The Ershov Informatics Conference (the “Perspectives of System Informatics” conference series, the 8th edition) was held on June 27 – July 1, 2011, in Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, Russia. [The conference was dedicated to the 80th anniversary of a pioneer in theoretical and system programming research, academician Andrei Petrovich Ershov (1931-1988), and to the 100 anniversary of one of the founders of cybernetics, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Aleksei Andreevich Lyapunov (1911-1973). Another aim of the conference was to provide a forum for the presentation and in-depth discussion of advanced research directions in computer, software and information sciences. Improvement of contacts and exchange of ideas between the regional and the international research communities and industry in the fields were further aims of the conference.
Altogether, more than two hundred participants attended the conference (including the workshops). At the conference, new results of theoretical and methodological studies in promising fields of theoretical computer science, programming methodology, and new information technologies were presented. The program of the main conference included a tutorial and five invited talks in addition to 18 regular and 10 short presentations (selected by the PC from among 60 papers submitted to the conference by researchers from 26 countries). The detailed information on the conference program can be found at http://psi.nsc.ru/psi11/programme.
The FME invited lecture A Connector Algebras and Petri Nets delivered by Professor Ugo Montanari, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, attracted public attention. This was due to the fact that the focus of the lecture was on formal methods to design correct component-based software architectures. In this talk, an overview of the main characteristic features of some notable theories of connectors (entities controlling interactions of components) and discussion of similarities, differences, mutual embedding and possible enhancements of the formal frameworks were presented.
The preliminary conference proceedings were available at the conference. A book with the invited papers and the papers presented at the conference (and revised with regard to comments and criticisms) will be published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series after the conference.
During the coffee breaks, coffee, soft drink and good sweet cookies were available in a room nearby the lecture hall of the House of Scientists and the lunches were served there, which also gave the possibility to continue scientific discussions on the hot topics of PSI’11. The participants really enjoyed a half-day picnic at the resort hotel “Bylina” with Russian sauna and a barbecue on the third day of the conference. The program of cultural events also included excursions to the geological and railroad engineering museums, the museum of cultural history of Siberian and Far East nations, and a visit to the Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre where the opera “Madam Butterfly” was performed. The conference dinner on the last day was greatly appreciated by all the participants.
The conference attracted sponsorship from industry, funding agencies as well as academic organizations such as FME which we are very grateful for.
Irina Virbitskaite (PSI’11 PC Co-Chair)
June, 2011