses; the workshop is integral part of the school and takes place in the last two days. As with last years events on 'Proof Theory and Computation' (Dresden) and 'Proof, Computation, Complexity' (Tübingen), we aim at a meeting where people have plenty of time to exchange ideas.

Registration is requested before May 25, 2003. For more information and a course schedule, please see our website at http://www.ki.inf.tu-dresden.de/~guglielm/WPT2/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-1.html#Jun20 .

On 20 June 2003, on the occasion of the promotion of J.A. van Laar the day before, the Theoretical Philosophy group of the University of Groningen will host an international symposium on ambiguity and other subjects on the border between logic and argumentation-theory. Speakers include Martin van Hees, Anna Pilatova, Douglas Walton (keynote), Guido Vanackere, Taeda Jovičić, José Plug, Peter Houtlosser en Frans van Eemeren. The day will be concluded with an extended discussion of the thesis of Jan Albert van Laar: The Dialectic of Ambiguity. Location: Filosofisch Instituut, A-Weg 30, Room 201, Groningen.

For more information, see here or contact Erik Krabbe (erik at philos.rug.nl) or Jan Albert van Laar janalbert at philos.rug.nl

The mission of the bi-annual TARK conferences is to bring together researchers from a wide variety of fields - including Artificial Intelligence, Cryptography, Distributed Computing, Economics and Game Theory, Linguistics, Logic, Philosophy, and Psychology, in order to further our understanding of interdisciplinary issues involving reasoning about rationality and knowledge. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, semantic models for knowledge, for belief, and for uncertainty, bounded rationality and resource-bounded reasoning, commonsense epistemic reasoning, epistemic logic, logics of knowledge and action, formal analysis of games, applications of reasoning about knowledge and other mental states, belief revision, and the role of knowledge in general information flow.

TARK IX is held jointly with NASSLLI, so registration details can be found on the NASSLLI site at http://www.indiana.edu/~nasslli/registration.html. For other information including a preliminary program, see the TARK site at http://www.tark.org/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

Recent years have seen lots of exciting work in spatial reasoning in computer science, AI, and philosophy. The motivation for this work ranges from image analysis and geographical information systems in CS through attempts to exploit properties of space in diagrammatic reasoning, to purely mathematical issues of expressivity of languages with respect to particular spatial domains. As of now, much of the research has been carried out within the respective fields and without much interaction with researchers in other fields.

The aim of this workshop is to present some recent advances in the field with a particular emphasis on bringing researchers in various fields together for purposes of looking at unifying logical frameworks (such as, for instance, modal logic) and getting a better sense of the most fruitful avenues for further research.

The workshop is held in the context of the Second North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information. For more information, see http://www.dit.unitn.it/~aiellom/nasslli03/.

The NASSLLI Steering Committee is pleased to announce the Second North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information, to be held in Bloomington, Indiana, June 17-21, 2003. The event follows on from the successful first school at Stanford in June, 2002. The school is focussed on the interfaces among linguistics, logic, and computation, broadly conceived, and on related fields. Our sister school, the European Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information, has been highly successful, becoming an important meeting place and forum for discussion for students and researchers interested in the interdisciplinary study of Logic, Language and Information. We hope that the North American schools will follow in this tradition.

Note: thanks to some recently received funds to support student attendance, NASSLLI expects to have a reasonable number of $100 registration reductions available.

For more information regarding the program, registration, accomodations and support, see the conference website at http://www.indiana.edu/~nasslli/.

The Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam of the UvA organizes an interdisciplinary Summer School for Master's students. Central theme is 'Human reasoning and Cognitive science'.

For more information and registration, see the CSCA website at http://www.csca.uva.nl/

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-1.html#Jun13 .

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/seminar.html

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

This is a try-out for the ZIC talk of 17 June.

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-1.html#Jun06 .

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~debruin/logic_tea.html

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/seminar.html

From Socrates to A.I. researchers, it's assumed that intelligence is based on features and rules. Thus, expert system builders assume [...] situation-action rule on the basis of features. But such systems have failed. Dreyfus will argue why.

For more information, please see here or contact illc at science.uva.nl

Abstract:
The Minimum Description Length (MDL) Principle is a powerful method for model selection. The theoretical development of MDL has mostly centered around probabilistic modeling. Yet practical applications of MDL often involve models which are best viewed as predictors rather than probability distributions. The standard example is classification, one of the most popular applications of MDL ever since its inception. MDL has been applied to such non-probabilistic models in various ways. We review these approaches and show that, contrary to what is often thought, they can exhibit some rather problematic behaviour: on the theoretical side, it is not known whether the resulting procedures are consistent (none of the existing proof techniques can be applied). On the practical side, the methods can behave quite unreasonably for small data samples. We analyze the reasons for this undesirable behaviour and propose a radical, general and surprising solution to the problem.

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-1.html#May23 .

