Carnegie Mellon Qatar hosts Asian Computing Science Conference

The series of annual Asian Computing Science Conferences (ASIAN) provides a forum for researchers in Computer Science from the Asian continent and promotes interaction with researchers in other regions.

Iliano Cervesato, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon computer science professor, organized this year's edition, which focused on computer and network security. "The conference was very beneficial. We had excellent speakers and many people had opportunities to identify collaborations and ways to work together in the future," says Cervesato.

ASIAN'07 attracted some 50 researchers from universities around the world including Japan, India, Iran, USA and France. In addition to the 25 regular presentations, three of the most influential experts in computer and network security gave invited addresses.

Andrei Sabelfeld, from Chalmers University in Sweden, exposed the most recent advances in the area of declassification, to which he was one of the early contributors. Joshua Guttman, from the U.S. think tank MITRE, who is well known as one of the creators of the popular strand space model of security protocols, spoke about new dimensions along which to perform verification tasks. Kazuhiko Kato, from the University of Tsukuba in Japan, discussed a new architecture meant to make computers more secure.

As the first technical conference on Computer Science in Qatar, ASIAN was a unique opportunity to listen to cutting-edge research, forge collaborations and showcase Education City, Qatar and everything that is happening here. While in Qatar, conference attendees had the opportunity to see the city, visit the souqs and explore the desert on a duning trip. "This was the first time in Doha for most everyone. Most people were surprised at the construction and the buzz in Qatar," says Cervesato. "Showing off Doha was one reason to have the conference here."

Cervesato will be organizing a larger Computer Science-focused conference in Doha in December of 2008. The 15th edition of the Logic for Programming Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (LPAR) conference is expected to attract at least 100 attendees worldwide. LPAR prides itself on bringing Computer Science logic to all parts of the world.