Saarbrücken, the 5th of February 2010
Dear Prof Jan Palmowski, Head of School for Arts and Humanities
Prof Rich Trainor, Principal of Arts and Science
Prof Keith Hoggart, Vice Principal of Arts and Sciences
Mr Chris Mottershead, Vice Principal of Research and Innovation
King's College, London
I am writing to express the concern of the International Federation for Computational Logic for the recent actions Kings College has been taking over a number of its top researchers. I refer to pending dismissals of Shalom Lappin, Wilfried Meyer-Viol, Jonathan Ginzburg, Anatoli Degtyarev and Odinaldo Rodrigues.
We have had extensive dealings with all of these academics who have each produced the highest quality research both in their primary fields and with members of IFCoLog working in other fields. Shalom Lappin, Wilfried Meyer-Viol and Jonathan Ginzburg have published extensively on the application of logic and computation in linguistics and philosophy, Anatoli Degtyarev is very well known for his work on temporal theorem proving and Odinaldo Rodrigues is an international authority on the the application of logic to practical and computational revision processes and systems.
IFCoLog has worked with each of these academics to arrange a substantial number of conferences and research projects based at Kings College over the years, and they have enabled Kings to be seen a centre of research excellence in the field of logic and computation. Currently IFCoLog is funding a number of projects in the philosophy and computer science departments at Kings, we do so because Kings is currently a world leader in research and teaching in many areas of computational, philosophical, linguistic and mathematical logic.
Because of the importance of these academics, the research they are conducting and the areas in which they are working, we find it hard to understand how Kings College has seen fit to reduce the size of logic in both the departments of philosophy and computer science ("but on a scale commensurate with the needs of the new department", to quote the head of the dept. of computer science) without consultation at all with the logic group itself. Furthermore, it makes little sense that academics making such clear contributions to excellence of their departments should be treated in this way by their administration.
Yours,
Professor Dr Jörg Siekmann
President, IFCoLog
Director of the DFKI
Professor of Computer Science and AI
University of Saarbrücken
<http://www-ags.dfki.uni-sb.de/>