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-1.html#May16 .

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~debruin/logic_tea.html

The Institute organises an Open Day as the opportunity to make yourself acquainted with its progressive research. Its people are open for questions and discussions about both research as education within the field of mathematics. The program comprises lectures and an informationmarket.

For more information and submission, see http://www.science.uva.nl/congres/ or call 020-5257865. Brochures can be obtained at ILLC Office.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

Nancy, "City of Art and History", the historical capital of Lorraine (the north-eastern part of France) welcomes you to the 8th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies. The Laboratoire Lorrain de Recherche en Informatique et ses Applications (LORIA) in Nancy, France will host the 8th International Workshop on Parsing Technologies (IWPT'03) from 23 to 25 April, 2003. IWPT'03 continues the tradition of biennial workshops on parsing technology organised by SIGPARSE, the Special Interest Group on Parsing of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

For more information, see http://iwpt03.loria.fr/.

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~debruin/logic_tea.html

This workshop is a forum for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in the application of formal methods and tools for the automatic verification of large practical systems.

For more information, see here or visit http://chacs.nrl.navy.mil/AVIS03/.

In recent years, multi-agent systems have come to form one of the key technologies for software development. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers from the fields of logic, theoretical computer science and multi-agent systems in order to discuss formal techniques for specifying and verifying multi-agent systems.

FAMAS'03 is affiliated with ETAPS 2003, April 5-13, 2003, Warsaw, Poland

For more information, see http://www.ai.rug.nl/conf/famas or here.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/seminar.html

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

The European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software (ETAPS) is the primary European forum for academic and industrial researchers working on topics related to Software Science. It is a confederation of five main conferences, a number of satellite workshops and other events.

Registration deadline is March 31, 2003. For more information, see here or the ETAPS website at http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/etaps03/

Within the framework of a seminar on logic and computer science, the Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel organizes a small workshop, under the name SLI-2003. The topic of this year's workshop will be devoted to the area of research involving logics dealing with "processes", "changes" or "interactions" in the fields of computer science and quantum physics. We present a program where the talks touch upon current research in: game semantics, dynamic logic, epistemic logic, game theory and quantum logic.

For more information, see here or http://www.vub.ac.be/CLWF/SLI-2003/

(In collaboration with the Music & AI seminar)

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~debruin/logic_tea.html. For further information please contact Mark Theunissen at mailto:mtheunis at science.uva.nl, or Boudewijn de Bruin at mailto:debruin at science.uva.nl.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.math.uu.nl/people/jvoosten/seminar.html

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

Alexander Verrijn-Stuart (Emeritus Leiden University) will talk about A Real Time Information System Language? ``Dynamic adaptation of system characteristics and contents'', while Pieter Adriaans (University of Amsterdam) will address Adaptive - System Management

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-1.html#Mar14 .

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

Het is ons een genoegen u uit te nodigen tot het bijwonen van de Theoriedag 2003 van de NVTI, de Nederlandse Vereniging voor Theoretische Informatica, die zich ten doel stelt de theoretische informatica te bevorderen en haar beoefening en toepassingen aan te moedigen. De Theoriedag 2003 is een voortzetting van de reeks jaarlijkse bijeenkomsten van de NVTI die acht jaar geleden met de oprichtingsbijeenkomst begon.

Evenals vorige jaren hebben wij een aantal prominente sprekers uit binnen- en buitenland bereid gevonden deze dag gestalte te geven met voordrachten over recente en belangrijke stromingen in de theoretische informatica. Naast een wetenschappelijke inhoud heeft de dag ook een informatief gedeelte, in de vorm van een algemene vergadering waarin de meest relevante informatie over de NVTI gegeven zal worden, alsmede presentaties van de onderzoekscholen.

For more information (in dutch), see here. For more (english) information please email Jan Willem Klop (J.W.Klop at cwi.nl).

You are kindly invited to the ILLC's Third Alumni Event which will take place Thursday March 6, 2003. The program combines general scientific lectures with social interaction and cultural and musical performances.

The full text of the invitation, including the program and the reply form, can be found at here.

In visual neuroscience the binding problem refers to the puzzle how spatial information segregation in the brain (form, color, motion) results in a unified percept. In language processing, however, the binding problem refers to the unification of information across time. I will show some of the organizational principles of binding together different types of language-relevant information into a unified representation of the incoming spoken or written signals. Research using EEG and fMRI will be discussed.

For more information, see the news and events page at http://www.csca.uva.nl or contact Lucy Wenting at L.U.Wenting at uva.nl.

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~debruin/logic_tea.html. For further information please contact Mark Theunissen at mailto:mtheunis at science.uva.nl, or Boudewijn de Bruin at mailto:debruin at science.uva.nl.

