This short article announces the recipients of the CONCUR Test-of-Time Award 2020

Aceto, L. (Luca)

Baeten, J.C.M. (Jos)

Bouyer-Decitre, P. (Patricia)

Hermanns, H. (Holger)

Silva, A.M. (Alexandra)

CWI's Institutional Repository

CONCUR Test-Of-Time Award 2020AnnouncementLuca AcetoICE-TCS, Department of Computer Science, Reykjavik University, IcelandGran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, ItalyJos BaetenCWI Amsterdam, The NetherlandsUniversity of Amsterdam, The NetherlandsPatricia Bouyer-DecitreLSV, CNRS, Gif-sur-Yvette, FranceENS Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, FranceHolger HermannsSaarland University, Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarbrücken, GermanyAlexandra SilvaUniversity College London, UKAbstractThis short article announces the recipients of the CONCUR Test-of-Time Award 2020.2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation → ConcurrencyKeywords and phrases Concurrency, CONCUR Test-of-Time AwardDigital Object Identifier 10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2020.5Category Invited PaperAcknowledgements We thank Javier Esparza (chair of the CONCUR Steering Committee), IlariaCastellani and Mohammad Reza Mousavi (chair and secretary of the IFIP Working Group 1.8 onConcurrency Theory), and Igor Konnov and Laura Kovacs (chairs of the CONCUR 2020 ProgramCommittee) for their assistance throughout our work.1 IntroductionThe International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR) and the IFIP WorkingGroup 1.8 on Concurrency Theory have established the CONCUR Test-of-Time Awardto recognize important achievements in Concurrency Theory that were published at theCONCUR conference and have stood the test of time. All papers published at CONCURbetween 1990 and 1995 were eligible for the first installment of the award, which waspresented at the 31st International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2020).The conference was held on line from Vienna, Austria, in the period 1–4 September 2020,with Igor Konnov and Laura Kovacs as chairs of the program committee.We had the great honour to serve as members of the first CONCUR Test-of-Time AwardJury, and were asked by the CONCUR Steering Committee to select one or two awardees forthe periods 1990–1993 and 1992–1995.After having made a shortlist of candidate award recipients for each of the above-mentionedperiods and having thoroughly discussed their relative merits and impact on the CONCURresearch community and beyond, the Jury unanimously selected the four articles mentionedbelow for the award out of a slate of many excellent candidates.© Luca Aceto, Jos Baeten, Patricia Bouyer-Decitre, Holger Hermanns, and Alexandra Silva;licensed under Creative Commons License CC-BY31st International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2020).Editors: Igor Konnov and Laura Kovács; Article No. 5; pp. 5:1–5:3Leibniz International Proceedings in InformaticsSchloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik, Dagstuhl Publishing, Germany5:2 CONCUR ToT Award 20202 The Award Winning Contributions2.1 Period 1990–1993Rob van Glabbeek. “The Linear Time-Branching Time Spectrum”.Citation: The companion papers on “The Linear Time-Branching Time Spectrum”,published by Rob van Glabbeek at CONCUR 1990 and 1993, jointly receive one awardfor offering a highly influential taxonomy of the menagerie of process semantics, bothin a setting where every system action is observable and in the presence of silent moves.Each of the plethora of studied semantics comes equipped with a variety of elegantcharacterisations in terms of modal logics, testing scenarios, relations, and completeaxiomatisations. The encyclopedic nature of the above-mentioned papers has made thema must read for researchers in concurrency theory for nearly 30 years.Søren Christensen, Hans Hüttel and Colin Stirling. “Bisimulation Equivalence is Decidablefor all Context-Free Processes”.Citation: The paper “Bisimulation Equivalence is Decidable for all Context-Free Pro-cesses”, published by Søren Christensen, Hans Hüttel and Colin Stirling at CONCUR1992, receives one award for extending and simplifying the seminal result by Baeten,Bergstra and Klop, who proved the decidability of bisimilarity over normed context-freeprocesses. The CONCUR 1992 paper has paved the way to further decidability andcomplexity results for a variety of classes of infinite-state processes. This includes the2-EXPTIME algorithm for bisimilarity over BPA presented by Burkart, Caucal andSteffen in a paper published at MFCS 1995, and the work by Senizergues in papers atFOCS 1998 and in the SIAM Journal on Computing in 2005, presenting decidabilityresults for all “equational graphs” with finite out-degree.2.2 Period 1992–1995Roberto Segala and Nancy Lynch. “Probabilistic Simulations for Probabilistic Processes”.Citation: The paper “Probabilistic Simulations for Probabilistic Processes”, published byRoberto Segala and Nancy Lynch at CONCUR 1994, receives one award for introducing the“simple” probabilistic automata model. Unlike earlier attempts to embrace probabilities,transition targets here are probability distributions over states, and this makes it possibleto lift core process algebraic results in a very elegant manner. Probabilistic automatahave quickly been recognised as the pivotal link between classical concurrency theory andthe theory of discrete-state Markov processes. They have become the central subjectsof probabilistic model checking, and are echoed in a range of very influential modellingformalisms including probabilistic timed automata, probabilistic hybrid automata, andMarkov automata.Davide Sangiorgi. “A Theory of Bisimulation for the pi-Calculus”.Citation: The paper “A Theory of Bisimulation for the pi-Calculus”, published by DavideSangiorgi at CONCUR 1993, receives one award for introducing the notion of openbisimilarity, which, unlike early and late bisimilarity, is a congruence for the pi-calculus.Open bisimilarity makes it possible to view most names as uninstantiated variables,and this allows for the development of efficient tools based on a kind of symbolic state-space exploration. Open bisimilarity and tools based on it have, for instance, played animportant role in research on cryptographic protocols modelled using extensions of thepi-calculus. For a recent example, Horne has used open bisimilarity as the appropriateway to model the capabilities of an attacker trying to get confidential information, with areal-world application to finding and fixing a privacy flaw in e-passports presented byFilimonov et al. at ESORICS 2019.L. Aceto, J. Baeten, P. Bouyer-Decitre, H. Hermanns, and A. Silva 5:33 Concluding RemarksInterviews with the award recipients, which give some information on the historical contextthat led them to develop their award-winning work and on their research philosophy, may befound in four blog posts that are accessible from https://processalgebra.blogspot.com/,and are collected under one roof in a contribution to the June 2020 issue of the Bulletin ofthe EATCS [1].We hope that researchers in Concurrency Theory will read or re-read the award-winningpapers and the others that were presented at the early editions of the CONCUR conference,which are a veritable treasure trove of information about our field’s intellectual heritage andof inspiration for future work.References1 Luca Aceto. Interviews with the 2020 CONCUR Test-of-Time Award recipients. Bulletin of theEATCS, 131:66–84, 2020. URL: http://bulletin.eatcs.org/index.php/beatcs/article/view/626.CONCUR 2020

CONCUR Test-of-time award 2020 announcement

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

CWI's Institutional Repository

Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server

UCL Discovery

NARCIS