VSL Foreword
In the summer of 2014, Vienna hosted the largest scientific conference in the history of logic. The Vienna Summer of Logic (VSL, http://vsl2014.at) consisted of twelve large conferences and 82 workshops, attracting more than 2000 researchers from all over the world. This unique event was organized by the Kurt Gödel Society at Vienna University of Technology from July 9 to 24, 2014, under the auspices of the Federal President of the Republic of Austria, Dr. Heinz Fischer.
The conferences and workshops dealt with the main theme, logic, from three important angles: logic in computer science, mathematical logic, and logic in artificial intelligence. They naturally gave rise to respective streams gathering the following meetings:
Logic in Computer Science / Federated Logic Conference (FLoC)
- 26th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV)
- 27th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF)
- 30th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP)
- 7th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR)
- 5th Conference on Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP)
- Joint meeting of the 23rd EACSL Annual Conference on Computer Science Logic (CSL) and the 29th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS)
- 25th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications (RTA) joint with the 12th International Conference on Typed Lambda Calculi and Applications (TLCA)
- 17th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT)
- 76 FLoC Workshops
- FLoC Olympic Games (System Competitions)
Mathematical Logic
- Logic Colloquium 2014 (LC)
- Logic, Algebra and Truth Degrees 2014 (LATD)
- Compositional Meaning in Logic (GeTFun 2.0)
- The Infinity Workshop (INFINITY)
- Workshop on Logic and Games (LG)
- Kurt Gödel Fellowship Competition
Logic in Artificial Intelligence
- 14th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR)
- 27th International Workshop on Description Logics (DL)
- 15th International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR)
- 6th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care 2014 (KR4HC)
The VSL keynote talks which were directed to all participants were given by Franz Baader (Technische Universität Dresden), Edmund Clarke (Carnegie Mellon University), Christos Papadimitriou (University of California, Berkeley) and Alex Wilkie (University of Manchester); Dana Scott (Carnegie Mellon University) spoke in the opening session. Since the Vienna Summer of Logic contained more than a hundred invited talks, it is infeasible to list them here.
The program of the Vienna Summer of Logic was very rich, including not only scientific talks, poster sessions and panels, but also two distinctive events. One was the award ceremony of the Kurt Gödel Research Prize Fellowship Competition, in which the Kurt Gödel Society awarded three research fellowship prizes endowed with 100.000 Euro each to the winners. This was the third edition of the competition, themed Logical Mind: Connecting Foundations and Technology this year.
The other distinctive event were the 1st FLoC Olympic Games hosted by the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC) 2014. Intended as a new FLoC element, the Games brought together 12 established logic solver competitions by different research communities. In addition to the competitions, the Olympic Games facilitated the exchange of expertise between communities, and increased the visibility and impact of state-of-the-art solver technology. The winners in the competition categories were honored with Kurt Gödel medals at the FLoC Olympic Games award ceremonies.
Organizing an event like the Vienna Summer of Logic has been a challenge. We are indebted to numerous people whose enormous efforts were essential in making this vision become reality. With so many colleagues and friends working with us, we are unable to list them individually here. Nevertheless, as representatives of the three streams of VSL, we would like to particularly express our gratitude to all people who have helped to make this event a success: the sponsors and the honorary committee; the organization committee and the local organizers; the conference and workshop chairs and program committee members; the reviewers and authors; and of course all speakers and participants of the many conferences, workshops and competitions.
The Vienna Summer of Logic continues a great legacy of scientific thought that started in Ancient Greece and flourished in the city of Gödel, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. The heroes of our intellectual past shaped the scientific world-view and changed our understanding of science. Owing to their achievements, logic has permeated a wide range of disciplines, including computer science, mathematics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, linguistics, and many more. Logic is everywhere -- or in the language of Aristotle, πάντα πλήρη λογικῆς τέχνης.
Vienna, July 2014
Matthias Baaz, Thomas Eiter, Helmut Veith