For both ACLC and ILLC understanding natural language is `core business', but hitherto contact between the two institutes has been limited. Recently several areas have been identified, where we would like to profit from each other's expertise. For example, the formal semanticists working on tense and aspect are very much interested in typology, and conversely functional linguists have become interested in formal models of discourse. During the afternoon, four speakers will introduce topics that might grow into areas of common research. Participants who want to discuss other such topics are most welcome to do so.

For more information, see the DIP Colloqium page at http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/, or contact m.nilsenova at hum.uva.nl.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-1.html#Feb20 .

Program

11.00

Ilan Newman, Haifa University
Three results on graphs and Property Testing

13.30

Gabor Tardos, Renyi Institute, Budapest
Optimal probabilistic fingerprint codes

14.30

Maria Luisa Bonet, UPC Barcelona
tba

16.00

David Mix Barrington, U. of Massachusetts
Uniform Circuits for Division: Consequences and Problems

For more information, see http://www.cwi.nl/~roehrig/theory-day-20030220.html.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

In 2002/2003 a joint Compact Seminar on Provability Algebras is organized by L. Beklemishev and W. Pohlers. Altogether, four sessions, alternating in Utrecht (Department of Philosophy) and in Münster (Institute for Mathematical Logic and Foundations Research), will take place.

Graded provability algebras (GPA) are modal algebras developed to provide an abstract algebraic approach to proof-theoretic analysis. This subject brings together traditional methods of proof theory and methods developed in provability logic.

For more information, see here, or contact Lev Beklimishev at lev at phil.uu.nl.

"Foundations of the Formal Sciences" (FotFS) is a series of interdisciplinary conferences in mathematics, philosophy, computer science and linguistics. The main goal is to reestablish the traditionally strong links between these areas of research that have been lost in the past decades.

This fourth meeting of the series will be devoted to a reflection on the object of interest: What are the Formal Sciences? How do they differ from the Natural Sciences and the Arts? How have they been perceived through history?

Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2002. For more information and submission guidelines, please see http://www.math.uni-bonn.de/people/fotfs/IV/, or contact the organizers at fotfs at math.uni-bonn.de.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~debruin/logic_tea.html. For further information please contact Mark Theunissen at mailto:mtheunis at science.uva.nl, or Boudewijn de Bruin at mailto:debruin at science.uva.nl.

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-1.html#Feb7 .

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-1.html#Jan31 .

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.win.tue.nl/zic/ or contact Francien Dechesne (f.dechesne at uvt.nl).

In 2002/2003 a joint Compact Seminar on Provability Algebras is organized by L. Beklemishev and W. Pohlers. Altogether, four sessions, alternating in Utrecht (Department of Philosophy) and in Münster (Institute for Mathematical Logic and Foundations Research), will take place.

Graded provability algebras (GPA) are modal algebras developed to provide an abstract algebraic approach to proof-theoretic analysis. This subject brings together traditional methods of proof theory and methods developed in provability logic.

For more information, see here, or contact Lev Beklimishev at lev at phil.uu.nl.

This will be an informal presentation of results in computability theory on computably enumerable reals and randomness.

The Logic Tea homepage can be found at http://staff.science.uva.nl/~debruin/logic_tea.html. For further information please contact Mark Theunissen at mailto:mtheunis at science.uva.nl, or Boudewijn de Bruin at mailto:debruin at science.uva.nl.

For abstracts and more information, see http://lit.science.uva.nl/News/seminar03-1.html#Jan20 .

For abstracts and more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/dip/.

Topics of interest for the workshop will be computational aspects of formal semantic theories and theoretical issues in building natural language understanding systems.

For more information, see http://let.kub.nl/research/TI/sigsem/iwcs/iwcs5/

For an abstract, see here.

Schedule

1. Probabilistic Modeling of Language: An Introduction and Apologia: Dan Jurafsky
2. Data-Oriented Parsing: Rens Bod
3. Dynamics and Connectionism: Whitney Tabor
4. Stochastic Optimality Theory: Paul Boersma
5. Exemplar Theory: Janet Pierrehumbert
6. Usage-Based Models: Jeff Elman
7. General discussion and book presentation

Special Event:
The book "Probabilistic Linguistics" (Bod et al. 2003, MIT Press) will be presented at this symposium. For ToC and Introduction, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~rens/mitbooktoc.html.

For more information, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~rens/lsa03.html

Kluwer announces a new section of the journal "Synthese", called "Knowledge, Rationality and Action". As of 2004, this section will appear as two separate issues. The aim of the section is to provide a platform for researchers in a formal approach to the process comprising rational behaviour: from gathering and representing information, via reasoning and decision making up to acting.

For more information, see here or http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~wiebe/ or refer to Wiebe van der Hoek (ed in Chief) (wiebe at csc.liv.ac.uk)

Students are invited to submit essays for the Association for Women in Mathematics' "Biographies of Contemporary Women in Mathematics" contest. The essays are based on interviews with women working in mathematical careers. The contest is open to students in four categories: 6th-8th grade, 9th-12th grade, undergraduate, and graduate.

