This grant provides funds to support twelve U.S.-based young researchers to participate as speakers in the special sessions and plenary lectures at the Twelfth Asian Logic Conference, to be held December 15-20, 2011 at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, one the major centers of logic in the world. All but one of those for whom funds are sought have either very limited or no other means of travel support. The biannual Asian Logic Conference is one of the most important meetings in logic outside of North America, and this the first time it will be held outside of continental Asia. The program includes areas of great current interest (Algorithmic randomness, Logical Aspects of Graphs and Matroids, Modal Logic, Set Theory) and speakers include leading world experts. This event provides an important platform for young researchers to present their work on a world stage and presents excellent opportunities for young U.S. based researchers to make strategic contacts in the Asia-Pacific region.
This award to the Association for Symbolic Logic partially supported eleven travel grants to US national and US-based researchers to participate in the Twelfth Asian Logic Conference in Wellington, New Zealand, December 15-20, 2011. This meeting was co-located with the annual meeting of the Australasian Association for Logic (AAL 2011). Five travel grant recipients attended a satellite conference on Analysis and Randomness held in Auckland, New Zealand, December 12-13, 2011. The selection of travel grant recipients for this award was made by the Program Committee of the Asian Logic Conference, chaired by Rod Downey. Nine of the awards were made to participants who earned their Ph.D.'s within the last five years or still are completing their Ph.D., and the two others are less than ten years past their Ph.D. degrees. Preference was give to those who have limited or no other means of travel support. The Association for Symbolic Logic, the administrative organization for this project, is the leading professional society for logicians in the world. Charles Steinhorn in his capacity as the Secretary-Treasurer of the Association for Symbolic Logic, was responsible for administering the travel grant program that was supported by the award. The two main meetings of the Association are the ASL North American Annual Meeting and the ASL European Summer Meeting (also known as the Logic Colloquium). The Association also meets annually at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, where it typically co-sponsors one or more events with the American Mathematical Society and/or the Mathematical Association of America, and, on a rotating basis, with one of the three divisions of the American Philosophical Association. The ASL sponsors meetings throughout the world in which logic and its applications are central. The ASL-sponsored meetings during the period of this award were: International conference on Algebra and Logic Dedicated to the 100th birthday of Professor V.V. Morozov (Russia); History and Philosophy of Computing (Belgium); Seventh International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems (FoIKS 2012) (Germany); Young Set Theory Workshop 2012 (France); Antalya Algebra Days XIV (Turkey); Fifteenth Latin American Symposium on Mathematical Logic (SLALM2012) (Colombia); Model Theory in Wroclaw 2012 (Poland); North American Summer School in Logic, Language, and Information (NASSLLI 2012) (USA); Turing Centenary Conference; Computability in Europe 2012 (CiE 2012)---How the World Computes (England); Twenty-seventh Annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS 2012) (Croatia); Seventh International Conference on Computability, Complexity and Randomness (CCR 2012) (England); Eighth Scandinavian Logic Symposium 2012 (Denmark); and, East-Asian School on Logic, Language, and Computation (EASLLC 2012) (China). Increasing the visibility and presence of logic outside North America and Europe is one of the ASL's highest long-term priorities. There already is substantial activity in Australia, Asia, and Latin America on which the ASL intends to build. In 2007, ongoing funding was authorized by the ASL Council for two highly successful meetings that the ASL has regularly sponsored: the biannual Asian Logic Conference (ALC) partially supported by this NSF award, and the biannual Simposio Latinamericano de Logica Matematica (SLALM). It is hoped that these meetings may someday move from ASL-sponsored status to become official ASL regional meetings. Recently, the ASL was awarded an NSF grant to support US national and US-based researchers to participate in the 2012 SLALM that took place in Bogota, Colombia in June 2012; for further information see http://matematicas.uniandes.edu.co/eventos/SLALM2012/. Of the eleven individual travel awards funded by this grant, two were made to plenary speakers (with positions and affiliations at the time of their travel awards): Isaac Goldbring, Hedrick Assistant Adjunct Professor, UCLA, and Grigor Sargsyan, NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow, UCLA. Each of the other nine travel awards were made to special session speakers: Uri Andrews, Van Vleck Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Mingzhong Cai, Van Vleck Visiting Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison ; Adam Day, Miller Research Fellow, University of California, Berkeley; Damir Dzhafarov, Visiting Assistant Professor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Notre Dame; Cameron Freer, Postdoctoral Fellow, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT; Asher Kach; postdoctoral fellow, University of Chicago; Jan Reimann, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University; Jennifer Chubb Reimann, Assistant Professor, University of San Francisco; and, Jason Rute, Ph.D. Candidate, Carnegie Mellon University. The conference included two tutorials, eight plenary lectures, and thirty-eight special session speakers. Titles and slides for the lectures can be found at http://msor.victoria.ac.nz/Events/ALC2011/LectureSlides. Abstracts of all talks will be published in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, one of the three official journals of the ASL. There were 110 conference attendees, including many of the strongest logicians from the Asia-Pacific region. A proceedings volume edited by Jorg Brendle, Rod Downey, Robert Goldblatt, and Byunghan Kim will be published in 2013 by World Scientific Publishers. It also was reported to the conference organizers that least fifteen papers will emerge from work and connections initiated at the meeting.
