The award supports the attendance of fifty US-based students to attend the sixth Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 14) which will be held in Vienna, Austria, in July 2014, as part of the Vienna Summer of Logic (VSL 14). The federated logic conference is an event which brings together ten major international conferences in the area of Formal Methods, and around 75 satellite workshops. While the participating conferences are normally held individually by their local conference organization on an annual basis, they all agree to this joint and federated event to be held every three-four years.
Enhancing the security, privacy, usability, and reliability of computing systems is widely accepted as one the grand challenges facing the computing-research community. Formal Methods have emerged as one of the primary approaches towards that goal. A federated conference provides an opportunity for accelerating research via synergy between the different strands of research in Formal Methods. It is also an outstanding training opportunity for young researchers, as it offers them a grand view of the whole area.
The purpose of this grant was to provide funds for travel grants US graduate student attendees of the 2014 Federated Logic Conference (FLoC'14), which took in Vienna, Scotland, during July 10-24, 2014, as part of the Vienna Summer of Logic. FLoC'14 consisted of eight major conference in computational logic: the 26th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV), the 27th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), the 30th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP), the 7th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR), the 5th Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP), the Joint Meeting of the 23rd EACSL Annual Conference on Computer Science Logic (CSL) and the 29th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS), the 25th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications (RTA) joint with the 12th International Conference on Typed Lambda Calculi and Applications (TLCA), and the 17th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT). The eight major conferences were accompanied by 75 workshops. For details, see http://vsl2014.at/logic-in-computer-science/. FLoC'14 was attended by about 1,500 participants, about 400 of which were students. Support funds were provided to selected students to cover expenses involved in attending the conference; 34 students were supported. (57 non-US students were supported from other sources.) The supported students were able to participate in a unique meeting, which takes place only once in four years. All major researchers in computational logic participate in FLoC. The list of invited speakers at FLoC is a list of luminaries. The students got exposed to cutting-edge research. They also got to meet numerous graduate students from all over the world, establishing connections that would help them in launching their research careers. The reports from the students indicate that they found FLoC'14 to be a transformative experience.