Entries must be submitted by OCTOBER 31, 2003. Faculty are urged to invite students to visit the website at http://www.awm-math.org/biographies/contest.html for more information.

For more information, please contact marx at science.uva.nl

For more information, email Christof Monz (christof at science.uva.nl)

For more information, email Juan Heguiabehere (juanh at science.uva.nl)

Poëtische teksten vormen een probleem voor de semantiek. Brouwer werkt een verklaringsmodel uit en stelt verder dat in de interpretatie van een poëtische tekst een subjectieve, niet-conventionele lezing toelaatbaar en zelfs sociaal wenselijk is.

For more information, see here or http://www.hum.uva.nl/actueel/

This defense is for the title of Doctorandus (Master's) of Mathematics, specialisation: Logic and Foundations. NOTE: The location has changed from room P.327 to M.328.

For more information, please contact hhhansen at science.uva.nl

For more information, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~ivar/phd/

The DFG research project "Determinacy and Combinatorics" (originally situated in Bonn) was expanded into an international NWO-DFG Bilateral Project (DN 61-532) with additional NWO travel money for collaboration between Amsterdam and Bonn on research topics pertaining to infinite games and their applications in infinitary combinatorics.

The project supervisors are Benedikt Löwe and Johan van Benthem in Amsterdam and Peter Koepke in Bonn. The successful expansion of this project into an official international research collaboration is the first success of the series of Amsterdam-Bonn events between the ILLC and the interest group Logic in Bonn (LiB)

For more information, see the project page at http://www.math.uni-bonn.de/people/logic/dfg/DK.html.

At two recent campaigns aimed at evaluating search engines on a variety of tasks, the Language & Inference Technology (LIT) group performed very well. Last week, LIT obtained a number three position on the Topic Distillation task for web retrieval at the 2003 edition of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), held annually at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), Washington. In addition, very competitive scores were obtained by LIT in both the Question Answering and Robust track.

Topping off an already very rewarding week, results coming in from the INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX), towards the end of last week showed that LIT's submissions were top ranking. More precisely, the LIT submissions for the "content only" task (finding relevant XML elements for a keyword query) ranked 1, 2, and 3 (out of a total of 58 submitted runs). And LIT's submissions for the "content and structure" task (finding relevant elements in XML documents where the elements have to satisfy additional structural constraints) ranked 1, 2, and 5 (out of 38 submitted runs).

To find out more about LIT's activities, browse to http://lit.science.uva.nl/.

Marco Aiello has won the prize for the best dissertation in the field of AI defended after January 2002 from the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA). The price consists of 1500 euro. Aiello will be awarded the price on 24 September from 17:10-18:50, during the national conference of the association that this year will be held in Pisa 23-26 of September, 2003.

Great news! At this years ESSLLI student session both the best paper and the best poster award were won by students of the ILLC GPiL programme. Willem Conradi (MoL 2001/2002) won the best paper award and Wouter Kuijpers (MoL ILLC) and Petrucio Viana (PhD ILLC) won the best poster award. Congratulations.

For more information, please contact marx at science.uva.nl

The Language & Inference Technology Group is happy to announce that it managed to obtain funding from the NWO for two three year postdoc projects, "Learning Stochastic Tree-Grammars from Tree-Banks" and "Inference for Temporal Question Answering", as part of NWO's annual "open competitie"

For more information, see here or http://lit.science.uva.nl

The E.W. Beth Dissertation Prize 2003 has been awarded to JASON BALDRIDGE (University of Edinburgh) for the dissertation ``Lexically Specified Derivational Control in Combinatory Categorial Grammar''. An award ceremony will take place during ESSLLI 03 in Vienna, on Monday , August 25 at 20:00 hrs.

The abstract can be found at: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~nza/beth02. For more information, see the FoLLI site at http://www.folli.org/, or the ESSLLI site at http://www.logic.at/esslli03/.

Prof. Solomon Feferman, Stanford University, member of ILLC's Scientific Advisory Board has been awarded the prestigious Rolf Schock Prize 2003 for his contributions to logic and philosophy. The other 2003 laureates are Richard Stanley (mathematics), Susan Rothenberg (visual arts) and Anne Sofie von Otter (musical arts). Among the previous laureates are Dana Scott, Michael Dummett, Andrew Wiles, John Rawls and W.V.O Quine.

Four ILLC-applications for preparatory grants in the NWO Cognition programme (2003) were honoured:

• Pieter Adriaans & Dick de Jongh: Cochlear implants and their effects on first language learning
• Reinhard Blutner: Logic, neural networks and optimality theory
• Michiel van Lambalgen: Reasoning and the brain
• Robert van Rooy, Frank Veltman & Paul Dekker: The evolution of meaning in a game-theoretical setting

The Cognition preparatory grants are intended as stimulation for exploring possibilities for interdisciplinary research. All four projects have co-applicants from other universities and/or other fields. The next round for full project proposals is in the fall.

