Monthly Archives: September 2025

EATCS Council 2025 Election Statement

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I am delighted to be nominated for the EATCS Council. I have completed two full terms but would be honoured to stay on board for another round. You can see my previous statements below; most of the opinions there remain valid today, in particular with respect to publication models for TCS, the connection between TCS and the Sciences, and my stance on core principles of scientific inquiry.

ICALP

Looking back at earlier statements, they are dominated by my ambition to increase the quality of ICALP, primarily by giving ICALP a steering committee. I have served in that steering committee for a while now, and currently am trusted with steering it. I think this has turned out extremely well. However, I have become convinced that it is important that the ICALP steering committee remains grounded in the wider concerns of EATCS and will continue to try to align expectations in both directions.

Fundamental TCS Ph.D. Course

From the time when I was a Ph.D. student, TCS has evolved dramatically in many directions. Students are recruited from many different institutions, and at the same time, academic institutions have become increasingly specialised. As a consequence many young researchers lack a common core of TCS knowledge, simply because few institutions have the resources to offer a full palette of graduate courses.

I would like EATCS to take responsibility for the “comprehensive view of TCS” and organise a regular (say, yearly) TCS core curriculum Ph.D. course; preferably as a one-week intensive course, with a relatively stable curriculum each year. This is not a “topics” course, nor a “recent advances” course, but the “graduate-level _foundations_ of theory of computation”. Also, it would be a great place to meet fellow young students.

To set this up stably—and make sure it happens more than once and doesn’t deteriorate into “whatever famous professor X thinks is cool this week”-course—I think we need a steering committee or an advisory board. But I haven’t thought this through; EATCS would be the right forum to host these ideas.