2024 Election Results

The following 4 new members were elected to serve in the Executive Committee for a period of 4 years:

• Roland Yap, National University of Singapore
• Nadjib Lazaar, University of Paris-Saclay
• Miquel Bofill Arasa, University of Girona
• Roie Zivan, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

They will replace the following 4 outgoing EC members:

• David Bergman (President)
• Tias Guns (secretary)
• Chris Beck (past president)
• Zeynep Kiziltan (DEI delegate).

The following members will continue to serve for another 2 years:

• Helene Verhaeghe (Conference Coordinator)
• Gilles Pesant
• Ines Lynce

Election statements

Roland Yap

My name is Roland Yap. Some background on myself. I have worked in Constraint Programming from its inception. I am among the early researchers in Constraint Logic Programming which then became the field of Constraint Programming. I was a developer of the CLP(R) language and system, one of the early CP languages emphasizing the first class nature of constraints.

I have been actively involved in the CP conference over a long period of time. I served as the general chair for CP 2000. In 2015, CP and ICLP were co-located, and I was the co-general chair for ICLP 2015 and worked with the CP 2015 general chairs. I was the program chair for CP 2023 in Toronto. I have served in the PC and SPC for many of the CP conferences. I have also co-chaired the CP Doctoral Program track and the Doctoral Research Awards. Previously, I was a member of the ACP Executive Committee. Most recently, was my term from 2010-2014. In addition, I was also on the CP Organizing Committee, the predecessor of the ACP.

CP is a well-established research area with CP 2024 being the 30th edition. However, with the current large growth of interest and research in AI mainly in ML/DL/LLMs, I believe that we have to be careful that CP remains a robust research area with significant relevance to AI. One way is to broaden the interest in CP and have more researchers working on CP-related research. I propose that investigating more co-locations of CP with other conferences where constraints also play a role can help in this direction. Some conferences which CP has co-located in the past are ICAPS and ICLP. I believe the SAT conference may have interest in co-location and the SAT track at CP 2023 had many submissions. At the main AI conferences, AAAI and IJCAI, while there are CP papers, it seems to me that CP is not so visible. It would be a good idea for the ACP to investigate more activities at AAAI/IJCAI.

I believe with my experiences with the CP conference, particularly in the role of Program and General Chairs, I can contribute to the running of the CP conference and related events which is key role of the ACP Exco. I have also been actively involved in the CP conference since the first CP in 1995 (Cassis, France).

Finally, while the ACP and the CP conference already have many activities geared towards supporting PhD students and junior researchers, it is time for us to investigate what more can be done. As a starting point, I propose that the ACP conduct a survey combined with a discussion forum to find out if there are some "pain points" and steps which the ACP could take but have not yet done.

Nadjib Lazaar

I have been appointed as a full professor at the University of Paris-Saclay, with my position starting in September 2024. Currently, I am a tenured assistant professor at the University of Montpellier and have been a member of LIRMM since 2013.

My research interests lie at the intersection of Constraint Programming, Data Mining, Machine Learning, and Software Engineering. I have made contributions in developing techniques and tools for Constraint Acquisition, Declarative Data Mining, and the application of Artificial Intelligence in Software Engineering.

I have been part of the Constraint Programming (CP) community for over 10 years, contributing at various levels. I have had the opportunity to serve on several AI program committees (CP, AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, etc.) and have been involved in the discussion and organization of several events and activities around CP. In particular, I lead a CNRS working group on learning and constraints (CAVIAR group at GDR-RADIA in France) and have participated in organizing two summer schools (VIVA2020 and ACP2020). This year, I received a four-year ANR project aimed at promoting the use of CP to facilitate interactive mining and make it explainable.

Regarding the CP conference, my involvement has been significant since 2016 with the thematic tracks and my role in the Test&Verif track, which last year includes topics on Trustworthy Decision Making. I also managed the doctoral program at CP2018.

Since January 2023, I have been a member of the ACP Executive Committee as a treasurer and appointed member. My candidacy aims to transition to an elected status to fully exercise my role as treasurer within the association.