For more information, please see the NWO Cognition pages at http://www.nwo.nl/cognitie/, or contact the ILLC Buro at illc at science.uva.nl.

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) approved the research project "Determinacy and Combinatorics" KO 1353/3-1 of Peter Koepke (RhFWU Bonn) and Benedikt Löwe from 2003 to 2006.

For more information, see here or http://www.math.uni-bonn.de/people/logic/dfg/DK.html

The NWO project by Joop Niekus in the Leraar in Onderzoek program on Choice sequences in the work of Brouwer (supervised by Dick de Jongh) will be extended for another two years! Such an extension is a rare occurrence.

For more information, please contact illc at science.uva.nl

From February 1 to March 31, 2003, Dr Benedikt Loewe will be visiting the ILLC in the NWO-project VMOSII (Verzamelingstheoretische Modelvorming voor Oneindige Spelen van Imperfecte Informatie). The project is a joint project of Johan van Benthem, Peter van Emde Boas, and Benedikt Loewe, and is closely related to the InIGMA project.

For more information, see http://staff.science.uva.nl/~bloewe/VMOSII.html

The European Young Investigators (EURYI) Awards are an initiative of 19 European Union Research Organisations from 17 countries, thus contributing to the creation of the European Research Area. The aim of the EURYI Awards is to enable and encourage outstanding young researchers from all over the world to work in an European environment for the benefit of the development of European science and for building up the next generation of leading European researchers.

The scheme is open to researchers from anywhere in the world between 2 and up to 10 years after obtaining the doctorate. Applicants should have an excellent track record with the potential to become world class leaders in their respective field of research. Applications should be submitted through one of the participating organisations (for the Netherlands: NWO).

Submission deadline for applications to NWO is 15 December 2003. For more information, see http://www.nwo.nl/subsidiewijzer.nsf/pages/NWOP_5QTJZA?Opendocument&su=no

The annual price is founded by the Dutch and French government, and will be granted by the KNAW. The price is meant as a coverage for a research stay in the Netherlands for about 6 months. For year 2003 KNAW is looking for a French researcher distinctively active in the fields of Humanities and Social Scienceslauded by colleagues and internationally famed for markmanship. The candidate must or have contributed in benefit to the development of the French-Dutch scientific cooperation. Furthermore will strong preference be given to candidates with their heydays yet to come.

For submissions and more information, please contact the ILLC Office at illc at science.uva.nl, before 15 May 2003.

The study of cognitive phenomena like perception, memory, attention, action, language, and problem solving, including relations to their neural substrates and social setting, is one of the fundamental challenges of modern times. The NWO special Programme on Cognition is meant to boost this highly interdisciplinary area across traditional academic boundaries. The programme committee and the steering committee wish to achieve further integration across the cognitive disciplines, and to explore strategic applications. This second Call for Proposals therefore invites strong groups working in different domains of the cognitive sciences to submit proposals for collaborative research projects.

For this final Call for Integrated Research Projects, projects are envisaged of maximally 400 000 Euro. The committee will pay special attention to the balance between project size and potential benefit for the programme. To decrease effort overall, applicants must submit a preliminary proposal in early October 2003. Only those who submitted a preliminary proposal may submit a full proposal in January 2004. Assessment and ranking of full proposals by the Programme Committee will take place in May 2004.

For more information, see the NWO Cognition pages at http://www.nwo.nl/cognitie/, or contact the NWO Cognition Programme buro at cognitie at nwo.nl.

This program was established to assist promising and highly qualified young foreign researchers wishing to conduct research in Japan. It is aimed at providing opportunities for such researchers to, under the guidance of their hosts, conduct cooperative research with leading research groups in universities and other Japanese institutions, thereby permitting them to advance their own research while stimulating Japanese academic circles, particularly young Japanese researchers, through close collaboration in scientific activities. The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) accepts applications until May 30th, 2003.

For more information, see http://www.jsps.go.jp/e-fellow/postdoctral.html.

UvA graduates who graduated between 1 July 2002 and 1 June 2003 can compete for the UvA-endpaper award or the AUV price for outstanding contributions to society, possibly winning a €3500,- grant for continuing scientific development, a laptop, or € 1000,-.

The results of the two competitions will be announced 21 June, at the Universityday. Final entrydate is 6 May (for graduates up to 1 April) or 1 June (for graduates up to 1 June). It is possible to enter third parties.

For more information, please contact M.Fopma at mfopma at bdu.uva.nl or see http://www.alumni.uva.nl/actueel/.

