Two CS professors chaired October conferences.

Eva Tardos was the Program Chair for the 46th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, which was held in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania , on October 23-25, 2005. For more information on the conference, visit http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~FOCS05/ .

Ken Birman was the Program Chair for the 20th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, which was held in Brighton , United Kingdom on October 23-26, 2005. The biennial ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles is the world's premier forum for researchers, developers, programmers, vendors and teachers of operating system technology. Academic and industrial participants present research and experience papers that cover the full range of theory and practice.

In the invitation, Birman indicated that the 2005 program presented important results in a wide range of areas, including distributed storage systems that slash energy costs while improving performance, virus detection and inhibition mechanisms that can stop an infection in its tracks within hundreds of milliseconds, new insights into robust software construction, and ideas for using contextual information in everything from file search to system repair after a viral attack. 

Birman also indicated that some of the best recent work on peer-to-peer computing was presented, including a panel session that debated the actual impact and future of this line of research.

SOSP '05 also offered opportunities to learn about the state of the art in systems software through short work-in-progress presentations and a poster session interleaved with the conference as a whole. For more information on this conference, visit http://www.sosp-20.com/ .