What I find remarkable about CP as both a field and a community is its ability to unite research groups with different specializations across OR, AI, and Logic Programming. I am full of admiration for this community that welcomes new ideas from other fields. I believe in the openness of CP and the richness we can gain from inductive methods, Machine Learning, Data Mining, and particularly from Software Engineering, which can help CP gain more traction at the industrial level. Moreover, I strongly believe in the symbolic power of CP to explain numerical learning methods such as deep learning. These are the ideas I am developing and would like to share with my community as an elected EC member.

I would like to add an element that is close to my heart: to see an edition of the CP conference held in a Maghreb country (Morocco, Algeria, or Tunisia). I am of Algerian origin and have strong collaborations with Maghrebian universities, which I can approach for organizing a CP conference in the coming years.

Miquel Bofill Arasa

I am an associate professor at the University of Girona. My research has always been related to applications of logic in Computer Science, with emphasis on automated reasoning. From my initial works on automated theorem proving in first order logic with equality, I switched to the SMT setting, and became part of the development team of the Barcelogic SMT solver. Later on I engaged with the CP community by developing some compilers from constraint modelling languages to the SMT formalism. Currently, I am continuing this line of research with a particular focus on planning and scheduling problems, adapting SAT and SMT solvers to address the particular structure of the formulas arising from these problems.

I have served on the program committee of SAT, AAAI, IJCAI, and CP, among others, and I think I can contribute to the CP community by fostering collaboration with other communities. I feel that the integration of CP, AI and OR is more important than ever, and that conferences like CPAIOR, and the co-location of CP with FLoC or similar events should be promoted. In order to ensure continuity of the CP conference and community in this AI era, where we are closer than ever to achieving "the Holy Grail", we need not only to engage CP and ML, but to make CP stand out. I am convinced that reasoning weaknesses of ML can (and need to) be complemented by CP, SAT and SMT-based methods. A significant effort must be made to publicize these less visible areas of AI to society. Equally important is to publicize successful industrial applications of CP and its tools, and to increase CP's presence in graduate and postgraduate studies, in order to keep attracting talented young people who may be drawn to mainstream AI.

If elected as a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Constraint Programming, I will do my best to reinforce these aspects from within the association. Additionally, having chaired the CP conference this year, I can also contribute my experience in conference organization.

Roie Zivan

Dear members of the ACP. It is much of an honor for me to ask for your support in the coming election for the executive committee of the ACP. As some of you already know, my research interest is within the field of distributed constraint reasoning (DCR), i.e., I investigate how combinatorial problems that are distributed by nature can be modeled as distributed CSPs or (more relevant recently) as distributed COPs (DCOPs) and solved using distributed algorithms.

When I started my academic career, about 23 years ago, several DCR researchers were active within the CP community, including Pedro Messeguer, Christian Bessire, Makoto Yokoo and others. Occasionally, we held the DCR workshop as part of the CP conference. In 2005, my paper, which introduced dynamic ordering to the asynchronous backtracking algorithm, received the best paper award in the CP conference. Later, most of the activity of the DCR community shifted to the multi agent systems community, and our visits to CP became rare.

Two years ago, I was asked by the ACP executive committee to organize and chair CP at Haifa. That was an opportunity for me to contribute to this community that gave me so much, and to check whether the intersection of interests between myself and active researchers in the community is significant. I learned that there is much work in the community, which investigates the use of CP models and techniques to generate explanations for algorithmic decisions. I believe that the generation of such explanations is a major challenge of the AI community these days, and that the CP community has much to offer in this direction of research.

Moreover, in distributed settings, with the rise of IOT applications, many times humans and technological agents cooperate in a multi agent system, which requires the participants to cooperate in search of high-quality solutions. To that end, the humans in the team need to understand the process so they will be able to contribute. Thus, agents need to be able to explain their actions and decisions to their peers.

I believe that this relation between explainable AI and multi agent systems can be a trigger for the return of DCR to the interest of the CP community. If I am elected, I intend to advance this process by encouraging colleagues to submit papers to CP, to include relevant tutorials and workshops in the CP program on the subject and to welcome relevant invited talks.