The international association for the promotion of cooperation with scientists from the New Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union (INTAS) has launched a series of calls, making available 25.2 million euro for international scientific research.
The calls are as follows:

• Open call for proposals for research projects and networks related to all scientific fields in both fundamental and applied science;
• Belarus call for proposals in all areas of science. Research teams must include at least one Belarussian partner;
• CERN call for proposals related to the physics and engineering of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (European organisation for nuclear research);
• Call for proposals in the field of spacecraft research and technology at CNES (the French national centre for space studies);
• GSI call for proposals related to the development of accelerators or experiments for the new international accelerator facility for means of ions and antiprotons
• GSI (society for heavy ion research).

In all cases the deadline for submission is 13 June 2003.
INTAS has also published calls for young NIS scientist fellowships, for which 2.5 million euro is earmarked, and innovation grants, for which 500,000 euro is available. Applications for the grants must be received by 11 July 2003.
Further information and full text call: http://www.intas.be/.

The Language & Inference Technology Group at the University of Amsterdam seeks a versatile, energetic, and highly motivated postdoc to work on inference for temportal question answering.

Application deadline: November 1, 2003. For more information, see here or http://www.science.uva.nl/~mdr/Projects/ITEQA/.

In the Theory of Interpretation project there is an opening for a PhD student, preferably for work in the Philosophical Foundations theme. Deadline for applications: August 31. Send resume, copy of MA thesis or other relevant work, and a description of research interests (max. 800 words) to:

Martin Stokhof
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 15
1012 CP Amsterdam
The Netherlands

For more information, see http://www.illc.uva.nl/Research/illcar01a.php, or contact Martin Stokhof: stokhof at science.uva.nl

A PostDoctoral Research Fellowship will shortly become available in the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics at University College Cork. It will be tenable from March, 2004 onwards for a period of up to two years. The fellowship is being offered in an area related to the Theory of Computation/Mathematical Foundations of Computation.

For more information, see here or contact a.seda at ucc.ie

The University of Amsterdam offers a two-year Research MA in Linguistics and a one-year MA in General Linguistics. Both programmes are taught in English or, in the case of language-specific courses, in the target language. Since the University of Amsterdam is interested in attracting talented students, the tuition rates are competitive.

The Research MA in Linguistics is directed towards students of proven ability who are interested in conducting research in one of the many areas of linguistics that are studied in the research institutes of the University of Amsterdam. The programmes offer students the opportunity of specializing in a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines studied from various theoretical perspectives. The programme lasts two years for selected students with a relevant BA or equivalent, and one year for selected students with a relevant MA or equivalent.

The MA in General Linguistics also offers a wide range of specializations, and is aimed at students with a BA in Linguistics or an equivalent programme, involving at least three years of full-time study at university level. The programme lasts one year.

For more information, see http://www.hum.uva.nl/graduateschool or send an email to graduateschool at hum.uva.nl.

At the Institut für Philosophie of the Philosophischen Fakultät I of the Universität Regensburg (Lehrstuhl für Theoretische Philosophie) is an opening available for a scientific assistant. This will be a three-year position starting in the summer of 2004, in the 'C 1 BBesG' salary bracket.

For more information, see here (in German) or contact dr. Hans Rott (email: hans.rott at psk.uni-regensburg.de, tel: 0941 943 3662, fax: 0941 943 1985).

Applications are invited for a Temporary Lectureship in the Department of Philosophy, from 1 January 2004 for one year. The successful applicant will be capable of teaching courses at undergraduate level in Theory of Knowledge (second year course), and Wittgenstein (earlier and later) and Philosophy of Language (both third year courses).

The position is a Lecturer Grade A position, £22,191 per annum (pay award pending) Full-time, Fixed-term for 1 year.
Closing date for applications 28 November 2003. It is anticipated that interviews will take place between 8 and 12 December 2003.

For more information, see http://www.reading.ac.uk/Jobs (Ref: AC0349).

The project 'Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Space, Time, and Knowledge' consists of several independent projects thematically and technically closely connected to each other. All of them belong to one of the most interesting fields of artificial intelligence, which is concerned with developing software capable of qualitative reasoning about the world around us. In the framework of the project we'll be considering some simple models of space, time, and knowledge.

Students with skills and interests in programming and research are welcome.

For more information, see here or http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/mz/, or email mz at dcs.kcl.ac.uk

There are PhD positions in philosophy available for the project "Selbstbewusstsein und Begriffsbildung beim Menschen" ("Consciousness and formation of concepts") in Bonn, Germany, for the period of Jan 2004-Dec 2005.

Deadline: October 15th, 2003. For more information, please see here or contact bloewe at science.uva.nl

For the spring term 2004, two European research student (PhD-)scholarships are available in the area of multilingual tools and resources. Support is given for 3 to 12 month research stays at the Bergen Advanced Training Site in Multilingual Tools (BATMULT) at the University of Bergen, Norway.

For more information, see http://www.hit.uib.no/batmult/. Students who wish to arrive at the beginning of the spring term of 2004 should send in their application before November 1, 2003.

