Founding Chair Statement

The Founding Chair statement can also be downloaded in pdf.

Logic is often called the calculus of computation and computation has indeed been the source of a major revitalization of logic in the twentieth century. Modern computer science grew out of logico-philosophical considerations by Gödel, Turing, Church, Curry, Kleene, Post, Markov and others. Subsequently computation has stimulated developments in modal logic (temporal logic, dynamic logic, Hoare logic), proof theory, computability theory, finite model theory and the lambda-calculus. In turn, central areas of modern computer science research are intimately tied up with logic; these include: computer-assisted verification, security and privacy, automated reasoning, programming languages, databases and complexity theory.

I am delighted to announce the formation of a new special interest group focussed on logic and computation. The new SIG will be called SIGLOG. The officers are: Luke Ong (vice-Chair), Natarajan Shankar (Treasurer), Alexandra Silva (Secretary) and I will serve as its first Chair. The officers will be assisted by an executive committee and an advisory committee. The formation of this SIG has taken a long time with a lot of effort put in by many people. The idea of such a SIG was first mooted in 2007 by Moshe Vardi and Dana Scott and the first draft proposals were written by Vardi with input from Martin Abadi, Rajeev Alur and Phokion Kolaitis.

For a long time the logic and computation community has functioned without a unifying organization. It has, nevertheless, grown in numbers and diversity and there are now many conferences that testify to the vitality of the community. Indeed the FLoC cluster of conferences this Summer in Vienna is expected to attract 1500 participants. There are, however, many ways in which a community-wide organization can serve the community that a single-conference-based organization cannot.

SIGLOG aims to serve a broad range of interests. The flagship conference will be the ACM-IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science. SIGLOG will actively seek association agreements with other conferences in the field. A SIGLOG newsletter is planned to be published quarterly in an electronic format with community news, technical columns, members’ feedback, conference reports, book reviews and other items of interest to the community. An important activity of SIGLOG will be advocating for the importance of logic in the undergraduate computer science curriculum. Another important activity will be the establishment of prizes to recognize the outstanding contributions made by leading members of the community. Several members of the community have won Turing prizes, but there is room for much more recognition, especially for younger researchers. SIGLOG will collaborate closely with EATCS and EACSL as well as other organizations, for example the Gödel Society. SIGLOG will maintain close ties with the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic. The upcoming Federated Logic Conferences in Vienna (part of the Vienna Summer of Logic) will feature a SIGLOG launch event.

SIGLOG seeks to be an inclusive and diverse organization. We are committed to encouraging the participation of women in computing and are pleased to note that there are many outstanding women leaders in the research areas covered by SIGLOG. We actively seek members from all geographical regions and from a broad variety of research interests.

Prakash Panangaden (SIGLOG Chair, 2014)