News

• 12 February 2026:
  Rannís has announced the 2026 allocation of new grants from the Icelandic Research Fund.
  One grant proposal from ICE-TCS was awarded funding:
  
  • Luca Aceto, Hyperlogics: expressiveness, monitorability and tools (H.-Lo)
  The other grant proposals from the lab were rejected. The CS department on the whole won 3 new grants and RU on the whole 11 new grants.
• 11 February 2026:
  Tarmo Uustalu is organizing the 28th Estonian Winter School in Computer Science, EWSCS 2026 and Luca Aceto is among the teachers. The school will be held at Viinistu, 2-5 March 2026. Registration by 15 February.
• 15 January 2026:
  On Thursday, 22 January 2026, Bjarki Gunnarsson will defend his University of Iceland (UI) MSc thesis Concurrent monads, in 2-categories. Supervisors: Tarmo Uustalu and Anders Claesson (UI). Examiner: Jacob Neumann. The defense will happen at 10:00 in room 258 of VR-II.
• 9 January 2026:
  The ICE-TCS annual report for 2025 is out. See what we did in 2025.
• 17 December 2025:
  Magnús Már Halldórsson will organise the 2027 edition of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) at RU. The conference will take place in the period of 21-25 June 2027.
• 18 November 2025:
The workshop to celebrate Anna Ingólfsdóttir's career took place on Friday, 14 November. Here are a news item and the announcement from the university's web.
• 11 November 2025:
  The recordings and slides of almost all talks of FroCoS/ITP/TABLEAUX 2025 are now available publicly through this index page. Enjoy!
• 7 November 2025:
  Arnar Bjarni Arnarson will defend his PhD thesis proposal Rigorous null models for network science on Monday, 10 November at 13:00 in room M102. Supervisor: Szabolcs Horvát. Committee: Magnús Már Halldórsson, Andreia Sofia Teixeira (Northeastern University London), Zoltán Toroczkai (University of Notre Dame).
• 27 September 2025:
  FroCoS/ITP/TABLEAUX 2025 has successfully started at RU.
• 26 September 2025:
  Two ICE-TCS researchers--Magnús Már Halldórsson and Luca Aceto--are on the Stanford University's list of the most cited researchers in the world, representing the top 2% of scientists globally.
• 16 September 2025:
  Jacob Neumann has successfully passed his viva voce examination in Nottingham. Congratulations!
• 21 August 2025:
  On Friday, 14 November 2025, we will hold a workshop to celebrate Anna Ingólfsdóttir's career. Kim Larsen, Giovanni Bacci, Elli Anastasiadi (Aalborg U.) and María Óskarsdóttir (U. of Southampton/RU) will speak. The workshop will take place at 13:00 in room M220.
• 6 August 2025:
  Maxime Flin will defend his PhD thesis Distributed vertex coloring in bandwidth constrained models on Tuesday, 12 August at 10:00 in room M208. Supervisor: Magnús Már Halldórsson. Examiner: Yi-Jun Chang (National University of Singapore). Committee: Luca Aceto, Fabian Kuhn (University of Freiburg), Merav Parter (Weizmann Institute).
  From 1 Sept, Maxime will be a postdoc at Aalto University in the group of Jukka Suomela.
• 16 July 2025:
  On 16 September 2025, Jacob Neumann will be viva voce examined on his PhD thesis A generalized algebraic theory of directed equality. Thorsten Altenkirch was his thesis supervisor at the University of Nottingham. His examiners are Paige North (Utrecht University) and Ulrik Buchholtz (University of Nottingham).
• 27 June 2025:
  Antonis Achilleos has been promoted to the rank of associate professor at RU, a well deserved recognition of his work that was long due. Congratulations, Antonis!
• 16 June 2025:
  Jacob Neumann has joined us as a postdoc from today. Jacob comes to us from the University of Nottingham where he wrote his PhD thesis.