Available positions: Post-Docs, PhD students and regular students, starting January 2004. Our research goals include: Real-Time Planning of an Intelligent Agent's Behavior, Technology Fusion, Multi-Objective Algorithm Design and Computer Games.

Final deadline for applications is 1 September 2003. For more information, see here or http://www.ai-center.com/jobs/jobs.txt

Bij de Vakgroep Theoretische Filosofie van de RU-Groningen bestaat een vacature voor een Universitair Docent Logica en Argumentatietheorie voor 50% van de werktijd.

Deadline sollicitaties: 8 Maart 2003. Voor verdere informatie, zie http://213.159.10.120/rug/Vacatures/detail.cfm?Vacature_ID=DBCMTG9C , of mail Prof. dr. E.C.W. Krabbe, email E.C.W.Krabbe at philos.rug.nl.

The Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam offers a new MA programme for talented students who are interested in conducting research in one of the many areas of linguistics that are studied in its research institutes. This Research MA in Linguistics offers the opportunity to specialize in a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines and pays serious attention to methodological issues. All courses are taught in English or, in the case of language-specific courses, in the target language. The programme takes two years for selected students with a relevant BA or equivalent, and one year for selected students with a relevant MA or equivalent. Since the University of Amsterdam is interested in attracting talented researchers, tuition rates are competitive.

Further information about the programmes may be found at http://www.hum.uva.nl/graduateschool/ or requested from graduateschool at hum.uva.nl

As of 1 december 2003, Tanja Kassenaar will, at her own request, end her work as programme manager for the Master of Logic program, and return to her old place of work at the ILLC office. She will continue to do the administration for the MoL program, and she will also remain first contact for the students. The coordination of the program will come in hands of Amanda Collins, whom most of you know as she replaced Ingrid van Loon during her maternity leave.

The complete schedule of ILLC's administrative staff can be found at

As of 1 september 2003, the ILLC crew will be extended with several new PhD students, staff members and guests:

• Kata Balogh, PhD student
• Fabrice Nauze, PhD student
• Brian Semmes, PhD student
• Evangelos Tzanis, PhD student
• Wouter Kuijper, Programmer
• Gilad Mishne, Programmer
• Jori Mur, Guest student
• Ian Hodkinson, Guest
• Marc Pauly, Guest
• Felix Bou, Guest

For more information, see here.

Another honour bestowed on a member of ILLC: Paul Vitányi has been appointed as fellow of the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI). This position is given to "outstanding members of CWI's research staff, enabling them to concentrate completely on research." Vitányi's research group is considered "world leader in quantum computing, distributed algorithmics, algorithmic information theory, learning and inference methods, and reversible adiabatic computing."

For more information, see http://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/fellow.html

The Universiteit van Amsterdam has appointed Johan van Benthem as university professor, to "further interdisciplinary research in the field of information science and cognitive science." The position of university professor is a very prestigious one and is offered to a select number of scholars of international renown, who "give an impuls to scientific developments that transcend traditional disciplines and make an important contribution to the profile of the university."

The appointment of Johan van Benthem as university professor does not mean that his association with ILLC ends: he will conduct his research as part of ILLC's efforts and he will also continue to supervise PhD students. His participation in various curricula will also continue albeit on a smaller scale.

The official annnouncement can be found at the UvA site at http://www.uva.nl/actueel/.

From April 1 2003 onwards, Benedikt Loewe succeeds Dick de Jongh as editor of the ILLC Prepublications.

For more information, please contact illc at science.uva.nl

Ingrid van Loon will be on maternity leave from February 17 until August 1. During these months she will be replaced by Amanda Collins. Amanda has worked at the bureau of the Faculty of Science for the past two years, and although she is new to the ILLC she has experience in the academic environment. She will be working the same hours as Ingrid, these are Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 8.30-17.00hrs. She can be reached at 020-5256090 or collins at science.uva.nl. Ingrid will not be reading her e-mail during her period of absence.

After working at the ILLC as program manager for a year, Peter Paul de Witte will be leaving the institute. Tanja Kassenaar will take over his job from the first of March. Her time schedule will be Tuesday 9-17, Thursday 9-17 and Friday 9-13 and she can be reached at tkassena at science.uva.nl or 020-5256519 in room P3.12/B2.33.

This week the sad and totally unexpected news has come to us that our respected colleague Wim Blok has died in a fatal accident. Obituary by several ILLC members (Dec 8th, 2003)

There is some L.E.J. Brouwer material displayed near the reading room on the second floor and near the service counter on the first floor of the University Library (Singel 425, Amsterdam).

The November 2003 issue of the Newsletter of the Association of Symbolic Logic is out. It is available online from the ASL website at http://www.aslonline.org/info-newsletter.html .

Thanks to Loredana, the ILLC Boattrip has now been immortalized in the form of a huge picture collection. You can view them for yourself at http://www.illc.uva.nl/NewsandEvents/Boattrip/.

