IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS SOCIETY TECHNICAL COMMITTEE
ON DISCRETE EVENT SYSTEMS

    Ryan J. Leduc
    Chair, IEEE CSS Technical Committee on DES
    Dept. of Computing and Software
    McMaster University
    1280 Main Street West
    Hamilton, Ontario
    Canada L8S 4K1

    Phone: (905) 525-9140 Ext. 27962
    Fax: (905) 524-0340
    e-mail: leduc@mcmaster.ca
    WWW: http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/~leduc/

DESTC Web Page: http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/destc/

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Contents:

1. Editorial


2. Conferences
 2.1 3rd International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and
     Applications (LATA 2009), Tarragona, Spain, April 2 - 8, 2009

3. Journals
 3.1 Selections from International Journal of Control, Volume 81 Issue
     10, October 2008

Welcome to the newsletter of the IEEE Control Systems Technical Committee on Discrete Event Systems!

See http://www.cas.mcmaster.ca/destc/ for information on the DESTC.

Personal note from the editor:

Welcome to the August 2008 edition of the DESTC newsletter,

Ryan

Contributed by: Ryan Leduc <leduc aT mcmaster dOt ca>

3RD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LANGUAGE AND AUTOMATA THEORY AND
APPLICATIONS (LATA 2009)
Tarragona, Spain
April 2 - 8, 2009

Call for Papers

AIMS:

LATA is a yearly conference in theoretical computer science and its
applications. As linked to the International PhD School in Formal
Languages and Applications that was developed at the host institute in
the period 2002-2006, LATA 2009 will reserve significant room for young
scholars at the beginning of their career. It will aim at attracting
contributions from both classical theory fields and application areas
(bioinformatics, systems biology, language technology, artificial
intelligence, etc.).

SCOPE:

Topics of either theoretical or applied interest include, but are not
limited to:

- algebraic language theory
- algorithms on automata and words
- automata and logic
- automata for system analysis and programme verification
- automata, concurrency and Petri nets
- biomolecular nanotechnology
- cellular automata
- circuits and networks
- combinatorics on words
- computability
- computational, descriptional, communication and parameterized
  complexity
- data and image compression
- decidability questions on words and languages
- digital libraries
- DNA and other models of bio-inspired computing
- document engineering
- extended automata
- foundations of finite state technology
- fuzzy and rough languages
- grammars (Chomsky hierarchy, contextual, multidimensional,
  unification, categorial, etc.)
- grammars and automata architectures
- grammatical inference and algorithmic learning
- graphs and graph transformation
- language varieties and semigroups
- language-based cryptography
- language-theoretic foundations of natural language processing,
  artificial intelligence and artificial life
- mathematical evolutionary genomics
- parsing
- patterns and codes
- power series
- quantum, chemical and optical computing
- regulated rewriting
- string and combinatorial issues in computational biology and
  bioinformatics
- symbolic dynamics
- symbolic neural networks
- term rewriting
- text algorithms
- text retrieval, pattern matching and pattern recognition
- transducers
- trees, tree languages and tree machines
- weighted machines

STRUCTURE:

LATA 2009 will consist of:

- 3 invited talks (to be announced in the second call for papers)
- 2 invited tutorials (to be announced in the second call for papers)
- refereed contributions
- open sessions for discussion in specific subfields or on professional
  issues (if requested by the participants)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Parosh Abdulla (Uppsala)
Stefania Bandini (Milano)
Stephen Bloom (Hoboken)
John Brzozowski (Waterloo)
Maxime Crochemore (London)
Juergen Dassow (Magdeburg)
Michael Domaratzki (Winnipeg)
Henning Fernau (Trier)
Rusins Freivalds (Riga)
Vesa Halava (Turku)
Juraj Hromkovic (Zurich)
Lucian Ilie (London, Canada)
Kazuo Iwama (Kyoto)
Aravind Joshi (Philadelphia)
Juhani Karhumaki (Turku)
Jarkko Kari (Turku)
Claude Kirchner (Bordeaux)
Maciej Koutny (Newcastle)
Kamala Krithivasan (Chennai)
Martin Kutrib (Giessen)
Andrzej Lingas (Lund)
Aldo de Luca (Napoli)
Rupak Majumdar (Los Angeles)
Carlos Martin-Vide (Tarragona & Brussels, chair)
Joachim Niehren (Villeneuve d'Ascq)
Antonio Restivo (Palermo)
Joerg Rothe (Duesseldorf)
Wojciech Rytter (Warsaw)
Philippe Schnoebelen (Cachan)
Thomas Schwentick (Dortmund)
Helmut Seidl (Muenchen)
Alan Selman (Buffalo)
Jeffrey Shallit (Waterloo)
Frank Stephan (Singapore)

