The VCLA will hold an award ceremony for the VCLA International Student Awards 2024 on June 30, 2025 as part of DEON, the 17th International Conference on Deontic Logic and Normative Systems.

The winners of the student awards will present their winning theses (20 minutes presentation followed by 5 minutes Q&A). Anyone interested in attending the talks and Q&A sessions is very welcome to join!

Speakers & Abstracts

Nathaniel Collins (University of Colorado Boulder)
“Count-Free Weisfeiler–Leman and Group Isomorphism”

We investigate the power of the counting and count-free variants of the Weisfeiler–Leman (WL) Version I algorithm for groups (Brachter & Schweitzer, LICS 2020).
• We study the counting and count-free versions of the Weisfeiler–Leman algorithm when applied to so-called CFI groups, which arise from CFI graphs (Cai, Fürer, & Immerman, Combinatorica, 1992) via Mekler’s construction (J. Symb. Log., 1981). We use O(log log n) rounds of WL Version I, improving upon the work of Brachter & Schweitzer, who used O(log n) rounds of WL Version II. As a consequence, we obtain improvements in both the parallel and descriptive complexities of identifying these groups.
• We further improve the parallel complexity using count-free WL Version I, bounded non-determinism, and limited counting. In particular, we obtain a β1MAC0(FOLL) isomorphism test for CFI groups.

Tikhon Pshenitsyn (formerly Lomonosov Moscow State University, now Russian Academy of Sciences)
“Hypergraph Lambek Calculus”

English summary