SOFSEM 2006: Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science

by Julius Stuller

SOFSEM is a successful annual international conference devoted to the theory and practice of Computer Science. Its aim is to foster co-operation among professionals from academia and industry working in various areas of Computer Science. Its 32nd edition was held in Merin, located about 60 km south of Prague on the right shore of Slapska prehrada (‘Slapy Dam’), Czech Republic, 21-27 January 2006.

SOFSEM (historically from SOFtware SEMinar) is the foremost Czecho-Slovak Computer Science conference being at the same time the most important joint activity of CRCIM and SRCIM; it is organised every third year in Slovakia while in-between twice in the Czech Republic.

Invited speaker Georg Gottlob.

SOFSEM offers a unique opportunity to quickly obtain a representative overview of the areas that are selected as the topics of the year. To avoid excess diversity among the conference participants and to foster the atmosphere of close professional interaction, SOFSEM is organised in tracks with topics narrow enough to attract a community of researchers that share very specific fields of interest. The schedule is tailored so that a unique opportunity to interact with other participants (invited speakers, researchers, students) of the tracks is given. For SOFSEM 2006, the following 4 tracks with selected topics have been chosen:

• Wireless, Mobile, Ad hoc and Sensor networks (Track & PC Chair: Jiri Wiedermann, Institute of Computer Science - ICS, Prague, Czech Republic)
• Foundations of Computer Science (Gerard Tel, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands)
• Semantic web technologies (Julius Stuller – General Conference Chair, ICS, Prague)
• Database technologies (Jaroslav Pokorny, Charles University, Prague).

SOFSEM conferences are well known for very high quality invited speakers. This was again confirmed by this year SOFSEM edition – in total ten invited speakers gave very interesting talks:

• Future and Emerging Technologies:
  Keith G. Jeffery,UK: ‘Beyond the Horizon’ project
• Wireless, Mobile, Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks:
  - Sotiris Nikoletseas, Greece: Models and Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks (Smart Dust)
  - Christian Schindelhauer, Germany: Mobility in Wireless Networks
• Semantic Web Technologies:
  - Marie-Christine Rousset, France: Somewhere in Semantic Web
  - Dimitris Plexousakis, Greece: Evolving Ontology Evolution
• Database Technologies:
  Georg Gottlob, Austria: Monadic Queries over Tree Structured Data
• Foundations:
  - S. Barry Cooper,UK: How Can Nature Help Us Compute?
  - Burkhard Monien, Germany: Selfish Routing in Networks
  - Andre Schiper, Switzerland: Group Communication: From Practice to Theory
  - Hajnal Andréka, István Németi, Hungary: New Physics and Hypercomputation.

The proceedings were published in LNCS No. 3831 by Springer-Verlag.
SOFSEM provides an ideal framework for discussions and meetings, for establishing personal contacts, and for socializing. Consequently it is especially well suited for young computer scientists. An integral part of the SOFSEM 2006 was the Student Research Forum (Chair: Maria Bielikova, Slovak University of Technology, Bratislava) organised with the aim to publish and discuss students’ projects in the field of theory and practice of computer science. The forum offered the students the opportunity to receive feedback on both the originality of their scientific work results and the work in progress.

The organizers would have not been able to organize such a successful conference without the help of sponsors among which the ERCIM contribution was the most important.

As usually SOFSEM has been used as a platform for spreading the ERCIM ideas both directly via ERCIM President Keith G. Jeffery’s invited talk presenting the ‘Beyond the Horizon’ project and a small exhibition advertising ERCIM, and indirectly by the involvement of ERCIM researchers in its scientific program.

Link:
http://www.sofsem.cz

Please contact:
Julius Stuller - SOFSEM 2006 General Chair,
Institute of Computer Science, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic / CRCIM, Czech Republic; Tel: +420 266 053 200
E-mail: stullercs.cas.cz