• 26 May 2025:
  Calvin Lee will defend his PhD thesis proposal Univalent generalized multicategories on Thursday, 5 June at 9:00 in room M104. Supervisor: Tarmo Uustalu. Committee: Paige North (Utrecht U.), Niccolò Veltri (Tallinn U. of Technology).
• 2 April 2025:
  Vasiliki Kyriakou will defend her PhD thesis proposal Effects of restrictive non-determinism on the expressiveness and relative complexity of bounded memory automata on Tuesday, 8 April 2025 at 11:30 in room M326. Supervisors: Antonis Achilleos. Cosupervisor: Karoliina Lehtinen (Aix-Marseille U.). Committee: Anna Ingólfsdóttir, Vassilis Gregoriades (National Technical U. Athens).
• 18 March 2025:
  Stian Lybech will defend his PhD thesis A type-theoretic approach to smart contract safety on Friday, 23 May 2025 at 13:00 in room M216. Supervisors: Luca Aceto, Mohammad Hamdaqa (Polytechnique Montréal), Daniele Gorla (Sapienza U. of Rome). Examiners: Laura Bocchi (U. of Kent), Maurizio Murgia (Gran Sasso Science Inst.). Committee: Ettore Merlo (Polytechnique Montréal), Silvia Crafa (U. of Padova).
• 14 March 2025:
  On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of ICE-TCS, the RU communications and marketing department published an interview with Magnús Már Halldórsson.
• 10 March 2025:
  On 8 March, Joseph Tooby-Smith presented his PhysLean digital physics effort in the podcast of the Assumptions of Physics project of Gabriele Carcassi (U. of Michigan). Enjoy the recording!
• 6 March 2025:
  During his upcoming visit to RU, Pierre-Louis Curien (IRIF, U. Paris Cité) will deliver two talks. The first talk will be on 14 March at RU in the ICE-TCS seminar series, the second on 20 March at U. of Iceland in their mathematical colloquium (see the announcement).
• 28 February 2025:
  The Iceproof project will hold a 3-day seminar in Reykholt 23-25 April 2025.
• 24 February 2025:
  On 3 March at 11:30 in room M120, the investigative journalist Thin Lei Win will give a talk about the non-profit storytelling project Kite Tales, which she co-founded, that chronicles the lives of people in Burma/Myanmar. See also her blog Thin Ink on food systems.
• 19 February 2025:
  Henning Úlfarsson is organizing the 15th installment of NORCOM, the Nordic Combinatorial Conference. NORCOM '25 will take place in Reykjavik, 16-18 June 2025. The call for papers is now out. The deadline for proposing talks is 10 March 2025.
• 7 February 2025:
  The 2025 allocation of the RU Research Fund was announced today. Jasmine Xuereb continues to receive a PhD grant. All applications for new PhD grants from ICE-TCS were rejected. The CS department on the whole got 4 new applications accepted and one continuation.
• 27 January 2025:
  The 2024 annual report of ICE-TCS is out.
• 25 January 2025:
  Registration to the 27th Estonian Winter School in Computer Science, EWSCS 2025, to be held at Viinistu, 3-6 March 2025, is open. Tarmo Uustalu is the main organizer and the lecturers include Anders Claesson from the University of Iceland. Registration deadline: 12 February 2025.
• 17 January 2025:
  Magnús Már Halldórsson is seeking candidates for a PhD student position in his project on comparative complexity via coloring. Apply by 5 February.
• 16 January 2025:
  Pierre-Louis Curien, emeritus research director of CNRS at IRIF, Université Paris Cité, recipient of the INRIA-French Academy of Sciences grand prize 2020, will visit us 12-30 March 2025. Host: Tarmo Uustalu.
• 16 January 2025:
  Rannís has announced the 2025 allocation of new grants from the Icelandic Research Fund.
