2019 Quarter 1

REPORT FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months January-March 2019.

The 2019 ACP Executive Committee (EC) comprises the following people, in alphabetical order:

  • Sophie Demassey - Treasurer
  • Maria Garcia de la Banda - President
  • Emmanuel Hebrard
  • Michele Lombardi
  • Laurent Michel (ex-officio, non-voting)
  • Claude-Guy Quimper - Conference Coordinator
  • Christian Schulte - Secretary
  • Charlotte Truchet

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: New ACP EC

The following ACP EC members left the ACP EC at the end of 2018 after having served their respective terms:

  • Alan Frisch
  • Christophe Lecoutre
  • Laurent Michel
  • Nina Narodytska
  • Helmut Simonis (ex-officio, non-voting)

Many thanks to them for their contributions to the ACP and the CP community at large during their past terms of office!

The following members started their term at the beginning of 2019:

  • Sophie Demassey
  • Emmanuel Hebrard
  • Michele Lombardi
  • Laurent Michel (ex-officio, non-voting)
  • Christian Schulte - Secretary

Maria Garcia de la Banda has been elected as President, Christian Schulte as Secretary, Sophie Demassey as Treasurer, and Claude-Guy Quimper continues as Conference Coordinator.

ACP.2: Success Stories Wanted!

The ACP EC looks for success stories of CP. Charlotte Truchet as elected member of the ACP EC has agreed to serve together with Marie Pelleau as editor of CP impact and success stories. Please contact Charlotte (charlotte.truchet@univ-nantes.fr) Or Marie (marie.pelleau@unice.fr) if you feel you have something to share!

ACP.3: Anti-Harassment Policy

The ACP has adopted an Anti-Harassment Policy which you can find here: https://www.a4cp.org/events/anti-harassment-policy.

ACP.4: Funding Ideas

The ACP has accumulated substantial funds. If you have a good idea of how to invest parts of funds by funding activities, events, etc, please contact the ACP EC.

ACP.5: Current Calls

The calls for bids for CP2021, the ACP Research Award, and the ACP Doctoral Research Award have been distributed.

ACP.6: ACP Summer School 2019

The 2019 ACP summer school will take place July 1-5th in Vienna, Austria, organized by Andrea Rendle and Tommaso Urli.

This year's topic is "Applying Constraint Programming", so the focus will be on learning about tools and technology to apply Constraint Programming for solving a hard optimisation problem.

The summer school will include practical labs where the participants can apply what they learn during presentations. Furthermore, there will be a hackathon-style challenge during the last days of the summer school where the participants apply Constraint Programming to solve a hard optimisation problem, guided by the speakers. Prior knowledge of Constraint Programming is not required, but f you already have some experience in heuristics, mathematical programming or even constraint programming, then we think that you can benefit a lot from this summer school.

ACP.7: Visibility of the CP Conference

The ACP EC especially welcomes ideas of how to increase the visibility of the CP conference. Please contact the ACP EC if you have an idea.