2026 Election
The 2026 ACP Executive Committee (EC) comprises the following people.
Officers (with starting year of term)
- President: Gilles Pesant (2023)
- Treasurer: Nadjib Lazaar (2025)
- Secretary: Miquel Bofill (2025)
- Conference Coordinator: Hélène Verhaeghe (2023)
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Delegate: Ines Lynce (2023)
- Communications: Roie Zivan (2025)
Other members (with starting year of term)
- Past President: David Bergman (2021)
- Roland Yap (2025)
The following ACP EC members will leave the ACP EC at the end of 2026 after having served their respective terms:
- Gilles Pesant
- Hélène Verhaeghe
- Ines Lynce
There are three candidates to replace the three outgoing members of the EC:
- Ruth Hoffmann
- Pierre Schaus
- Joan Espasa
Election statements
Ruth Hoffmann
My name is Ruth Hoffmann and I am a lecturer (associate professor) at the University of St Andrews (Scotland).
I have been actively involved in the CP community only in the last 5 years or so, but have been on the fringes thanks to the St Andrews CP group for around 15 years now. My research focusses on the use of search algorithms in mathematical problems, which has itself manifested as an interest in good models, better search and better "front-end"(s) of CP for mathematicians.
I am on the programme committees of CP, IJCAI and AAAI. As part of my work with mathematicians, I have been involved in reviewing and programme committee for permutation patterns (a field in combinatorics) and am an active maintainer and workshop organiser for GAP (a computational algebra tool). Within the general academic community, I have experience with organising workshops (GAP Days, SCM), summer schools (SAT/SMT/AR) and conferences (Permutation Pattern 2025, and helping with CP2025).
I am very much invested in introducing CP and CP-like fields to a wider community (especially mathematicians) who are not realising that they are (almost) re-inventing the wheel by writing backtrack (often named brute force) search from scratch, where they should really use the tools that are already doing search very well. Widening the access to CP should be done in an agnostic way, and I have not shied away from being open to looking at the search community as a whole, and to neutrally compare different aspects.
Should you select me for the Executive Committee, I would be honoured to pursue to grow the CP community to beyond CP (and its related SAT/SMT/OR/AR/AI fields) and to widen the access to CP in an open-minded way. I will lend my expertise to continue the successful organisation of the CP conference (and its many workshops), while also enabling growth of the conference and community through new channels and better communications with applicable communities who should (already) know about CP.
Pierre Schaus
I am pleased to stand as a candidate for the Executive Committee of the Association for Constraint Programming.
I would like to contribute to several directions that I believe are important for the future of our community.
First, I would like to help improve and share teaching material for Constraint Programming, making CP more accessible to students and easier to teach across universities.
Second, I strongly support solver competitions and benchmarking initiatives, which are essential for advancing the state of the art and maintaining strong research momentum.
I would also like to strengthen the connections between the CP community and industry, including closer interactions with industrial users and developers of industrial solvers.
Another important objective for me is to encourage more regular local and regional CP workshops, helping build stronger communities and collaborations at the regional level as well.
I also plan to become more involved in the CPAIOR organization, which I see as highly complementary to CP. In my view, both conferences benefit from strong interactions and cross-fertilization between their communities.
Finally, I would like to support the continued development of CP in emerging regions or where the CP community is not yet so well established, particularly in some regions of Asia and Africa.
Recent ACP-supported summer schools in Africa and China are excellent initiatives, and I would be happy to help expand such efforts in the future.
I would be honored to contribute to the ACP and help support an active CP community.
Joan Espasa
I am a Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the University of St Andrews. My research sits at the intersection of Constraint Programming, Automated Planning, and Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). I have been part of the CP community for over a decade, contributing regularly to the conference and workshops such as ModRef, both as an author and as a reviewer. Outside CP, I have been involved in organising the International Planning Competition (IPC) and a SAT/SMT Summer School, which has given me some insight into how neighbouring communities handle benchmarking, competitions, and cross-community engagement. I believe CP has always been at its best when it stays open to ideas from related fields. The influence of SAT techniques on modern CP solvers is a good example of how much can be gained from this kind of cross-pollination, and there are promising signs of the same happening with other paradigms. I think there is still much more to gain from engaging with communities like automated planning and beyond. If elected, I would like to help encourage this kind of exchange, whether through co-location, shared workshops, or simply making it easier for researchers with new solving approaches to see CP as a natural home for their work. I am also keen to see our benchmarking infrastructure continue to evolve, drawing on what I have learned from competition organisation. I would be glad to contribute to the work of the EC and to support the community that has shaped much of my research career.