  These 3 grant proposals from ICE-TCS were awarded funding:
  
  • Magnús Már Halldórsson, Comparative complexity via coloring, project grant
  • Reed Acton, Moving from objects to transformations to account for the finer structures of permutations, PhD student grant
  • Vasiliki Kyriakou, Effects of restrictive non-determinism on the expressiveness and relative complexity of bounded memory automata, PhD student grant
  The other grant proposals from the lab were rejected. The CS department on the whole won 4 new grants and RU on the whole 11 new grants.
• 5 January 2025:
  The call for papers for TABLEAUX 2025, to take place in Reykjavik in autumn, is out. Submission deadlines 9 May (abstracts), 14 May (papers). The PC is co-chaired by Gian Luca Pozzato and Tarmo Uustalu. The conference is organized by Tarmo Uustalu.
• 4 January 2025:
  The RU Department of Computer Science is soliciting applications for permanent faculty positions. Theoretical computer science is one of the domains explicitly listed. See the announcement. Apply by 30 January 2025.
• 11 December 2024:
  Our postdoc Joseph Tooby-Smith has been offered a lecturer position at the CS department of the University of Bath from autumn 2024.
• 1 October 2024:
  Nicolaos Matsakis and Joseph Tooby-Smith are starting as new postdocs at the lab today. Nicolaos comes from the Charles University, Prague. Joseph comes from Cornell University.
  Dylan McDermott has left us after an almost 5-year postdoctoral fellowship to take up a senior research associate position at the University of Oxford.
• 18 September 2024:
  Duncan Attard with colleagues has won the AITO distinguished artifact award of ECOOP 2024 (Vienna, 16-20 September 2024) for the artifact accompanying their paper Runtime instrumentation for reactive components.
• 22 August 2024:
  The Iceproof project will hold a 3-day seminar in Bifröst 3-5 September. Thorsten Altenkirch (University of Nottingham), Christian Bean (Keele University) and Giulio Fellin (University of Brescia) will attend as guests.
• 28 June 2024:
  Today is the last workday at RU of our postdoc Jana Wagemaker. She will be an assistant professor at Radboud University, Nijmegen.
• 29 May 2024:
  Final joint call for participation: Sign up for NLS/SLSS/GandALF 2024, to take place at RU 10-21 June, organized by Antonis Achilleos and colleagues.
  Lecturers of NLS: Miika Hannula, Sandra Kiefer, Greg Restall, Jandson Ribeiro, Rineke Verbrugge.
  Invited speakers of SLSS: Fausto Barbero, Sara Negri, Aybüke Özgün.
  Invited speakers of GandALF: Bernd Finkbeiner, Kim Guldstrand Larsen, Brigitte Pientka, Azalea Raad.
• 28 May 2024:
  Tarmo Uustalu together with Gian Luca Pozzato (University of Torino) will chair the programme committee of TABLEAUX 2025, to be held in Reykjavik in September 2025.
• 16 May 2024:
  Calvin Lee will defend his 60 ECTS MSc thesis Interactions of (co)monads in Agda on 30 May at 14:00 in room M101.
  Supervisor: Tarmo Uustalu. Committee members: Exequiel Rivas (Tallinn University of Technology), Thorsten Altenkirch (University of Nottingham), Jana Wagemaker. Details here.
• 10 May 2024:
  The steering committees of the FroCoS, ITP and TABLEAUX conference series have accepted the bid by Tarmo Uustalu to host these conferences in Reykjavik in September 2025.
• 12 April 2024:
  We have finally regained access to the data of our old website.
  The new website of ICE-TCS opened today. We will incrementally bring the data from our old website online here.
• 8 April 2024:
  The work of Calvin Lee for ESOP/FASE/FoSSaCS 2024 artifact evaluation has been recognized by the committee co-chairs with a distinguished artifact reviewer award.
  Congratulations, Calvin!
• 6 April 2024:
  The 107 pp. (!) version of record of Nathanael Arkor and Dylan McDermott's study of the foundational theory of relative monads appeared in J. Pure Appl. Algebra today.