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Madalina Barbaiani
Gemma Bel-Enguix
Cristina Bibire
Adrian-Horia Dediu
Szilard-Zsolt Fazekas
Mihai Ionescu
Alexander Krassovitskiy
Guangwu Liu
Carlos Martin-Vide (chair)
Robert Mercas
Catalin-Ionut Tirnauca
Bianca Truthe
Sherzod Turaev
Florentina-Lilica Voicu

SUBMISSIONS:

Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and
unpublished research. Papers should not exceed 12 single-spaced pages
and should be formatted according to the standard format for Springer
Verlag's LNCS series (see
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs/lncs+authors?SGWID=0-40209-0-0-0).
Submissions have to be uploaded at:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lata2009

PUBLICATION:

A volume of proceedings published by Springer in the LNCS series will
be available by the time of the conference. A refereed volume of
extended versions of selected papers will be published after it as a
special issue of a major journal. (This was Information and Computation
for LATA 2007 and LATA 2008.)

REGISTRATION:

The period for registration will be open since September 1, 2008 to
April 2, 2009. The registration form can be found at the website of the
conference: http://grammars.grlmc.com/LATA2009/

Early registration fees: 450 euros
Early registration fees (PhD students): 225 euros
Registration fees: 540 euros
Registration fees (PhD students): 270 euros

At least one author per paper should register. Papers that do not have
a registered author by December 31, 2008 will be excluded from the
proceedings.

Fees comprise free access to all sessions, one copy of the proceedings
volume, and coffee breaks. For the participation in the full-day
excursion and conference lunch on Sunday April 5, the amount of 70
euros is to be added to the fees above: accompanying persons are
welcome at the same rate.

PAYMENT:

Early registration fees must be paid by bank transfer before December
31, 2008 to the conference account at Open Bank (Plaza Manuel Gomez
Moreno 2, 28020 Madrid, Spain): IBAN: ES1300730100510403506598 - Swift
code: OPENESMMXXX (account holder: LATA 2009 ? Carlos Martin-Vide).

(Non-early) registration fees can be paid either by bank transfer to
the same account or in cash on site.

Besides paying the registration fees, it is required to fill in the
registration form at the website of the conference. A receipt for the
payment will be provided on site.

FUNDING:

Up to 20 grants covering partial-board accommodation will be available
for nonlocal PhD students. To apply, candidates must e-mail their CV
together with a copy of the document proving their present status as a
PhD student.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Paper submission: October 22, 2008
Notification of paper acceptance or rejection: December 10, 2008
Application for funding (PhD students): December 15, 2008
Notification of funding acceptance or rejection: December 19, 2008
Final version of the paper for the proceedings: December 24, 2008
Early registration: December 31, 2008
Starting of the conference: April 2, 2009
Submission to the journal special issue: June 22, 2009

FURTHER INFORMATION:

carlos.martin@urv.cat

ADDRESS:

LATA 2009
Research Group on Mathematical Linguistics
Rovira i Virgili University
Plaza Imperial Tarraco, 1
43005 Tarragona, Spain
Phone: +34-977-559543
Fax: +34-977-559597

web site: click here

Contributed by: Ryan Leduc <leduc aT mcmaster dOt ca>

SELECTIONS FROM INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CONTROL
VOLUME 81 ISSUE 10
OCTOBER, 2008

1) Generalised projections in finite state automata and decidability of
state determinacy

Ishanu Chattopadhyay and Asok Ray

Abstract: 

Loss of sensors and communication links may lead to incomplete
observation at the supervisory level of discrete event systems (DES).
Under these circumstances, an event may conceivably be observable at
one state and unobservable at another state and the observability may
become dependent on the history of event occurrences. This paper
presents a framework for analysis of generalised projection maps in
DES, including the maps that introduce possibly unbounded memory

web site: click here