The 12th annual IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS'97) and the 8th international conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR'97) took place this year with a planned overlap. Both conferences took place in Warsaw, Poland at venues fairly close to each other. LICS ran from June 29 to July 2 and CONCUR ran from July 1 to July 4.
I attended only selected portions of both the conferences and hence this report should not be taken as a comprehensive account. LICS had around 140 registered participants. Luca Cardelli gave nice invited talk on object-based programming languages. The second invited talk was on set constraints by L~Pacholski which I could not attend due to overlap with CONCUR. I also skipped the tutorial on ``Methods of automated complexity analysis for inference rules'' by David McAllester. But I did attend the excellent tutorial by H~Comon on ``Applications of tree automata in rewriting and lambda calculus''. As a result I had to skip the CONCUR invited talk by Michael Shields. Finally, Anita Fefermann gave a very entertaining and well-researched talk on ``The saga of Alfred Tarski: From Warszawa to Berkeley''. The talk was based on a forthcoming book on Tarski. I look forward to reading the book when it comes out.
At LICS, I attended the sessions on model checking, concurrency, temporal logic and automata (where I had a joint paper with Igor Walukiewicz). The talks were of high quality and most of the material was interesting. I particularly liked the paper on BDD's entitled ``Boolean Expression Diagrams'' by H~Andersen and H~Hulg{\aa}rd as also the paper ``A Kleene theorem for timed automata'' by Asarin, Caspi and Maler.
CONCUR had around 70 registered participants and the invited speakers were Glynn Winskel, Michael Shields, Jeremy Gunawardena, myself and Scott Smolka. I had to skip Smolka's talk as well due to my travel plans. I particularly liked Jeremy Gunawardena's talk entitled ``Recent developments in the mathematics of reactive systems''. Very loosely put, the talk surveyed recent work on the application of min-max functions to analyze the performance of discrete event dynamical systems.
The papers presented were of fairly good quality though the talks were, more often than not, badly presented. I quite liked the paper ``Fair simulation'' by Henzinger, Kupferman and Rajamani which was presented by Rajamani.
On the whole I thought that CONCUR had suffered this year as a result of teaming up with LICS both in terms of the number of submissions and the number of registerd participants. Both the conferences were well-organized and it was a pleasure to spend a week in Warsaw.
I have the proceedings of both the conferences and will be happy to provide more details.