At its meeting held on Tuesday, 12 July 2016, the EATCS Council appointed the new leadership of the EATCS for the coming two-year period. The new president of the EATCS will be Paul Spirakis (University of Liverpool and U. Patras). He will be supported by Leslie Ann Goldberg (University of Oxford), Antonin Kucera (Masaryk University) and Giuseppe Persiano (University of Salerno) as vice-presidents.

The "Best ICGT Paper Award" goes to

Title of the paper: Sesqui-Pushout Rewriting with Type Refinements

Author: Michael Löwe

The two following two papers are the winners ex-equo of the EATCS award for the best ETAPS paper:

Weakest Precondition Reasoning for Expected Run–Times of Probabilistic Programs⋆ Benjamin Lucien Kaminski, Joost-Pieter Katoen, Christoph Matheja, and Federico Olmedo (ESOP)

Neil Ghani, Fredrik Nordvall Forsberg, and Alex Simpson Comprehensive Parametric Polymorphism: Categorical Models and Type Theory (FDOSSACS)

The committee for selecting the winner(s) for this award was composed by Don Sannella, Luca Aceto, and Catuscia Palamidessi

Sad news: Zoltán Ésik passed away yesterday

Our good colleague and friend Zoltán Ésik passed away suddenly yesterday afternoon in the hotel room where he was staying with his wife during a visit to our group at Reykjavik University. He had delivered a survey talk at Reykjavik University on the Equational Logic of Fixed Point Operations on Tuesday and we were making plans for the coming days.

The 43rd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2016) will be held in Rome (Italy) from July 12-th  to 15-th 2016 (http://www.easyconferences.eu/icalp2016/index.html).

The 2016 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation is given to Rajeev Alur and David Dill for their invention of timed automata, a decidable model of real-time systems, which combines a novel, elegant, deep theory with widespread practical impact.

Rajeev Alur and David Dill: A theory of timed automata. Theoretical Computer Science 126(2):183–235, 1994.