2016 Quarter 3

REPORT FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months July-September 2016.

The 2016 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: CP 2016

The annual conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming was held in Toulouse, France, this year. The conference was a great success, with over 250 participants, a doctoral program, and five specialized workshops. The program also introduced, for the first time, five dedicated tracks in addition to the technical track and application track. We thank all organizers for their hard work, in particular the program chair Michel Rueher and conference chair Thomas Schiex.

Pictures are available in the CP 2016 Google photo album.

ACP.2: ACP Summer School 2016

The ACP Summer School took place June 20-24 in Cork, Ireland, and was organized by the Insight Centre for Data Analytics. The speakers at the school included NIcolas Beldiceanu, Hadrien Cambazard, John Hooker, Lars Kotthoff, Barry O'Sullivan, Jean-Charles Regin, and Helmut Simonis. The school attracted about 50 participants that learned the capabilities and current research directions in the area of Constraint Programming. We thank the speakers and organizers for a great event, in particular the organizing chair Helmut Simonis.

ACP.3: ACP Distinguished Service Award 2016

This year's ACP Distinguished Service Award was presented to Thomas Schiex during the conference CP 2016 in Toulouse, France. The award committee's citation reads "For many years of sustained service to the constraint programming community, both nationally and internationally, as well as for bridging to other communities including bioinformatics and artificial intelligence." We congratulate Thomas Schiex with this well-deserved award!

A list of previous award winners can be found on the ACP website.

ACP.4: ACP Doctoral Research Award 2016

The 2016 ACP Doctoral Research Award was presented to Andre Cire during the conference CP 2016 in Toulouse, France, for his dissertation "Decision Diagrams for Optimization". Andre received his doctoral degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014, and was advised by John Hooker and Willem-Jan van Hoeve.

A list of previous award winners can be found on the ACP website.

ACP.5: Executive Committee Election Results

This summer the ACP held elections to replace three members of the Executive Committee, each for a four-year term. The voting period was from August 9th to September 1st, 2016. The ACP had 231 members when the elections started, and a total of 133 votes were received. As a result of the elections, the following ACP members will join the Executive Committee per January 2017: Maria Garcia de la Banda, Claude-Guy Quimper, and Charlotte Truchet. We would like to congratulate those elected, and thank all candidates who took part in the election.

More details can be found on the ACP website.

ACP.6: CP 2017 Collocations and Call for Tracks

The conference CP 2017 takes place August 28th to September 1st, 2017, in Melbourne, Australia. It will be collocated with with ICLP17, IJCAI17, and SAT17.

CP 2017 will continue the successful thematic tracks that were introduced in CP 2016. A _Call for Thematic Tracks​_ is now open: Track proposals can be in the form of an email to Chris Beck (jcb@mie.utoronto.ca), the CP 2017 Program Chair, containing * The names and email addresses of at most two track co-chairs (one is fine, too). * A paragraph justifying and demonstrating the relevance of the theme to the CP community. * A list of 6 to 10 people who have expressed interest in either serving on the program committee of or submitting a paper to the track. Potential chairs are encouraged to contact Chris Beck (jcb@mie.utoronto.ca) for informal discussions.

ACP.7: ACP Sponsorship Updates

Earlier this year, the conference CPAIOR had received a sponsorship of EUR 1500 from the ACP. CPAIOR ran successfully this year, and as a consequence was able to return the full sponsorship amount to the ACP. We thank the CPAIOR organizers, Claude-Guy Quimper and Bernard Gendron, for their efforts.