Elsevier Science sponsors Travel Grants to the SIAM 50th Anniversary and 2002 Annual Meeting (SIAM50) Five grants are available. Program information for SIAM 50 at http://www.siam.org/meetings/SIAM50/. To qualify: Individuals must be mathematical scientists with full time appointments in universities in "outreach" countries, for whom attendance would otherwise not be within reach. Any country on the list of countries to which we extend SIAM "outreach"

The consortium of Italian Computer Science PhD granting institutions sponsors an annual summer school offering three graduate-level courses aimed at all first-year PhD students. In addition to introducing students to timely research topics, the school is meant to promote acquaintance and collaboration among young European researchers. Further details: http://www.cs.unibo.it/biss2002/

Details: http://pompeiu.imar.ro/~eurrommat/AGAT2.html

Brief: When: May 5-7, 2002. Who: Romanian Academic Society in co-operation with German Marshall Fund, British Council Romania, American Embassy Bucharest, Goethe Institute Romania Where: at the best Western Savoy Hotel Constanta, Black Sea Coast in Romania. Why: to bring together Eastern and Western public policy experts and managers; to foster discussions on potential partnerships and common projects between regional NGOs, to discuss the role of

We determine the precise value of the satisfiability threshold of random 1-in-k SAT. The analysis essentially shows that this (NP-complete) problem is in the same universality class as the polynomial time computable problem 2SAT, and has a second-order phase transition. We also obtain rigorous lower and upper bounds, as well an experimental estimate of the location of the phase transition in random NAE 3SAT.

Cheeseman, Kanefsky and Taylor (IJCAI'91) have experimentally shown that the "hardest" (in an average-case sense) instances of combinatorial problems appear at phase transitions. They also conjectured that it is the presence/absence of a phase transition that distinguishes NP-complete problems from those having a polynomial time algorithm. Their conjecture is, of course, naive (there are well-known tractable problems with a phase transition), but

We investigate a simple dynamics on graphs, motivated by: 1. The Pavlov rule in Prisoner's Dilemma 2. A special case of co-learning, a concept in distributed Artificial Intelligence introduced by Shoham and Tennenholtz , and further investigated by Kittock. We prove two results: 1. On cycles absorbtion takes O(n log(n)) steps. 2. In contrast, the number of steps is exponential on the complete graph.

I determine the threshold behaviour of random Horn satisfiability via a probabilistic analysis of positive unit resolution, also determining as a byproduct the average-case complexity of this algorithm. A preliminary version can be read from http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.DS/9912001

July 17-20, 2002. Further details: http://www.infoiasi.ro/~ispdc/

July 17-20, 2002. Further details: http://www.etc.tuiasi.ro/ecit/Ecit2002/Ecit2002.htm