• 21 March 2024:
  Tarmo Uustalu will be one of the two invited speakers of the Structure Meets Power 2024 workshop of LICS '24. The workshop will be held in Tallinn on 7 July 2024.
• 20 March 2024:
  We welcome Szabolcs Horvát as an (adjoint) member of ICE-TCS. Szabolcs is a member of the CRESS research center, but his interests and work significantly overlap with ours.
• 16 March 2024:
  Tarmo Uustalu is seeking candidates for two 1-year postdoc positions. One is in the Icelandic Research Fund project Computational effects and high-level control (CTRL-F). The other is in the Collaboration Fund project Icelandic advantage in computer-assisted proof. Apply by 31 March.
• 13 March 2024:
  Magnús Már Halldórsson is seeking candidates for a 1-year postdoc position in his project on randomized distributed graph coloring algorithms. Apply by 30 March.
• 5 March 2024:
  The joint call for participation in NLS 2024 and abstracts for SLSS 2024 is out, as is the call for papers for GandALF 2024. Organizer: Antonis Achilleos.
  Do sign up and submit contributions, do visit us in Reykjavik this June!
• 4 March 2024:
  The Estonian Winter School in Computer Science 2024 has begun. The ICE-TCS delegation consists of Calvin, Szabolcs, Vasiliki, Tarmo and Yasuaki.
• 12 February 2024:
  Georg Struth from the University of Sheffield will visit us 17-24 March. Hosts: Tarmo Uustalu and Jana Wagemaker.
• 8 February 2024:
  The RU Research Fund board have decided to give a PhD grant to Vasiliki Kyriakou. Vasiliki is supervised by Antonis Achilleos and Karoliina Lehtinen (LIS, Aix-Marseille University).
  The fund will also continue supporting the PhD study of Yasuaki Morita, supervised by Tarmo Uustalu, and Jasmine Xuereb, supervised by Adrian Francalanza (University of Malta) and Antonis Achilleos.
• 2 February 2024:
  Reykjavik University fell victim to a major cyber attack. The ICE-TCS website at icetcs.ru.is is no longer accessible.
• 30 January 2024:
  Dylan McDermott has been invited to serve on the PC of FoSSaCS 2025.
• 30 January 2024:
  The results of the Collaboration Fund call for new projects in 2024 were announced today (see the list of grants awarded and video of the event).
• 22 January 2024:
  The public announcement of the results of the Collaboration Fund call, originally scheduled for 16 January, was postponed because of the volcanic eruption. The new date is 30 January.
• 21 January 2024:
  Szabolcs Horvát will teach a course on the random graph model at the 26th Estonian Winter School in Computer Science at Viinistu, 4-7 March 2024. Tarmo Uustalu is the organizer. To attend, apply by 19 February.
• 12 January 2024:
  Tarmo Uustalu together with Anders Claesson from the University of Iceland has won a Collaboration Fund grant for the project Icelandic advantage in computer-assisted proof (Iceproof). The award amount for the 2-year project is 51.84 MISK.
  The higher education minister will publicly announce the results of the call for proposals for new projects in 2024 at an event in Gróska on 16 January.
• 12 January 2024:
  The results of the Icelandic Research Fund call for proposals for new projects in 2024 were publicly announced today; see the list of grants awarded. All proposals from ICE-TCS were rejected this time. The CS department of RU won one PhD grant.
• 8 January 2024:
  Eva Ósk Gunnarsdóttir will defend her 60 ECTS MSc thesis Applying binary decision diagrams to learn hidden Markov models on 18 January at 12:00 in room V103.
  Supervisor: Anna Ingólfsdóttir. Committee members: Giovanni Bacci (Aalborg University), Luca Aceto. Details here.
