Dear participants:
As advised by Chongqing municipal government, the school (delayed due to outbreak of H1N1 infection) will re-open on 28 Nov 2009 to 11 Dec 2009. Please get into touch with the organisers asap to confirm your attendance. (Emails have also been sent to participants, which contains more detailed informs.)
Thanks,
The Organisers
This international school on foundations of concurrency and multicore programming is co-organised by the International Institute for Software Technology of the United Nations University (UNU-IIST), and the Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications (CQUPT) . It will be held between 26 September 2009 and 9 October 2009 in CQUPT, Chongqing, China. CQUPT is one of the key universities in China in the field of posts and telecommunications, and is situated in the beautiful Nan'an district of Chongqing. Nan'an literally means southern bank of Yangtze river. It is one of six central districts in Chongqing and is famous for its abundance of natural and historical tourist attractions. The campus of CQUPT is nicely located in a scenic environment with modern buildings and facilities.
It has been designed to raise awareness of concurrency education in postgraduate curricula - particularly in China and surrounding countries. The style of the School reflects that of research and teaching at UNU-IIST, being based on carefully presented lectures, detailed problem classes and rigorous reasoning throughout. The lecturers have an international reputation, and substantial experience, for teaching and research in this area.
In the School two of the most promising alternatives to classical lock-based shared-memory concurrent programming are explored. One removes shared memory but retains the capability of processes to block each other; it is known as the rendezvous or synchronous message-passing programming style, and a typical representative is the process algebra CSP. The other keeps shared memory but attempts to reduce locks (i.e. blocking); it is known as nonblocking or low-lock shared-memory programming. The first alternative is covered in the course `The foundations of concurrent systems: Communicating Sequential Processes', whilst the second is covered in `Foundations of multicore programming: algorithm and verification'.
These two courses will be lectured by Dr. Jeff Sanders and Dr. Xu Wang in English. Both are professional staff in UNU-IIST. Dr. Sanders holds degrees in Mathematics from Monash University and the Australian National University. He has taught across the range of undergraduate and graduate courses in Pure Mathematics and Computer Science, and has taught courses in China, Africa, Iran and Malaysia. He has supervised numerous MSc and PhD students. Before moving to Macao he spent 22 years at the Programming Research Group, Oxford, and is now an emeritus fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Dr. Xu Wang is currently a research fellow at the International Institute for Software Technology, United Nations University. His research interests lie in the broad field of semantic and verification of concurrent systems, where he specialises in developing advanced automatic verification methods and state space reduction techniques for CSP/FDR. Before joining UNU-IIST in 2006, he worked as research staff at HKUST, Oxford University and Birmingham University since 2000. He holds PhD, M.Eng. and B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from Chinese Academy of Sciences and Xi'an Jiaotong University. He would like to work with motivated students with interests in applying formal methods to solve practical problems in concurrent systems.
The School will be held during a period of two weeks for a total of 60-70 lecture hours. Participants are required to attend the course full time. Participants will receive a UNU-IIST certificate for credit recognition if they reach an acceptable level on the course. After the School outstanding participants may be invited to study as UNU-IIST fellows for 9 months in Macao.
For participants from China and other developing countries, registration and training materials are free. The School sponsors will also provide full or partial financial support on travel and accommodations for some participants based on their application. The participants from developed countries need to be self-funded. Registration and training materials will be charged at a minimum level.
The School sponsors will organise a one-day trip in Chongqing, which is free for all the participants. To guarantee good training and communications between lecturers and participants, the number of positions in this school is limited. Therefore, we recommend early applications, especially for those who intend to apply for financial support.
