SOFSEM: The Seminar - Winter School - Conference
of the Czech and Slovak Computer Science Community

by Keith Jeffery

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SOFSEM is a seminar with a long term tradition that has been evolving into its present form for more than 20 years. Soon after its establishing in 1974 SOFSEM became the foremost Czechoslovak seminar devoted to theoretical and practical problems of software systems. In fact, during those early days of computer science and technology SOFSEM supplemented the university education and academic research by mediating a fast transfer of the latest relevant knowledge to the SOFSEM audience. Traditionally, this audience consisted of university professors, academic researchers, university teaching staff, advanced stu-dents, and professionals from the field.

First local and later on also international experts have been invited. Each of them was to present a series of lectures related to some recent topics in computer science. The basic format of each SOFSEM consisted of several series of invited talks. Each of them had the duration of 3 to 5 hours. This was complemented by selected contributions of participants presented during two half-days in two parallel sessions. Until 1994, the total duration of SOFSEMs was two weeks.

The most substantial changes concerning SOFSEM have been realized after the 'velvet' revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989. From that time, SOFSEM has subsequently transformed from a mainly national seminar into a truly international conference. In 1993, an international advisory board was created to provide assistance to the program committee in the preparation of a scientific program. Beginning with SOFSEM'95, after two years of exhaustive discussions SOFSEM was shortened to eight days while almost preserving the number of invited lectures. At the same time SOFSEM proceedings now appear as a volume in the Springer Verlag series Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Also after the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993 it is still assumed that SOFSEM will continue to be held in either the Czech Republic or the Slovak Republic.

Thus, through its numerous invited papers and selected contributed papers as well as its excellent working atmosphere, the current SOFSEM is a mix of a winter school, a conference, and an advanced workshop. Driven by an international advisory and endowment boards and international program committe in reflecting the recent trends both in theory and practice, the current SOFSEM prolongs its tradition in striving for multidisciplinarity and generalizations in informatics. At the same time it intends to foster international co-operation among professionals working in various areas of computer science.

ERCIM professionals have been involved heavily in SOFSEM as speakers and committee members. For details of the people involved in SOFSEM'96 see: http://www.ics.muni.cz/sofsem/organizers.html

For all information on the conference (including the history reproduced above) and programme and registration details for the '96 conference see: http://www.ics.muni.cz/sofsem/sofsem.html

Please contact:
Jiri Wiedermann - CRCIM
Tel: +42 2 6605 3520
E-mail: wieder@uivt.cas.cz
or Keith G Jeffery - CLRC
Tel: +44 1235 44 6103
E-mail: kgj@rl.ac.uk

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