• 21 December 2023:
  Tarmo Uustalu together with Amirouche Moktefi and Niccolò Veltri is organizing a World Logic Day 2024 celebration in Tallinn. The 2024 Logic in Estonia workshop will be held in the Estonian Academy of Sciences, Tallinn, on 15 January 2024. The invited speakers are Valentin Goranko (Stockholm University), Margus Veanes (Microsoft Research) and Jan von Plato (University of Helsinki).
• 6 December 2023:
  Egill Torfason will defend his 30 ECTS MSc thesis Noise resilience of proofs of quantumness on 7 December at 14:30 in room M120.
  Supervisors: Magnús Már Halldórsson, Alexandru Georghiu (Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg). Examiner: Giulia Ferrini (Chalmers University of Technology). Details here.
• 8 November 2023:
  Raphaël Reynouard will defend his PhD thesis On learning stochastic models: from theory to practice on 14 November at 10:00 CET (9:00 GMT) in Sala Consiliare of GSSI, L'Aquila. A Zoom live stream from the defense can be followed in room M123 of RU.
  Supervisors: Anna Ingólfdóttir, Giovanni Bacci (University of Aalborg). Examiners: Nils Jansen (Ruhr-University Bochum and Radboud University), Catia Trubiani (GSSI). Committee: Luca Aceto. Details here.
• 21 August 2023:
  Vasiliki Kyriakou is joining us as a new PhD student from this academic year, supervised by Antonis Achilleos and Karoliina Lehtinen (LIS, Aix-Marseille University).
  Calvin Lee is joining as a new MSc student, supervised by Tarmo Uustalu.
• 13 July 2023:
  Peter Dybjer [DBLP, GS] from Chalmers University of Technology will visit us from 27 August to 2 September. Host: Tarmo Uustalu.
• 7 June 2023:
  Our postdoc Valentina Castiglioni has accepted an assistant professorship offer from TU Eindhoven and will begin there on 1 October.
  Valentina started at RU on 15 May 2019 as a postdoc in Luca and Anna's IRF research project OPEL. In January 2022, she won an IRF grant for her own postdoc project ULTRON.
• 31 May 2023:
  From 1 July 2023, Henning Úlfarsson will be the chair of the CS department of RU.
  Henning will pick up the baton from Luca Aceto, who has been serving the department in this role from 1 March 2019.
• 30 May 2023:
  Antonis Achilleos will bring three logic events to Reykjavik next June: GandALF, the Scandinavian Logic Symposium and the Nordic Logic Summer School.
  The PC of GandALF will be co-chaired by Antonis and our collaborator Adrian Francalanza from U. of Malta.
• 8 May 2023:
  On 23 May, we are organizing an informal one-day workshop on formal methods in security at RU. Experts from some of the most active research groups in Denmark, Norway and Sweden will speak.
  Register by 17 May.
• 5 May 2023:
  Flavien Breuvart [DBLP] from LIPN, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, will visit us from 23 August to 4 October. Hosts: Tarmo Uustalu and Dylan McDermott.
• 19 April 2023:
  Henning Úlfarsson has been promoted to associate professor.
  Congratulations, Henning!
• 18 April 2023:
  Duncan Attard defended his PhD thesis Runtime monitoring for asynchronous reactive components for a University of Malta and RU joint degree in Malta today.
  Supervisors: Adrian Francalanza (University of Malta), Luca Aceto, Anna Ingólfsdottir.
• 27 March 2023:
  On 19 May, we welcome Marta Kwiatkowska [DBLP, GS] from the University of Oxford for a public talk at RU.
  This talk is to celebrate 18 years of ICE-TCS, 25 years of computer science at RU and 25 years of RU. It is part of the Valkyrja distinguished lecture series.
  Marta's talk, entitled Safety and robustness for deep learning with provable guarantees, will take place at 14:00 in room V102. Details here.
• 7 February 2023:
  Thin Lei Win, an award-winning multimedia journalist specializing in food and climate issues, will give a public talk Rebooting our food systems on 14 February at 12:00 in room M103. Details here.