The September 2003 issue of the Newsletter of the Association of Symbolic Logic is out. It is available online from the ASL website at http://www.aslonline.org/info-newsletter.html .

As happens every year during the summer period (21 juli-17 august) the Euclides building and other buildings of the Roeterseilandcomplex (A, E, P) will be closed during the evenings. Closing times are at 18:00 (as is normal for fridays). Of course it remains possible during all summer to use the "overwerkregeling" to get into the buildings.

From July 14 until August 17, 2003 the opening hours of the canteens of the Roeterseilandcomplex (REC) will be:
Mensa Agora: 09.00 till 16.00
Kantine A: closed, the machines will be functioning.

Please note that Thursday, May 29 and Friday, May 30 all university buildings will be closed because of "Hemelvaartsdag" on Thursday. In order to enter the building you shall need a "overwerkpas".

The 'Landelijk Orgaan Wetenschappelijke Integriteit' (LOWI) has been established by the KNAW board. The LOWI will deal with complaints about violation of scientific integrity.

After consultation with the VSNU and the boards of het Universities, the 'Landelijk Orgaan Wetenschappelijke Integriteit (LOWI)' was established by the KNAW board on the 1st of May 2003. The LOWI will deal with complaints about violation of scientific integrity that have been addressed to the board of a university, the board of NWO or the KNAW after the 1st of May 2003. After the addressed board has made a decision about on the complaint, the complainer may consult the LOWI for a second opinion.

For more information on the LOWI, please contact Amanda Collins, collins at science.uva.nl, tel: 6090.

Due to all the recent developments around the disease SARS, we wish to be informed on the whereabouts of all ILLC-personnel especially those traveling to countries where travel is not recommended by the World Health Organization. We also wish to be informed about guests we can expect from these area's. We request that you, as soon as you know that you'll be traveling to one of these area's or when you know of a guest who'll be coming from one of the countries would send an email to Martin Stokhof (stokhof at hum.uva.nl) or Amanda Collins (collins at science.uva.nl) informing us of these events.

More information and advice on SARS and the risk areas, can be found on the websites of the World Health Organization (at http://www.who.int/) and the Ministry of Health (at http://www.minvws.nl/zoeken.html?folder=549).

The police, in cooperation with Carglass BV, Stichting Certificering Motorrijtuigenbeveiliging, Dienst Infrastructuur Verkeer en Vervoer and Datatag, are taking measures to reduce vehicle crime in the Plantage area. On Thursday 8 May, as part of this initiative, people will have will have the opportunity to have their vehicles (cars, bicycles) marked at no cost.

The event will be made into a minor festivity, with presents and candy for children, and festive flags to guide people to the correct area.

For more information contact the neighborhood coordinator, Linda Smit.

The quickly spreading lung disease SARS is cause for alertness for the UvA, since our university has many international contacts involving staff and students.

The College van Bestuur wishes to impress upon staff members and students with foreign contacts that they should be aware of the spread of the disease, and take precautions where necessary. They recommend postponing visits to risk areas and recalling any staff members or students that are already in those areas. Furthermore, they advice using restaint when inviting guests from risk areas, and postponing already planned visits where possible.

The Ministry of Health advices people who have been in potential contact with a SARS victim to be alert for the following symptoms: sudden high fevers, aching muscles, coughing, an aching throat and/or shortness of breath. Persons with these symptoms should report to their physicians and notify them of the possibility of SARS.

More information and advice on SARS and the risk areas, can be found on the websites of the World Health Organization (at http://www.who.int/) and the Ministry of Health (at http://www.minvws.nl/zoeken.html?folder=549).

The April 2003 issue of the Newsletter of the Association of Symbolic Logic is out. It is available online from the ASL website at http://www.aslonline.org/info-newsletter.html .

Pieter Adriaans' pursuit of realising the ultimate schoolboy's dream whilst at the same time accomplishing a scientific project of outstanding caliber, has led him to bravely cross the Atlantic Ocean as a solo sailer. Aided by nothing but his determination and advanced computersystem of own build, he entered the 2000 STAR challenge to sail off from Plymouth. The finish at Newport he'll never make...It's an almost literal version of Plato's doomed syracuse.

For more info and ordering: http://www.uitgeverijboom.nl/html/catalogus/boek.php3?item=995 Furthermore one copy is available for reading at the glass display@sitcorner of floor 3 ILLC (for reading, not borrowing!).

The January 2003 issue of the Newsletter of the Association of Symbolic Logic is out. It is available online from the ASL website at http://www.aslonline.org/info-newsletter.html .

This reading group is intended for researchers and advanced students with an interest in (co)algebraic logic and duality theory. During the first meeting we will discuss the first two sections of Chapter I.

For more information, contact Yde Venema (yde at science.uva.nl)