2015 Quarter 3

REPORT FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months July-September 2015.

The 2015 ACP Executive Committee (EC) comprises the following people, in alphabetical order:

  • Pierre Flener - Conference Coordinator
  • Alan Frisch
  • Willem-Jan van Hoeve - Secretary
  • Christophe Lecoutre - Treasurer
  • Laurent Michel - President
  • Nina Narodytska
  • Helmut Simonis (ex-officio, non-voting)
  • Guido Tack

The ACP EC welcomes feedback and suggestions from the ACP community. We encourage you to engage with the ACP EC to help design new initiatives that promote constraint programming.

ACP.1: Research Excellence Award

The ACP award for Research Excellence in constraint programming is awarded bi-annually, with the purpose of celebrating those CP researchers who have made exceptional and very influential research contributions to CP with their work. The recipient of the 2015 Research Excellence Award is Prof. Toby Walsh. The award was presented at the International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2015).

Toby Walsh is Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales and research leader at NICTA. His impressive research record of over 200 publications covers a wide range of topics including symmetry, uncertainty, global constraints, complexity, local search, Boolean satisfiability, robustness, search algorithms and heuristics, and modelling. Toby has advanced the field of constraint programming through deep foundational work and empirical research, and by reaching out to other communities in artificial intelligence and computer science.

Toby was nominated by Christian Bessiere. The selection committee consisted of previous award winners Alan Mackworth and Jean-Charles Régin, this year's CP conference program chair Gilles Pesant, ACP president Laurent Michel, and ACP secretary Willem-Jan van Hoeve.

The list of previous award recipients can be found here.

ACP.2: Doctoral Research Award

The ACP Doctoral Research Award is awarded every year to a promising young researcher working in the area of constraint programming and who defended his/her thesis between January and December of the previous two years. For this year, the committee decided to present the award to two researchers: Anastasia Paparrizou (University of Western Macedonia, Greece) for the dissertation Efficient Algorithms for Strong Local Consistencies and Adaptive Techniques in Constraint Satisfaction Problems, and Jean-Guillaume Fages (Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France) for the dissertation On the use of graphs within constraint-programming. Both winners received the award at the CP 2015 conference where they also presented their work. Congratulations to both winners!

The award committee consisted of Nina Narodytska (chair), Christian Schulte, Emmanuel Hebrard, and Peter van Beek. The list of previous award winners can be found here.

ACP.3: CP 2015 Conference

The ACP EC warmly thanks conference organizers Ken Brown and Barry O'Sullivan, as well as the program chair Gilles Pesant, for a very successful CP 2015 conference. The conference took place in Cork, Ireland, and was collocated with ICLP (the International Conference on Logic Programming). Both conferences were part of the Boole Bicentenary Celebration.

Please visit the CP 2015 website to view pictures of the event, download the slides of the tutorials, browse through the online material posted on the workshop pages, or try your best at the instances of the Industrial Modeling Competition.

ACP.4: CP 2016 Conference

The conference CP 2016 will take place in Toulouse, France, September 5-9, 2016, with Thomas Schiex as local chair and Michel Rueher as program chair. A novel feature of this conference is the increased number of tracks dedicated to a specific topic: Testing and Verification, CP and Biology, Computational Sustainability, Preferences, social choice and optimisation, Music, and Applications. In addition, the successful Journal-First Track will be continued, and extended with papers published at sister conferences. The conference also continues the successful Fast-Track for Journal Publications in collaboration with the journal Constraints. Detailed information about these tracks can be found on the CP 2016 homepage.

ACP.5: CP 2016 Incubator Workshop

The Association for Constraint Programming (ACP) invites proposals for a CP 2016 incubator workshop. An incubator workshop should address a promising novel topic, be multi-disciplinary in nature, and have the aim to broaden the application of CP or deepen its methodologies.

Organisers of the selected incubator workshop can request sponsorship from the ACP to strengthen the workshop programme, which can for example be used to support external speakers. The ACP will make EUR 1,500 available for this purpose.

Workshop organisers that want to be considered to receive funding as incubator workshop should indicate this in the CP 2016 workshop proposal, together with a clear motivation.

Important Dates

  • Friday 1 April 2016: Workshop proposal submission deadline
  • Monday 11 April 2016: Workshop acceptance notification
  • Friday 13 May 2016: Workshop webpage at the CP 2016 website + first call
  • late July 2016: early registration deadline
  • Monday 5 September 2016: CP 2016 Workshops

Submission Process

More details on the submission process will come up soon at the CP 2016 website. Please send any questions about incubator workshops to Pierre Flener, the CP 2016 Workshop Chair (Pierre Flener).

ACP.6: ACP Summer School 2015

The ACP EC thanks the organizers of the 2015 ACP Summer School, David Bergman and Andre Cire, for a great summer school. The school took place in Toronto, Canada, July 8-11, 2015, on the topic New Frontiers in Constraint Programming. Speakers at the school were Chris Beck, Claude-Guy Quimper, Willem-Jan van Hoeve, Pascal Van Hentenryck, and Petr Vilim. The slides of the presentations can also be downloaded from the website.

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